US President Donald Trump is murdering fisherfolks in the Caribbean Sea, supposedly for smuggling drugs, while threatening to invade Venezuela in his latest effort of international bullying. So far, President Nicholas Maduro of that country and his military have refused to take his bait or given in.
The US government has long been harassing Venezuela. This began no later than 1998, when Hugo Chavez was democratically elected to the presidency, and this has included US support for a 2002 coup attempt—which failed—along with continued efforts to harass the government and people. (For an early and visual account of this, see “The Revolution will Not be Televised” by an Irish film crew that was filming Chavez and happened to be in the in the governmental palace, Miraflores, during the failed coup attempt.)
Since then, the US—mainly through its’ imperialist National Endowment for Democracy, but also through the governments of George W. Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden—has continued to harass leaders of the country, not only Chavez but his successor, Nicolaus Maduro.
Trump’s current threat to invade the country has taken things to a whole different level. He has brought US military units into the Caribbean, especially to Puerto Rico, but he’s also shifted the USS Gerald Ford, the US’s largest aircraft carrier, from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean. It’s clear he is intensifying pressure on the country’s leadership; but what’s not clear is whether he actually plans to attack or invade should Venezuela’s leaders resist.
In an effort to encourage resistance on the part of Venezuela and opposition to such an attack by Americans, LEPAIO—the Labor Education Project on the AFL-CIO’s International Operations, whose web site is at https://aflcio-int.education/ —organized and conducted a webinar on November 9th (2025). The purpose of LEPAIO, an organization that has long opposed AFL-CIO foreign operations, was to educate Americans about what is really going on. (The webinar is on-line at https://znetwork.org/zvideo/the-afl-cio-and-venezuela-a-history-of-subversion-and-counter-revolution/.)
We assembled an excellent panel of speakers. Most important was Dr. Steve Ellner, a US-born Professor Emeritus of History at the Universidad de Oriente, who lived in Venezuela for over 40 years, although he’s now based in the US. Other speakers included James Jordan of the Alliance for Global Justice (afgj.org), and Ramon Ortiz, a Puerto Rican activist and independent scholar.
The point made by each of these panelists was the insanity of any attack on Venezuela. The clearest point was that any comparison with the US invasion of Panama in 1989 was simply not valid; in Panama, the US went in, destroyed a working class neighborhood in Panama City, grabbed President Manuel Noriega, and got out. If the US were to invade Venezuela, they would be resisted by a much larger and better trained military, where the presidency is recognized as legitimate, and which has been in power for over 25 years, able to inculcate a sense of pride of nation and each other in large numbers of their citizens.
It should be noted that in the 2002 coup attempt, somewhere around 1,000,000 Venezuelans went to the palace in support of then-president Hugo Chavez, demanding his life and his release, which they won. As this author learned during a 2006 visit to Caracas and the country, Chavez’ people did not have the organizational capacity to mobilize so many people in support of Chavez: the people had mobilized themselves in the barrios surrounding the city center and marched spontaneously on the palace to demand their president’s release. The current mobilization by the government of the people into armed militias suggests this spirit remains!
This LEPAIO webinar also is an indication of growing resistance by Americans to the Trump administrations’ activities. We know of the neighborhood-based resistance to the fascist ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) attacks on people of this country, and the increasing number of people mobilized across the country in the “No Kings” protests. Now this is a project of US trade unionists who are educating against Trump’s delusion of adequacy.
Perhaps the biggest challenge to Trump’s continued harassment and threatened invasion is the truth: Trump claims that the Cartel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns) is a real organization, claiming it is a drug-running organization. According to Dr. Ellner, this is a broadly-used term to refer to corruption among the generals of the army, not an existing organization. (It is similar to Trump thinking that ANTIFA is an organization, when it’s a general attitude of resistance to fascism, especially his.) Interestingly, after Ellner’s talk, on November 18, 2025, a news analysis by Charlie Savage of the New York Times—the paper is not generally friendly to Venezuela—made the exact same argument (see https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/18/us/politics/trump-maduro-drug-cartel.html).
In short, the US government has been conducting an economic war against Venezuela, and most importantly by applying strict sanctions that have caused great suffering, massive dissatisfaction, and emigration from the country, with many entering the United States. The US doesn’t like that a country is critical of US foreign policy and has tried to institute a form of socialism in response to the worsening failures of capitalism. Trump lies, and threatens death and destruction on those who challenge his lies.
Watch the accompanying video and see what you think.