Oriana points through her living room window at the bombing site where President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores were abducted, January 2026.Photograph by Celina della Croce
In mid-January, a young Venezuelan mother named Oriana invited me into her home in Ciudad Tiuna, a government-built housing project with thousands of apartments and roughly 20,000 residents. With her five- and twelve- year-old sons in the other room, she pointed through the window at the charred earth where the United States military had abducted President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores two weeks earlier. A few buildings down, Oriana’s neighbor showed me the path where a bullet had entered through the bedroom window, ricocheted off the wall, and pierced a dresser, a pair of shoes, and a towel next to her bed. The exterior and interior walls of the building, too, were pierced with bullets. So was the nearby primary school that Oriana’s sons and younger siblings attend.
Children in a playground in Ciudad Tiuna, January 2026. Photograph by Celina della Croce
Since the January 3 assault, rumors and accusations have spread like wildfire across the globe. On the evening of January 3, one of my neighbors in Queens, New York – who knew I was in Venezuela at the time – sent me a screenshot of a Tweet that had been seen by 4.3 million people alleging that “the so called ‘capture’ of Maduro was a negotiated deal between Maduro and US for an agreed exit strategy. … Maduro likely already has purchased property in Dubai to retire to.” Last month, an attendee of an event in Brooklyn, New York – not far from where Maduro and Flores sit in prison – quipped, like many, that the Bolivarian Revolution has sold out since January 3 and asked somewhat rhetorically, why Venezuelans weren’t “fighting back”.
Colonel Castro, a member of then President Hugo Chávez’s inner security detail at the time of the short-lived 2002 coup, points to the sky above the historic military fort Cuartel de la Montaña (4F) and tells of a missile dropped nearby, obliterating the bodies of Venezuelans who fired back at a US aircraft on 3 January. Photograph by Celina della Croce.
When I was invited to Venezuela for an assembly for peace in December, a friend of mine – a photographer – asked if I might have room in my suitcase to bring him a pair of combat pants. He, like many Venezuelans, had begun civic-military training exercises in the build-up to the bombing, in which Trump’s administration killed 150 fisherpeople, seized Venezuelan oil tankers, and repeatedly threatened and carried out acts aggression of against Venezuela. When I arrived in Caracas and caught up with a member of a commune in the neighborhood 23 de Enero (an economist by trade), he had a pistol tucked into his waistband: he was headed straight to his volunteer patrol shift after our conversation, preparing for the possibility of an invasion at any moment.
The idea that Venezuelans have given up or are not “real” revolutionaries is easy to profess from an armchair in the imperial core (as Vijay Prashad, Roxanne Dunbar Ortíz, and others reminded us in “A letter to intellectuals who deride revolutions in the name of purity,” published in the aftermath of the 2019 coup in Bolivia). There is a deep irony that this assertion is made – and made often – in a country that has not only intentionally and strategically “increase[ed] pain and suffering that the Venezuelan people are suffering from,” to use the boastful words of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, but that continues to brutally repress the right to democratic expression within its own borders (as is evident from the mass arrests of anti-police brutality and anti-ICE protestors through the years, the murders of Alex Pretti and Renée Good in Minneapolis earlier this year, and the decades’-long political prisoners such as Mumia Abu-Jamal and Josh Williams). Yet for this group of people, the focal point, seemingly exclusively, is whether or not Venezuela (or Cuba, for that matter) is “doing it right.” Have they sold out? Has enough blood been shed to win the approval of these studied observers? (What happens within the US seems to be of no interest here).
“A window of the classroom where Oriana’s five-year-old son studies in Ciudad Tiuna, January 2026. Photograph courtesy of Celina della Croce.”
In Venezuela, a country that has lived through terrorism in many forms – from the degradation imposed by the poverty in which 70% of the population lived before the revolution to the bipartisan economic warfare wrought by the US which caused 40,000 people to die in the first year of Trump’s “maximum pressure campaign” and attempts to assassinate Maduro – many would prefer to die on their feet rather than to live on their knees. Over the years, the United States has spent millions of tax-payer dollars on “pro-democracy” initiatives in Venezuela that seek to enact regime change and has imposed over 1,000 unilateral coercive measures, including one of the harshest sanctions regimes in the world (in fact, the very idea of economic warfare is for the population to overthrow its own leader by, as US President Richard Nixon put it 1970, ‘mak[ing] the economy scream”).
The Trump administration has taken no pains to hide its agenda, declaring, repeatedly, some variation of phrases like “America will not… allow a hostile regime to take our Oil, Land, or any other Assets” (President Donald Trump) and the US is “deadly serious about getting back the oil that was stolen from us” (Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, “our” meaning Venezuela’s oil). Furthermore, Trump has been clear that a decision from the Venezuelan government to refuse to make concessions would undoubtedly lead to mass destruction, stating at his January 3 press conference, for instance, that “we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so… a much bigger wave, actually” and that “[a]ll political and military figures in Venezuela should understand what happened to Maduro can happen to them”. (Interestingly, in the press conference there is not a single mention of international law, which the US has violated repeatedly – only of “American justice,” “American property,” “American foreign policy,” “American dominance,” and “American sovereignty.” As Trump said in a telling slip of tongue, “I watched last night one of the most precise, uh, attacks on sovereignty. I mean, it was, uh, an attack f- – for justice.”)
