Approved as a Statement of the Steering Committee of the International Marxist-Humanist Organization on October 27, 2025

The latest chapter in the U.S.’s effort to impose regime change on a sovereign country may unfold any day now, as the Trump administration prepares for a military intervention against Venezuela.

In the Caribbean, the U.S. Navy has deployed a fleet of destroyers, amphibious ships, a nuclear submarine, Tomahawk missiles, and advanced radar and 10 F-35 fighter jets, the most advanced in the U.S. military aircraft. And on October 24, the administration sent the USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier toward Venezuela, supported by 27 other vessels, all this in preparation for launching a direct attack.

The stage began to be set for this on September 2, when Trump ordered the U.S. military to destroy a boat off the coast of Venezuela, killing all 11 on board, on the grounds that it was trafficking drugs destined for the U.S. No effort was made to stop, board, or search the vessel—this was shoot first and ask no questions later. The same is true of the 10 additional boats destroyed (as of this writing) that have killed 43 people in total.

The Trump administration has not supplied a shred of evidence that drugs were on board or that the ships were commanded by drug gangs. Nor would there be much reason to bomb them even if that were not the case: Venezuela does not produce fentanyl, which is responsible for most drug-related deaths in the U.S., and the vast majority of drugs that enter the U.S. are shipped through the Pacific Coast, not the Caribbean (less than 10% of the illegal drugs that enter the U.S. go through Venezuela).

In fact, these attacks have nothing to do with stopping the drug trade. They are aimed at providing a pretense for removing President Nicolas Maduro from power in Venezuela and imposing a far-rightwing government upon it. Trump aims to do by using the same mechanism the U.S. has utilized for two centuries in Latin America—overt as well as covert military intervention.

As we have argued elsewhere, Trump is not an isolationist. Faced with the U.S.’s setback in the 2003 Gulf war and the failure of its 20-year war in Afghanistan, he—like his counterpart Vladimir Putin when it comes to Russia—is seeking to solidify control over the U.S.’s “spheres of interest” in what has become an increasingly multipolar world. And there is no sphere of interest that is more important to the U.S. than Latin America.

Trump already wanted to overthrow Maduro’s regime during his first administration. Instead, he did something that was no less egregious—in 2017 he cut off all oil imports from Venezuela (at the time a major source of U.S. oil) and imposed sanctions which blocked Venezuela’s access to U.S. and international financial markets. Since oil (like most major commodities) is traded on the world market in dollars, this effectively prevented Venezuela from exporting the bulk of its oil—which made up 94% of its foreign exchange. As a result, Venezuela’s already weakening economy fractured, plunging millions of Venezuelans into dire poverty.

It was this fact, more than any other, that explains the massive numbers of Venezuelans who have fled the country since 2017, with close to a million immigrating (or attempting to immigrate) to the U.S.

Trump’s saber-rattling against Maduro’s regime—which until recently was involved in negotiations with the U.S. to resolve their differences—is directly related to his war against immigrants at home. He has unleased ICE and the Department of Homeland Security against documented as well as undocumented immigrants under the blatantly false charge that they are engaged in “criminal” activity. Thousands of working-class and poor Venezuelans have been deported in recent months, and he plans to evict 700,000 more (many of whom were granted residency in the U.S. through the Temporary Protective Status program). Several hundred have been deported to the U.S. concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay and the notorious “Terrorism Confinement Center” in El Salvador.

Here is the madness embodied in Trump’s policies: he creates the conditions that compel many to leave Venezuela and then he punishes the victims of his policies by deporting them to other places to suffer further degradation and torture.

Yet in the eyes of Trump, Secretary of War Hegseth, and fascist White House counselor Stephen Miller, what better way is there to get support for deporting as many immigrants as possible than by tarnishing them with being connected to the drug-dealing Tren de Aragua gang from Venezuela—and on the grounds that the gang is controlled by the Venezuelan government.

In fact, there are no more than a few hundred members of Tren de Aragua in the U.S. InSight Crime, which has tracked the gang for years, has found no evidence that it has organized cells in the U.S. that cooperate with one another or that it receives instructions from abroad. Nor is there evidence that Maduro sent members of Tren de Aragua and other Venezuelan gangs to the U.S., as Trump claims. Tren de Aragua is a horrible group, responsible for violent crimes in Venezuela and elsewhere in South America. But since the Venezuelan military stormed the prison in 2023 that Tren de Aragua controlled, the gang is greatly weakened, not centrally organized, and has no clear political goals.

To dehumanize people in practice, one first must label them as somehow less than human in words. This is what Trump is trying to do by tying Venezuelan (as well as other) immigrants to violent gangs. And a major reason he is going after Maduro is to further bolster this very claim.

Make no mistake about it: it is total hypocrisy to oppose Trump’s war against immigrants at home while not opposing his effort to attack and overthrow the Venezuelan government. The two policies are inseparable.

Trump is not hiding the fact that he is aiming for regime change in Venezuela. His preferred replacement is Maria Corina Machado, a far Rightist who sought to run against Maduro in the most recent presidential election but was prevented by him from doing so. She is a long-time supporter and advocate of Trump who has been calling for the U.S. military to violently overthrow its government for years. Not only that; she supports Trump’s deportation of Venezuelan immigrants and defends his decision to send some of them to Guantanamo Bay and El Salvador. This has alienated her from many former supporters of hers in Venezuela.

How ironic then that the committee that decides the Nobel Peace Prize picks this as the moment to give her the award. Machado is no friend of peace. She is a product of the oligarchy that ran Venezuela for decades prior to the ascent of Hugo Chavez to the presidency, and she has allied herself with some of the most reactionary political forces in the Americas. Her getting the Nobel Prize for Peace only makes Trump’s work easier.

We must say loud and clear—NO to U.S. intervention in Venezuela! NO to any effort to overthrow of the Venezuelan government! NO to the deportations of immigrants, whether from Venezuela or anywhere else! And NO to the dehumanization of those victimized by past and present U.S. foreign and domestic policies!

Our firm support for these demands does not imply political support for the present-day policies of the Venezuelan government.

But whatever one thinks of them, they are NOT the reason for the U.S.’s effort to take military action for the sake of regime change. It is instead about promoting its reactionary drive to dismantle what is left of U.S. democracy, accelerate its war on immigrants, and violently impose U.S. imperial control over Latin America.

There is a long history of U.S. military interventions in Latin America—from William Walker’s effort to conquer Nicaragua in the 1850s to Theodore Roosvelt’s seizure of the area that became the Panama Canal from Colombia, and from JFK’s Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in the early 1960s to Nixon’s complicity in overthrowing Allende’s government in Chile a decade later. U.S. imperialist interventions never end well, and neither will this one, if allowed to go forward.