By Timo Dorsch and Moritz Krawinkel
medico has not worked in Venezuela since 2019. A project with the Cecosesola cooperative association, which inter alia provides its members with affordable food and healthcare, already ended after a trial phase. The improvisation required of the cooperativistas in post-Chavista daily life was simply incompatible with the documentation required in Germany for donated funds. What remained was mutual respect and a dialogue on the situation in Venezuela. Despite this flow of information, the attack on Venezuela’s sovereignty and the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores in early January came as a surprise. The military action appears to be a new edition of the US interventionist policy of the 20th century in Latin America. Yet despite a similar modus operandi, the coup against Venezuela took place under different global political circumstances.
The assault was made possible by extensive US troop movements in the Caribbean Sea. The fact that the US Navy has extrajudicially killed over a hundred people in the waters off Venezuela’s coast in recent months can, in retrospect, be seen as an aggressive overture. The United Nations Charter is unequivocal on this though: it prohibits such actions just as it prohibits wars of aggression. Article 2 enshrines the prohibition of the use of force against the territorial sovereignty of other states; Article 51 permits self-defence only in the event of an ‘armed attack’ and subject to the involvement of the UN Security Council. To legitimise the use of military force or the attack, the Trump Administration relied on charges against Maduro in a US court in March 2020 for international drug trafficking and ‘narco-terrorism’, although it remains unclear what the latter legally encompasses. Especially since equating drug trafficking with terrorism is more a case of populist rhetoric than a legal category. War on Terror meets War on Drugs: you can’t get more buzzwords than that.
Against China
Just how arbitrarily the US government actually wages its War on Drugs was demonstrated once again in early December 2025: Donald Trump pardoned the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been sentenced to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking by a New York court in the summer of 2024. The comparatively small amount of cocaine smuggled from Venezuela, on the other hand, is headed primarily for Europe. The cocaine for the US market, on the other hand, comes to a far greater extent from Ecuador. To date the US has not launched any military offensive against its Trump-friendly president. Fentanyl, for its part, which is to blame for the majority of drug-related deaths in the US, comes mainly from Mexico.
And yet, the US government justifies invading the territory of sovereign states by invoking a ‘legitimate national security need’ amidst an alleged climate of continental insecurity, as the Trump Administration recently affirmed in the revised US National Security Strategy it published. The document directly references the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, under which the US reserves the right to take action against “foreign powers” in the Western Hemisphere. This is a clear signal to China, which not only has close economic ties with Venezuela and is the main buyer of Venezuelan oil, but has also established close economic relations with many Latin American countries in recent years as part of its ‘New Silk Road’ policy.
As such, the attack on Venezuela is also part of a continuum of assaults on the sovereignty of Latin American countries with a view to enforcing US interests. Trump influenced election campaigns in Honduras and Argentina to the benefit of right-wing politicians and imposed sanctions on a Brazilian federal judge for convicting former President Jair Bolsonaro. Add to this US military drones over Mexico and open threats of intervention against the drug cartels, as well as a generally aggressive tariff policy against Latin American states. The increasing aggressiveness of US policy thus also not least serves the aim of pushing back China’s significant influence in Latin America.
Sovereignty or subjugation
In Venezuela, the US interest is first and foremost accessing the world’s biggest oil reserves. Rarely has a state’s and capital’s interest in the resources of other countries been proclaimed so bluntly as it was in the days following the attack. The US government openly threatened Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, with further military attacks should she stand in the way of US interests. What is new is the realisation that the US is tolerating the Chávez supporter in office. This pragmatism has clearly upset the Latin American right, especially the Venezuelan right. Right-wing opposition figure María Corina Machado had after all recently given the Nobel Peace Prize she had just been awarded to Donald Trump in an attempt to win his favour and demonstrate her submission to him. But Trump’s foreign policy is not as ideological as she had hoped – when push comes to shove, whoever promises the best deal is the one who comes out on top. Something also recently experienced by Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro, whom Trump had described as “an illegal drug leader” and placed on the US sanctions list just shortly before. Petro, for his part, had heavily criticised Maduro’s abduction. Following a meeting at the White House, during which Petro pledged his support in the fight against the drug cartels, the tone suddenly became conciliatory: “We got on very well,” said Trump. And so-called progressive Latin America for the most part breathed a collective sigh of relief.
Not so Cuba, though, which for decades has faced a US blockade in contravention of international law and has only managed to keep its head above water in recent years thanks to oil imports from Venezuela. These shipments were stopped in the wake of Maduro’s abduction, and the already precarious situation on the island has since worsened drastically. Fuel is being rationed and prioritised for the health service and the production of electricity and food. Military intervention, which many had feared, seems obsolete as the social pressure within the country continues to mount. Mexico could step in, but Trump is threatening any state that breaks the US blockade. In Mexico, which has closer economic ties to the US than any other Latin American country, sanctions would have devastating consequences. So Mexican President Sheinbaum is very cautious and promises humanitarian aid, but not oil.
Whilst the Latin American right is prepared to submit to the role of being vassals of the US and is downright celebrating its closeness to Trump, the situation is complicated for the social movements and the last remaining progressive governments in Latin America. There is a lack of shared strategic and political prospects; the days of Latin American integration under a left-wing banner, as fostered by Hugo Chávez and Lula da Silva in the early 2000s, are long gone. Brazil is responding by turning more towards the other BRICS states and the EU – an attempt to preserve independence. Would a right-wing government continue this trajectory? Unlikely. The presidential elections set to take place this year in Colombia and Brazil will therefore determine the course going forward.
European pandering
Whilst the governments of Mexico, Brazil and Colombia at least positioned themselves as defenders of a rules-based world order after Maduro’s abduction – albeit unable to act due to their own limited influence on the international stage – European officials proved the opposite. Of course, there is no relativising the political mistakes, corruption and violence of the Maduro regime. Transformative projects such as the Chavista one are vulnerable not just to outside threats, but also those from within. However, condemnation – and better still, sanctions against the US attack should go without saying. But like with their support of the genocide in Gaza, Europe’s governments wanted nothing more to do with a ‘values-led foreign policy’ when it comes to allied states blatantly flouting international law. No genuine condemnation was to be heard from London, Paris, Rome or Berlin. On the contrary: in their reactions to the attack, Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, Giorgia Meloni and Friedrich Merz have made it clear once again that, when push comes to shove, they side with the US’ policies that are clearly illegal under international law. As such, they are contributing to the institutions of international law increasingly losing their significance.
Dominance instead of dialogue, interests instead of values, and an ever more pronounced friend-or-foe rationale. We are entering an age of polarisation. Nuances and middle ground are being destroyed – with currently unforeseeable negative ramifications for policies and politics that stand for the equality of all and a life in dignity; like medico and our former partners at Cecosesola do.