The 30-year war waged against Venezuela

Jan 13, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – In the blood-soaked dawn of 3^rd January 2026, when American bombs fell on Venezuelan soil, when Venezuela’s president was abducted by force and spirited away to a New York jail, and when the United States’ warships stalked Caribbean waters like predatory leviathans, one would have hoped for astonishment. Instead, what should have shocked was merely the ostensible scale of violence — not its logic.

For those who have watched the long arc of US policy toward Venezuela, these recent events are not anomalies. They are the apotheosis of a foreign-policy worldview that has always demanded control over Venezuelan oil and obedience from Caracas, from Caracas’s earliest neoliberal subservience in the 1980s to the violent regime change operation of 2026.

During the late 20th century, Washington’s demands were bureaucratic and economic before they became military. Venezuela’s vast oil wealth made the country a jewel of geopolitical interest long before Hugo Chávez’s election in 1998. In the 1980s and 1990s, Venezuela was pressed to adopt neoliberal reforms—deregulation, privatization, IMF conditionalities—that opened its economy to foreign capital while hollowing out domestic social structures. The resulting austerity produced mass misery, exemplified by the Caracazo uprising and brutal military repression that killed thousands. This was not collateral damage but the social cost of a model that prioritized foreign profit over human life.

When Chávez came to power, he did more than challenge a government; he challenged a system. He nationalized oil revenues to fund health care, education, and housing, refused to subordinate Venezuelan policy to US wars, and forged alliances across the Global South, including the Caribbean. For a Washington habituated to dictates rather than dialogue, this was intolerable. What followed was not diplomacy but the artful application of economic and psychological warfare, culminating in the lethal carnage of January 2026.

The United States and its allies worked to overthrow the Venezuelan government under Chavez and Maduro. This included the April 2002 coup attempt against Hugo Chávez, during which Washington swiftly recognized a short-lived, unelected regime that dissolved the constitution before collapsing under mass popular resistance. When overt coups failed, regime change was repackaged as “constitutional transition,” most blatantly in 2019, when the US and allied governments recognized Juan Guaidó as “interim president” despite his lack of electoral mandate, transferring control of Venezuelan state assets abroad while intensifying sanctions. Across both periods, US-funded opposition networks, media campaigns, street violence, and mercenary plots functioned as complementary tools in a sustained strategy to fracture Venezuelan sovereignty, erode legitimacy, and force political submission.

Simultaneous with these political acts of destabilization was the economic war waged against Venezuela: sanctions designed not merely to punish a government but to throttle the country’s economy. Starting formally in 2015 under the Obama administration—yet accelerated under Trump and consistently expanded thereafter—sanctions struck at the heart of Venezuela’s fiscal lifeline: oil. By targeting Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), the state oil company that accounted for over 90 percent of Venezuela’s foreign earnings, the United States choked off the economy’s ability to earn hard currency and pay for imports essential to human survival. Between January 2017 and December 2024, Venezuela is estimated to have lost oil revenues amounting to 213 percent of its GDP — roughly US$226 billion, or US$77 million every single day — because of sanctions that strangled exports and scared off financial partners.

Oil for Venezuela is the foundation of national income that paid for fuel, medicine, food, spare parts, electrical power, and water systems. When US coercive measures froze central bank assets, blocked access to international loans, and restricted foreign transactions, the Venezuelan state saw its ability to import essential goods plummet. The value of average monthly public imports was roughly halved in 2019 and again in 2020.

Nor are these statistics dry numerals. They represent a collapse in human dignity. Food imports were slashed by 73 percent; hunger surged; HIV/AIDS patients could not access treatment; and hundreds of thousands of surgeries were canceled because basic supplies could not be paid for. Banking restrictions and secondary sanctions led financial institutions to shun Venezuelan commercial activity altogether, further hamstringing the economy and cutting off remittances.

This is what modern economic warfare looked like: sanctions that do not explicitly ban food and medicine, but that make imports bewilderingly expensive or impossible; sanctions that freeze a nation’s foreign currency, forcing hyperinflation and misery; sanctions that drive millions to emigrate in desperation, weaponizing migration itself as a diplomatic cudgel.

And the United States did not stop at economic siege. It seized Venezuelan tankers at sea, asserting control over crude shipments as if it were the rightful owner of Venezuela’s hydrocarbon wealth. Preparation for the 2026 invasion included legal maneuvers to block Venezuelan oil revenues from ever returning to Caracas while positioning US oil corporations to reap the spoils.

All of this — the blockade, the financial embargo, the systematic undermining of Venezuela’s oil industry — prepared the psychological terrain on which bombing campaigns and the abduction of the country’s leadership became conceivable. The actions of 3rd January 2026 were not a sudden rupture but the violent consummation of decades of hostilities. The brutality of airstrikes and kidnappings is merely the most visible expression of American coercion; the economic strangulation that preceded it was the silent artillery that devastated Venezuelan society.

To forget the economic siege is to misunderstand the violence. Bombs do not fall in a vacuum; they are hurled from the vantage point of power, and power is often first established through financial dominance, trade controls, and sanctions. The United States’ bombing campaign was the instrument of a policy that began not with coup attempts, missiles but with tariffs, banking restrictions, and oil sanctions.

This is the pattern of empire: first the economists, then the bureaucrats, and finally the soldiers. By 2026, Venezuela had already fought a decade of war without bullets. What it faced in January was merely the overt climax of that long campaign.

 

 

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• Hugo Chavez, media campaigns, networks, street violence, US-funded, Venezuela

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