THE KIDNAPPING OF MADURO PART OF THE US EFFORT TO CRUSH THE SPIRIT OF THE BOLIVARIAN REVOLUTION

Harry Targ

Make no mistake about it. The brutal murders and kidnapping of the president of Venezuela is designed to crush the spirit of the Bolivarian project. And all the US media, while implicitly critical of the military action, make sure to refer to Maduro as an authoritarian. They feature in their stories the celebration of Venezuelans in Miami. And references to the difficulties of the Venezuelan economy make no mention of US sanctions.

As the new century dawned Venezuela, Cuba, and other Latin American countries began to break away from US hegemony. Regional transformation had some successes and then reversals since then. The US military coup in Venezuela on January 3, 2026, signifies a dramatic almost complete reversal of the Bolivarian Project. It remains to be seen how the peoples of Venezuela and Latin America in general respond to this seeming reemergence of US imperialism in the region. And if the Bolivarian spirit survives it should be vigorously supported by peace and justice activists in North America,)

 

                                Peoples Dispatch photo
The Bolivarian Revolution Spreads Across Latin America

The Bolivarian Revolution was the name given by former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to the populist revolution he initiated in his country. Elected in 1998, he embarked on policies to empower the poor, spread literacy, expand access to health care, build worker cooperatives, and modestly redistribute wealth and power from the rich to the poor. His vision was to constitute an economic and political program designed to reverse the neoliberal policy agenda embraced by his predecessors. The oil-rich country, collaborating with revolutionary Cuba, initiated a campaign to make real the nineteenth century dream of Simon Bolivar to create a united and sovereign South America, free from imperial rule. Inspired by grassroots movements, populist governments came to power in Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Paraguay, Honduras, and Nicaragua. More cautious but left-of-center governments emerged in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. 

Venezuela and Cuba established the eleven nation Bolivarian Alternatives for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) in 2004; Venezuela, Cuba and several other Caribbean countries created, in 2005, Petrocaribe, a trade organization, primarily dealing with oil. In the Hemisphere, twelve South American countries constructed the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) in 2008, and the 33 nation Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) was established in 2011. All of these organizations were inspired by the vision of expanding regional economic and political sovereignty as opposed to the traditional United States hegemony in the region. Primarily they challenged the neoliberal model of economic development.

The Bolivarian Revolution as Part of the Rise of the Global South 

 The Bolivarian Revolution in Latin America, was part of the formation of intergovernmental organizations in the Global South, buoyant economic growth among some of the poorer countries, and the spread of anti-austerity grassroots social movements everywhere have sent shock waves across the international system. The world has been experiencing a global transformation potentially as great as when the nation-state system was constructed out of feudalism in the seventeenth century, or the multipolar world was transformed into a bipolar one after World War II. Similar dramatic changes resulted from the collapse of the bipolar Cold War world to a unipolar one after the collapse of the Socialist Bloc. This time countries of the Global South and mass movements of workers, youth, indigenous people, and people of color are taking center stage.

However, these twenty-first century tectonic shifts occurring in world affairs have not been occurring automatically. Keepers of the old order, the rich and powerful states of the Global North, continue to promote their hegemonic project particularly when resistance shows its internal weaknesses. The effort to maintain control amid faltering resistance is displayed in recent United States foreign policy toward Latin America.