By The kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, at the hands of U.S. imperialism marks a new and extremely serious escalation in the sustained aggression against Venezuela’s sovereignty. Far from being an isolated or exceptional event, this episode is part of a prolonged offensive that combines economic and financial warfare, political delegitimization, military coercion, and the production of media consensus and cultural hegemony. In the face of informational confusion, propaganda, and the proliferation of speculative narratives, this article proposes an analytical framework to understand the structural logic of contemporary imperialism and to situate this attack within the context of the siege Venezuela has been subjected to for decades.
Imperialism and the Capitalist World-System: An Analytical Framework
From the perspective of world-systems analysis, capitalism is not understood as a collection of isolated national economies, but as a historical totality structured by hierarchical relations of domination and dependence, articulated through unequal exchange. Within this framework, imperialism is not a temporary distortion nor the exceptional result of specific crises or wars, but rather a constitutive dimension of the capitalist world-system, inseparable from its historical logic of expansion and its permanent need for accumulation on a global scale.
Imperialism can thus be defined as the hierarchical mode through which the capture, transfer, and appropriation of value are organized worldwide. This process is based on the structural subordination of some societies to others within an international division of production and labor that separates countries that do not retain the value they produce from those that capture and concentrate it through unequal exchange. This hierarchy shapes the classic poles of the system—core and periphery, or Global North and Global South—as well as intermediate semi-peripheral spaces, where contradictory dynamics of appropriation and dependence coexist. Imperialism, in this sense, segregates and orders the world to guarantee capital accumulation, relying on the cheap extraction of labor, material goods, and energy, and on the systematic externalization of costs onto the periphery.
Far from being reduced to direct military domination or territorial control, contemporary imperialism operates as an integrated system that articulates different spheres of social life. Economic domination—based on control over value flows, debt, sanctions, or access to markets—is reinforced by political and diplomatic instruments, by the threat or effective use of military coercion, and by forms of cultural and media hegemony that help legitimize the existing order within the social imaginary. These spheres do not function in isolation, but rather combine and reinforce one another through varying degrees of coercion and consent, seeking a balance that allows imperial subordination to be naturalized and the capture of value to be normalized as inevitable or even desirable.
The active participation of states is central to this architecture of domination. Through legal frameworks, international agreements, diplomatic mechanisms, and, when necessary, the use of military force, the conditions are created for transnational corporations and financial entities to concentrate the bulk of the benefits of global trade. In this context, it is possible to speak of imperialist states, primarily located at the core of the capitalist world-system, as opposed to other states whose structural position is one of dependence, regardless of their internal political projects or development aspirations. The different historical phases of imperialism—colonial, neocolonial, and neoliberal—display continuities and ruptures in these forms of domination, generally associated with periods of hegemony by specific powers, with the United States as the central actor of contemporary imperialism.
This framework allows the Venezuelan case to be analyzed not as an anomaly nor as a strictly internal conflict, but as a concrete expression of the tensions of the capitalist world-system and of contemporary forms of imperialist aggression. The economic, political, diplomatic, media, cultural, and military dynamics that have shaped Venezuela in recent decades—culminating in the open military intervention of recent days in violation of international law—can only be fully understood when situated within this structural logic of domination, value capture, and the disciplining of the periphery.
Venezuela Within the Gears of Contemporary Imperialism
Situating the Venezuelan case within the framework of the capitalist world-system requires abandoning exceptionalist or moralizing explanations and understanding it as a concrete expression of the structural dynamics of contemporary imperialism. Far from being a mere bilateral conflict, an “internal failure,” or an alleged “authoritarian drift,” the sustained aggression against Venezuela must be read as part of a process of disciplining the periphery in a context of crisis, geopolitical reconfiguration, and the relative decline of U.S. hegemony.
