Nicolas Maduro, one of the remaining leftist leaders in a Latin America increasingly led by right-wing governments, was kidnapped with his wife, Cilia Adela Flores de Maduro, and flown to the US, where he has since appeared before a New York court on charges of “narco-terrorism conspiracy and cocaine importation conspiracy”. Hours after Maduro’s capture, which followed the bombing of the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, and the murder of 40 Venezuelan people, including military personnel and civilians, Trump addressed the media from Mar-a-Lago, his Miami resort used by convicted paedophile and sex trafficker Jeffery Epstein. Trump said the US would effectively “run Venezuela” and would immediately “take a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground”, in reference to Venezuela’s oil.
Venezuela has the world’s largest reserves of oil and has rare earth minerals. Trump was unequivocal in his statement that the US would send in its own oil companies to facilitate the plunder. Most chillingly, Trump has said if the Venezuelan government does not cooperate with this blatant colonial agenda, he’d permit a second wave of attacks far worse than the one that led to Maduro’s capture.
He also repeated his calls for the US annexation of Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark. This has sent shockwaves across Europe. One would think the US bombing and inevitable invasion of Venezuela would be condemned and reported as the imperial, colonial, and criminal action it is.
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Unfortunately, a lot of media across the world, including in South Africa, is using euphemistic language and refraining from calling things by their proper names. Rather than speak to the blatant criminality of Trump’s actions, we’re being subjected to narratives about how Maduro is a dictator who has destroyed the Venezuelan economy. Analysts are falling all over themselves trying to intellectualise the situation in a way that obfuscates facts, manufacturing nuance that does not exist.
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