Venezuelans took to the streets the night before the May 24 US military drill in Caracas to paint slogans across the walls of the city, such as “loyal always, gringos never” (featured above), “we are not a colony,” and “go to hell, sh*t Yankees.” “The walls speak,” a member of Abuelos de la Patria (Grandparents of the Homeland) told me the next morning; “We’ll keep fighting, raising our voices, from whatever trenches we can.” Photograph by Huascar Rodríguez
Trump and his predecessor showed how far they are willing to go, and what they are capable of, to further the American agenda and consolidate US hegemony. The livestreamed genocide in Gaza has been one warning to the world; January 3 was another, when the US military shut off power in Caracas, disabled detection and air defense systems, flew over 150 aircraft into the city, bombed at least seven locations, and made off with the president and first lady (herself an important leader in the country since the early years of the revolution) after rehearsing the attack on a full-scale replica of Maduro’s compound built in Kentucky.
As US President Donald Trump boasted later the same day, “[t]his extremely successful operation should serve as warning” and “if you would’ve seen the speed, the violence… it’s just, it was an amazing thing, an amazing job that these people did.” Caracas became an example for the US government to show off its military might; as many survivors of the bombing told me, “we experienced, briefly, what it is like to be Palestinian.”
A woman from the Peasant Militia (Milicia Campesina) holds a machete during her graduation as a combatant from a Tactical Method of Revolutionary Resistance (Método Táctico de Resistencia Revolucionaria, MTRR) course, October 2025. Photograph by Rosana Silva R
The discussion of where Venezuela “should” – or can – draw the line is an extremely complex one, and not something that should be taken lightly. January 3, and the escalated genocide in Palestine before it, ushered in a heightened era of hyper-imperialism, an increasingly unrestrained, and illegal, use of US military power as the country’s economic and technological edge lose their edge. Faced with the threat of continued bombings and bloodshed, the Venezuelan people are left with a difficult, if not impossible, set of choices and their own internal contradictions to struggle through.
To fixate on these calculations while ignoring the context that informs them – implying that we, in the West, in fact know what is best and what decisions should be made – is an adaptation of imperialist thinking disguised as left intellect. Or, as Fidel Castro said, “You strangle us for… years and then criticize us for the way we breathe.”
Apartment buildings near a January 3 bombing site in Ciudad Tiuna, a government-funded housing project through Mision Vivienda which has in total constructed over 5 million homes across the country. Photograph by Celina della Croce
The decision of where to draw the line, what setbacks to accept and at what cost, and how much blood is to be shed, is one that belongs to the Venezuelan people – the ones who would pay the price for a hard stance with their lives. To imply that the Venezuelan people do not have agency in this choice is not only ahistorical but pedantic, colonial, and quite frankly racist. To point to one segment of the population – especially the diaspora in the US – as if they represent the voice of an entire people, is lazy, inaccurate, and unscientific.
Iraida, a leader of the Movimiento de Pobladores, speaks at a protest in Caracas on May 24 against the US military drill that took place the same day. Photograph by Rome Arrieche
Those in the West who insist that Venezuelans must take a hard stance to be “real revolutionaries” in so doing imply that Venezuelans are not acutely aware of the complex reality in which they find themselves and that they cannot think for themselves or sort through the contradictions and challenges they face, whether external or internal. This assumption is particularly ironic when imposed on a country where the revolution has from the onset used its wealth to fund programs that have not only vastly improved the quality of life of its people but have also bolstered their training, consciousness, and confidence to lead their own revolution, fromMission Robinson (which eradicated illiteracy by 2005 and taught 1.5 million people to read and write) to a variety of programs that have built dozens of universities and developed cadre training and political education.
The task for the left in the West is not to determine the “right” thing for Venezuela to do, nor is to make ahistorical comparisons that equate the reality in Venezuela with countries like Iran. The task, rather, is to build a struggle for liberation at home that furthers social advances for and builds the dignity and confidence of their own people. Beyond lifting our own population out of poverty and defeatism, such a struggle in the United States would widen the space for sovereign processes across the world in the very places under scrutiny from sections of the self-proclaimed left today, from Venezuela and Cuba to Iran and the countries of the Sahel. This cannot be done in a vacuum – or “on an island surrounded by a sea of capitalism,” as Chávez warned. In a country rife with poverty and inequality whose president recently professed that the only obligation of the government is to fund the military, we would do well to learn from the extraordinary skill, accomplishments, and fierce dedication of peoples who have withstood decades, if not centuries, of foreign interference rather than challenge their ability to determine their own future.
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Celina is the director of publications and an editor at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. She has also been a leader in internationalist, anti-imperialist, and working-class struggles in the United States for over a decade and has lived and studied in Latin America. She also participated in CodePink’s 2026 to Venezuela.
This article was originally published in CounterPunch on May 26.
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