From the beginning of the Bolivarian process, Venezuelan sovereignty became the target of sustained confrontation by U.S. imperialism and its regional allies. Already during Hugo Chávez’s presidency (1999–2013), this offensive took multiple forms that foreshadowed the mechanisms deployed against Venezuela today. The April 2002 coup d’état—backed by business, media, and military sectors and de facto legitimized by Washington—marked a turning point, followed months later by the 2002–2003 oil strike, an act of economic sabotage aimed at paralyzing PDVSA and suffocating the Venezuelan state. These episodes were accompanied by political and financial destabilization operations, such as the financing of the opposition through U.S. agencies (USAID and NED), international pressure during the 2004 recall referendum, and the detection of paramilitary plots linked to Colombia, such as the so-called Operation Daktari in 2004.
These events also unfolded within an increasingly militarized regional environment, marked by the expansion of U.S. presence in Colombia and the conduct of military exercises simulating intervention scenarios in Venezuela, including the precedent of Operation Balboa in 2001, led by Spain in coordination with Colombia, Panama, and the United States. In parallel, an international media war was consolidated, aimed at eroding the legitimacy of the Bolivarian government and preparing the symbolic terrain for more open forms of force. Far from being isolated incidents, these precedents reveal a prolonged strategy of interference combining economic pressure, political conspiracy, military threat, and discursive disciplining, which continues—through more radicalized means—in the current phase of imperialist aggression against Venezuela.
Thus, over recent decades—and with particular intensity since the mid-2010s—Venezuela has been subjected to an escalating multifaceted strategy of domination, combining economic sanctions, financial strangulation, diplomatic delegitimization, political destabilization operations, military threats, covert actions, and an intense media and cultural war. This articulation of instruments clearly corresponds to the imperialist mechanisms described above: a relative balance between coercion and consent aimed at forcing regime change in order to impose the country’s submission to global circuits of capital accumulation.
The economic axis has been central to this offensive. Following the internal destabilization caused by the 2014 guarimbas—accompanied by increased direct U.S. funding of the opposition—unilateral U.S. sanctions, illegal under international law, intensified from 2015 onward and became qualitatively more aggressive in 2017 and 2019. These sanctions not only severely punished the Venezuelan state’s capacity to trade, finance itself, and sustain public policies, but also functioned as a mechanism of economic warfare aimed at eroding the material conditions of social reproduction. The financial sanctions imposed in 2017 blocked access to international credit markets and prevented debt refinancing, while the de facto oil embargo imposed on PDVSA in 2019—along with the confiscation of strategic assets abroad—deepened the collapse of public revenues and the country’s import capacity.
The material consequences of this strangulation have been widely documented. Studies by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) estimated that sanctions contributed to 40,000 avoidable deaths between 2017 and 2018 alone, by restricting access to food, medicines, hospital supplies, and basic services, while other studies raised the figure to over 100,000 by 2020. Reports by United Nations agencies have documented the sustained deterioration of health, nutrition, and infant and maternal mortality indicators in the context of an induced economic collapse. In 2018, a U.S. State Department official openly acknowledged the objective of this policy, stating that sanctions had forced Venezuela into default and that “total collapse” was proof that the strategy was working.
This process of economic suffocation has been accompanied by direct financial dispossession, in which institutions from core countries have actively participated. The case of Venezuelan gold retained by the Bank of England is particularly illustrative. Under the argument of “not knowing who the legitimate government is,” the United Kingdom refused to return sovereign reserves belonging to the Venezuelan state, even during the COVID emergency. In parallel, state assets worth tens of billions of dollars were frozen abroad, and strategic companies such as Citgo were placed under judicial control in the United States, depriving the country of fundamental resources.
This economic axis was articulated with a political and diplomatic offensive aimed at denying Venezuelan sovereignty on the international stage. Following the non-recognition of the 2018 presidential elections, January 2019 saw the immediate recognition by the United States, the European Union, and other allies of Juan Guaidó as a parallel authority, despite his not having even run in the presidential elections. This was followed a month later by an attempted incursion from the Colombian border under the pretext of “humanitarian aid.” These episodes highlighted the role played by governments, multilateral organizations, and regional alliances in constructing an international consensus for regime change and intervention, normalizing a remarkably elastic interpretation of international law in favor of hegemonic interests.
