The Trump administration has launched a violent escalation of imperialist threats against Venezuela with the dispatch of an armada to within striking distance of the South American nation’s shores. The deployment of three guided missile destroyers and an attack submarine, together with 4,000 personnel, to the southern Caribbean has been followed by the dispatch of three amphibious assault ships carrying an expeditionary force of 2,000 Marines.

The military siege of Venezuela marks a new stage in an unprecedented escalation of US imperialist aggression against Latin America as a whole.

Washington’s official announcement of the military operation made clear its absolutely illegal and relentless character. The White House press secretary announced that the administration headed by President Nicolás Maduro “is not the legitimate government of Venezuela, it is a narco terror cartel” against which President Trump “is prepared to use every element of American power.”

The action was preceded by the absurd designation of Maduro and his government as the leaders of the Cartel de los Soles—a supposed drug trafficking organization whose very existence lacks any credible evidence. Classifying this cartel as a “terrorist organization,” Washington has placed a $50 million bounty on the Venezuelan president’s head.

The inflammatory attack against Venezuela is directed at creating an ominous precedent for the entire planet; US imperialism is proclaiming its right to intervene violently against any regime it considers an obstacle to its interests.

Although the attack on Venezuela has advanced systematically under previous Republican and Democratic administrations alike, Trump’s actions mark a qualitative leap.

Washington has abandoned the hypocritical pretensions of “restoring democracy” and “human rights,” which served as a cover for its previous interventions. Trump is not bothering to reprise the farcical attempt to pass off a nonentity like Juan Guaidó as the “legitimate” president in furtherance of regime change. It is instead resorting to naked armed force.

The fate of oil-rich Venezuela is being decided under terms similar to the fate of Czechoslovakia or Poland in World War II; or, more directly, according to the brutal paradigms being established in Gaza by Zionism and its imperialist supporters.

Imperialist offensive against Latin America

The escalation against Venezuela is part of a coordinated offensive that—combining military, economic and political means—aims to establish unrestricted US domination over Latin America.

This imperialist onslaught has advanced by leaps and bounds in the first months of the second Trump administration.

The first days of his term were marked by the neocolonial bullying of Panama, threatening military invasion if the country did not cede to the US total control over the Panama Canal.

It gained momentum with the announcement of crippling tariffs against Brazil, openly justified as a political intervention against the Brazilian government to prevent the trial of the country’s fascist former president Jair Bolsonaro for his 2023 coup attempt.

In a historic shift, Washington has adopted the kind of aggressive hostility toward Brazil—the region’s largest power and a longtime US ally—previously reserved for Venezuela and countries it has labeled the “Axis of Evil.”

The operation against Venezuela was anticipated by reports of a directive recently signed by Trump for the Pentagon to “begin using military force against certain Latin American cartels,” expressly naming Mexican crime groups.

An unprecedented 10,000 US troops have been deployed to the border, and US warships have been dispatched to threaten Mexico.

Despite President Claudia Sheinbaum’s insistence to the contrary, a US invasion of Mexico is an imminent threat.

The onslaught against Latin America is directly embedded in the shift in US imperialism’s global war policy.

A day before dispatching ships and troops to the Caribbean, Trump hosted a NATO crisis summit at the White House. Creating huge rifts with the European imperialist powers, the meeting was prompted by Washington’s turn away from the war against Russia in Ukraine.

This strategic shift is guided by the Trump administration’s openly stated goal of concentrating US forces for war against China, within which Latin America constitutes a major battleground.

The grotesque conspiracy theory used to justify the US incursion into a region it has historically considered its “own backyard,” which combines the phony pretexts of the “war on drugs” and the “war on terror,” has as its corollary the blaming of China and its “evil agenda” for destabilizing the Western Hemisphere.

This narrative, modeled on Hitler’s “Big Lie,” was explicitly formulated in SOUTHCOM’s strategic guidelines presented in February. The Pentagon stated that “transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) ... use enormous revenue from drug trafficking ... to corrupt and co-opt portions of regional governments” in Latin America, and thus “open space for China, Russia, and other malign actors to achieve strategic ends and further their agendas.”

In other words, what begins nominally as a fight against drug trafficking evolves seamlessly into the overthrow of targeted governments and a war between great powers for control of strategic resources and chokepoints.

Dictatorship over the Americas

US imperialism’s struggle for domination of the Western Hemisphere and the rest of the planet merges directly with efforts to impose a dictatorial regime within the United States itself.

The war plans of the capitalist oligarchy require massive attacks on the working class in the United States and the crushing of its power of resistance.

The Trump administration is mobilizing military forces to wage war not only against its “strategic rivals” but against the American people as well. On August 11, it began a military occupation of Washington D.C., mobilizing nearly 9,000 police and military troops.

This military occupation represents the highpoint of a systematic effort to impose a presidential dictatorship, continuing the objectives of the fascist coup attempt of January 6, 2021.

The breakdown of democratic rule in the United States acts as a powerful impetus for fascist political forces in Latin America, the heirs of the CIA-backed military dictatorships of the 1970s.

In Brazil, the coup attempt promoted by Bolsonaro and the military high command on January 8, 2023 was directly inspired by Trump’s attack on the US Capitol two years earlier. Today, the trial of Bolsonaro and his fellow fascist conspirators serves as a pretext for US imperialist intervention against Brazil.

