The reported capture of President Nicolás Maduro by US forces, his appearance in handcuffs, and the subsequent declaration by President Donald Trump that the US will now “run” Venezuela are not merely legal manoeuvres. HISTORY has a cruel way of rhyming when the powerful grow impatient. In the early hours of January 3, 2026, the world awoke to images that felt more like a return to the 19th-century frontier than modern diplomacy.
It is the reincarnation of colonial discipline, a modern-day sjambok striking the back of a sovereign nation. To grasp the visceral nature of this event, one must look back to 1870, to a dusty patch of land in Southern Africa. There, Paul Kruger, a Commandant of the Zuid-Afrikaanische Republiek, demanded that Kgosi Kgamanyane of the Bakgatla provide free labour, the “inboekelinge” system, to build a dam at Saulspoort.
When the Kgosi refused to reduce his people to slaves for the Boer infrastructure, Kruger had him tied to an ox-wagon and publicly flogged. The parallels are as chilling as they are precise. Kruger didn’t just want a dam; he aimed to overthrow a leader who dared to defend the dignity of his people against the demands of a superior military force.
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Today, the “dam” is Venezuela’s oil, and the “sjambok” is Operation Absolute Resolve. This US military operation and related coercive instruments also re-silenced Third Worldism by centring a depoliticised global order in which power operates through force, legality and markets. The US Attorney General’s unsealed indictment in New York may speak of “narco-terrorism”, but Trump’s own words reveal a different goal.
At Mar-a-Lago, he was clear: the US will manage a “transition” while American oil firms “fix” the infrastructure. He also claimed that this operation “won’t cost us a penny” because the US would be reimbursed from the “money coming out of the ground”. The timing of this colonial reincarnation is deliberate.
For nearly 30 years, since Hugo Chávez first nationalised the country’s oil in 1998, Venezuela has been a thorn in the side of the petrodollar system. But the real sin occurred more recently. Venezuela possesses 18% of the world’s proven oil reserves, the largest globally. In 2017, under pressure from US sanctions, Maduro’s government became an early proponent of the petroyuan, joining China’s effort to de-dollarise global petroleum trade.
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