When these tools failed to produce the desired results, imperial logic turned to more direct forms of action. In August 2018, an attempted assassination of President Nicolás Maduro using explosive drones took place. In subsequent years, U.S. naval deployments in the Caribbean intensified, including mercenary incursions such as Operation Gedeón in May 2020 and recent interdiction operations under the pretext of the “war on drugs,” which have resulted in the extrajudicial killing, without evidence, of more than a hundred people—many of whom are known to have been simple artisanal fishers. In this context, the designation of fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction” or the criminalization of the Venezuelan state through narratives such as the so-called Cartel of the Suns served to construct a moral framework legitimizing imperial violence before public opinion. It is revealing that the latter accusation was dropped once judicial hearings against Maduro began, exposing its instrumental and propagandistic nature.
Of course, this coercive apparatus is not sustained by force alone. The production of consent has been equally crucial. This has involved the international promotion of opposition leaderships and symbolic legitimization mechanisms through institutional awards, ranging from the European Union’s Sakharov Prize to far-right figures María Corina Machado and Edmundo González Urrutia, to the Nobel Prize awarded to the former, or the farcical FIFA Peace Prize awarded to Donald Trump. This has been accompanied by systematically biased media coverage—with the uncritical repetition of terms such as “dictator,” “tyrant,” “autarkic,” or “regime” across mainstream, tabloid, and even sports media—constituting a cultural strategy aimed at naturalizing intervention and presenting regime change as a desirable, humanitarian, or even peaceful cause. As in other historical scenarios, cultural hegemony functions here as an indispensable complement to financial and military coercion, making aggression a central component of political common sense.
Behind this offensive, however, lies not only an abstract will to discipline, punish, or dominate. Venezuela occupies a strategic place in the material geography of global capitalism, particularly due to its energy reserves. Although Venezuelan oil is ultra-heavy and costly to refine, its relevance cannot be assessed outside the current configuration of the global energy market. Venezuela holds one of the largest proven crude reserves in the world—around 300 billion barrels, mostly in the Orinoco Belt—a volume comparable to or even exceeding that of major producers such as Saudi Arabia or Iran, albeit under complex geological and technical conditions. The sharp decline in production—currently around 900,000–1.1 million barrels per day compared to historical peaks above 3 million—reflects the impact of sanctions through financial suffocation and the consequent deliberate deterioration of investment and infrastructure.
In this context, Venezuelan heavy crude acquires specific importance, as it could help compensate for the limitations of ultra-light U.S. shale oil, which is estimated to be insufficient on its own to meet demand for diesel and other middle distillates. Moreover, Venezuelan oil fits the installed capacity of major Gulf of Mexico refineries, which are specifically designed to process dense, high-sulfur crudes. Added to this is a significant logistical factor: geographic proximity—around 1,500–2,000 nautical miles compared to 8,000–10,000 from the Middle East—reduces transport costs (and therefore crude utilization costs) and exposure to strategic chokepoints such as Hormuz, Suez, or Bab el-Mandeb, in a context of growing global instability. This combination of reserves, crude quality, refining infrastructure, and geography explains why territorial and logistical control over Venezuelan oil, while not the only factor, remains a significant element in contemporary geoeconomic disputes, beyond the conjunctural narratives used to justify aggression. Moreover, control over these resources has not only energy implications but also financial and monetary ones, as part of a strategy aimed at reinforcing the role of the dollar in international energy trade in order to shore up a hegemonic order in crisis.