The Argentine government of fascist President Javier Milei, who came to power a year ago, openly acts as the spearhead of Washington’s incursion into the region. This was clearly demonstrated in this week’s events.

While the US fleet advanced against Venezuela, in the extreme south of the region Milei inaugurated “Southdec 2025” alongside US SOUTHCOM commander Admiral Alvin Holsey.

After the national anthems of Argentina and the United States were played, Defense Minister Luis Petri stated: “This meeting is very important for our country because it ratifies the decision and mandate of President Javier Milei to align ourselves with the administration of Donald Trump.”

The meeting continued with speeches attacking the “Chinese Communist Party [which] continues its methodical incursion into the region” and calling for a war against “transnational crime.”

The Milei government’s plans include the creation of a special division to combat Brazilian “transnational criminal organizations” inside and outside Argentina. A militarization of the borders with Brazil in conjunction with US troops appears to be imminent.

Crisis of bourgeois nationalism and the Pink Tide

The response to the attacks of US imperialism demonstrates the profound crisis of the bourgeois nationalist governments of the so-called Pink Tide.

The government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, of the Workers’ Party (PT), recently declared to the press a genuine concern that Washington is preparing a regime change operation in Brazil.

The solution sought by Lula is emblematic. Internally, the PT seeks to move closer to the extreme right on the basis of a reactionary nationalist ideology; externally, it seeks to strengthen relations with the right-wing regimes in the region and with European imperialism.

Lula’s desperate initiatives have included an appeal for collaboration with Ecuador’s fascistic President Daniel Noboa to combat organized crime in the region; in other words, to legitimize the bogeyman created by Washington for its hemispheric interventions. The same attitude prevails among all the failed governments of the Pink Tide.

In the face of open aggression against Venezuela, Brasilia has adopted an even more cowardly position. Lula’s adviser Celso Amorim limited himself to declaring “concern,” emphasizing that the Brazilian government does not recognize Maduro’s election, offering a justification for imperialist intervention.

The project for Latin American unity advanced by the Pink Tide in the days of UNASUR—which spoke openly of joint defense measures against US-backed coup attempts —foundered along with the “commodity boom” that boosted the region’s economies at the beginning of the century.

The deepening of the global capitalist crisis and the intensification of the class struggle over the last decade have pitted these bourgeois “left” governments against the working class domestically and made them increasingly adopt the slogan of “every man for himself” in the search for accommodation with imperialism.

The shipwreck of the failed bourgeois Pink Tide project marks the final crisis of the experiments with bourgeois nationalism in Latin America. More than a century of bitter betrayals and defeats have demonstrated the absolute inability of purely national programs to resolve Latin America’s basic social and democratic problems, much less overthrow its oppression by imperialism.

Necessary response of the working class

The International Committee of the Fourth International rejects the dead-end of nationalism and advances a program for the unification of the struggle of workers across the Americas and internationally.

The 1940 Manifesto of the Fourth International Against War proclaimed:

The monstrous growth of armaments in the United States prepares for a violent solution of the complex contradictions in the Western Hemisphere and should soon pose point blank the question of the destiny of the Latin American countries. ... Only under its own revolutionary direction is the proletariat of the colonies and the semi-colonies capable of achieving invincible collaboration with the proletariat of the metropolitan centers, and with the world working class as a whole. Only this collaboration can lead the oppressed peoples to complete and final emancipation, through the overthrow of imperialism the world over.

Eighty-five years later, this perspective has taken on even greater meaning. Throughout Latin America, the working class has become the most numerous and powerful social force. Its objective connection to workers around the world has been radically deepened through the globalization of capitalist production.

In particular, the fate of Latin American workers and those in the United States is deeply intertwined.

The unity of workers throughout the Americas is the key to a successful struggle against oppression by imperialist capitalism in both the South and the North.

The ICFI unconditionally denounces the criminal attacks of US imperialism against Venezuela and the other oppressed countries of Latin America. But imperialist aggression can only be defeated through the methods of class struggle.

The battle against imperialism must be waged under the following banners: US troops out of Venezuelan waters and the streets of Washington! Unity of the working class in the imperialist and oppressed countries!

In this context, an understanding of the true nature of Trump’s tariffs against Brazil and other countries is particularly necessary. Their irrationality and economic destructiveness obey the logic of the drive to global imperialist war.

The program being promoted by the PT, the unions and the pseudo-left is utterly inadequate. Their demands for “national unity” above the class struggle and a turn towards economic nationalism are totally reactionary and represent an adaptation to the irrationality of imperialist war.

The devastating impact of the tariffs will be felt by the working class both in Brazil and within the United States itself and must be answered by the international working class in a unified manner.

Workers must launch an international campaign against factory closures and job cuts, and against the plans of transnational corporations to restructure globally in order to intensify the exploitation of labor. The increase in workplace deaths and accidents, which necessarily result from these conditions, must be met with the establishment of workers’ control of production.

To advance this program, it is necessary to break the shackles imposed by the corporatist unions and the parties that falsely claim to represent workers, such as the Pink Tide in Latin America and the Democratic Party in the US. Aided by pseudo-left organizations, their role is to keep workers imprisoned within the confines of bourgeois national politics.

• Build the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees!
• Against imperialist war for the redivision of the globe advance the struggle for global socialism!
• Build the revolutionary leadership of the working class, the International Committee of the Fourth International!