In this sense, Venezuela appears as a key site within a broader tactical retrenchment by the United States toward its spheres of influence (including efforts to discipline the European Union, the United Kingdom, Japan, and South Korea), at a moment of global transformation, combustion, and strategic contestation. It is not merely about renewing the Monroe Doctrine through the “Trump Corollary” to reaffirm the old “backyard”—as U.S. imperialists disparagingly refer to Latin America—but about consolidating positions vis-à-vis potential systemic competitors while reinforcing dependencies and freeing up resources for the central axis of contemporary geopolitical confrontation. Far from being marginal, the Venezuelan case thus lies at the heart of the contradictions of imperialism in its current phase, as the core perceives that it has lost hegemonic control over the rest of the world.
Facts Versus Conspiracies: The Strategic Obligation of Information Against Imperial Media Confusion
The analysis carried out thus far allows for a fundamental conclusion: without tools of structural analysis, imperialist aggressions appear as confused, exceptional, or even inexplicable events, sometimes attributed to megalomaniacal attitudes or psychotic outbursts. In reality, they respond to well-known historical patterns. Understanding imperialism as a system, rather than as a series of excesses, errors, or isolated conspiracies, is not an abstract intellectual exercise but a political necessity to identify the aggressor, name the violence, and articulate collective responses.
In contexts of crisis, uncertainty, and disinformation, this task becomes even more urgent. The imperialist offensive is not waged solely on economic, diplomatic, or military fronts, but also in the field of knowledge production. What circulates massively in such moments is not neutral information but, at best, propaganda: narratives designed to disorient, fragment, sow suspicion, and shift attention from verifiable facts toward a swamp of permanent speculation. The most recent example has been the attempt to suggest that former vice president—and now acting president—Delcy Rodríguez betrayed Nicolás Maduro. Without evidence, without data, without anything, this accusation has permeated debates within parts of a supposed left on social media that, at the mercy of algorithms, has not even dared to question the origin of the claim, despite its widespread propagation by Donald Trump himself, U.S. intelligence services, and Miami-based media outlets. This demonstrates that the greater the hegemon’s capacity for media diffusion, the more effective its strategy of disinformation and confusion becomes.
Speculation without evidence, the uncritical amplification of narratives fabricated in hostile centers of power, and the obsession with opaque plots ultimately play into imperial hands, weakening denunciatory capacity, eroding political trust, and fragmenting those who should be building common responses. Where clarity, unity, and strength are needed, confusion, suspicion, and paralysis are introduced. This is not about denying complexity or shutting down debate, but about quarantining narratives that clearly serve imperial interests and refusing to turn uncertainty into a marketplace of rumors. The history of imperialism shows that its greatest effectiveness lies not only in the violence it exercises, but in its capacity to politically disarm its adversaries, even from positions that claim to be critical or leftist.
Indeed, faced with an imperialist aggression that only a few decades ago would have provoked mass mobilizations, today we too often witness the replacement of analysis with recycled conspiracy theories, frequently originating—as we have seen—from the very media and intelligence apparatuses that have historically driven destabilization campaigns against Venezuela and other Global South countries. Against this backdrop, recovering materialist analysis, attending to structures, identifying interests at stake, and sustaining a critique grounded in verifiable facts is not one option among many, but a strategic obligation. In a world marked by an extraordinary systemic crisis and the consequent intensification of imperialist aggression, intellectual rigor and discipline are not luxuries, but forms of active resistance and indispensable conditions for rebuilding international solidarity and collective action in the face of aggressions such as those we are currently experiencing.
For this reason, it is necessary to focus on the facts we know: sanctions, asset plunder, military threats, covert operations, systematic economic violence, and, of course, the kidnapping of the constitutional president and his wife in violation of international law—at a time when it becomes increasingly clear that such law has only ever functioned as long as it served the hegemon’s global control. It is through these corroborated facts that we avoid the mire of unfounded opinion and can focus on what is essential at this moment: denouncing the blatant U.S. violation of Venezuela’s sovereignty, exposing the threat this poses to the rest of the world, and consequently demanding the immediate release of Venezuelan citizens Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores.
Alejandro Pedregal, @AlejoPedregal, @alejopedregal.bsky.social
