Venezuela: From revolution to recolonisation

Between smiles and a handshake, Venezuelan Acting President Delcy Rodríguez thanked United States President Donald Trump for “supporting the country’s return to multilateral forums”, following a face-to-face meeting on September 22 that she called “historic.”

In her address before the United Nations General Assembly one day later, Rodríguez reiterated her gratitude to Trump while promising a “democratic transformation” of her country.

The acting leader’s trip to New York, a mere nine months after the January 3 US bombings and kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores, perfectly encapsulated the Venezuelan government’s international and domestic realignment with US imperialism in general and its MAGA faction in particular.

The Venezuelan leadership’s diplomatic activity in New York showcased a new foreign policy direction that is now unmistakably marching to Washington’s drum.

Rodríguez held talks with International Monetary Fund and World Bank representatives, deepening reengagement with the Washington-based financial institutions that former President Hugo Chávez denounced as instruments of US imperialism and booted out of the country. The spectre of another IMF loan-and-adjustment package returns as the Rodríguez administration begins negotiations to restructure the country’s enormous and illegitimate debt.

Rodríguez also held sideline meetings with US allies only, such as Netherlands PM Rob Jetten, Trinidad and Tobago PM Kamla Persad-Bissessar and Chilean President José Antonio Kast. Rodríguez also hosted Paraguayan President Santiago Peña in Caracas before flying to the US.

The right-wing Chilean and Paraguayan administrations had firmly backed US regime change efforts in Venezuela, leading the Maduro government to sever ties.

Trinidad and Tobago’s case was even more egregious, with Caracas suspending all cooperation, including in key cross-border natural gas projects, after Port of Spain endorsed Washington’s military buildup and extrajudicial boat bombings on Venezuela’s doorstep in late 2025.

Rodríguez and her team also broke with the Chavista tradition of holding meetings with global majority countries similarly under Washington’s gun, especially allies and strategic partners such as Cuba, Iran, China and Russia. A customary event in Harlem, alongside Cuban officials and international solidarity movements, was scrapped as well.

Absent from the acting president’s UN address was the hitherto denunciation of Washington’s criminal wars across the globe, replaced by a vague expression of solidarity with “peoples who suffer war”. Nor was there any condemnation of US economic sanctions, which remain in place against Venezuela and its former allies.

Rodríguez offered no words of support for Cuba as it faces a US blockade that gets more murderous by the day.

There was no mention of Palestine either. Before January 3, Venezuelan representatives had never wasted an opportunity to reiterate support for the Palestinian cause and expose the international community’s failure to rein in the genocidal, Western-sponsored settler colony.

In contrast, Venezuela joined the US, Israel, Ukraine, Western European countries and Latin American right-wing governments in boycotting the UN’s commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the Durban Declaration.

The 2001 World Conference Against Racism marked a milestone in the ongoing struggle to end racism and colonialism, provoking the ire of the US and Israel, which have led boycotts of every one of its commemorations.

Along with the 180-degree foreign policy shift, the Rodríguez administration has moved to restructure the economy to the benefit of a declining US hegemon reeling from its strategic defeat in the war against Iran.

With US officials’ input and supervision, Venezuelan authorities have overhauled energy and mining laws in the interest of multinational corporations, slashing taxes and royalties as well as ceding operational and commercial control.

Corporate executives, often shepherded by Trump aides, have paraded through the presidential palace to sign agreements carving up Venezuela’s immense subsoil resources.

A recent oil deal with the Trump administration, which Rodríguez hailed as “historic”, will turn over 17 prime oilfields holding more than one-fifth of Venezuela’s crude reserves to a private petroleum company, NABEP, controlled by the Pentagon.

Furthermore, the US State Department will be able to buy 20% of NABEP’s output at cost, while having a right of first refusal for the remaining 80%, for which a Venezuelan oil official promised a major “sales discount.”

In other words, Venezuela is going to supply energy below market price to the imperial war machine.

Whatever revenue is ultimately left for Caracas is still going to be controlled by the US Treasury Department, under what Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA chief defended as a “state-to-state agreement”.

Washington’s semi-colonial control extends beyond privileged access to natural resources, including strategic minerals.

A looming privatisation drive and debt restructuring process are likely to further entrench Venezuelan dependence on Western monopoly capital.

At the same time, the US is also looking to turn the South American country into a captive market for its heavily subsidised agricultural output. Venezuela’s imports of staples such as rice and corn have skyrocketed this year, seriously threatening national production, especially small and mid-size campesino farms supplying much of the country’s food.

The speed and scope of Caracas’ realignment with Washington has made it an uphill battle for those still insisting that the acting Rodríguez government is merely conducting a “tactical retreat” without straying from the Bolivarian Revolution’s strategic horizon.

One early line of argument was to invoke historical examples, such as the Brest-Litovsk treaty, to rationalise difficult concessions at gunpoint. But there are other historical analogies that are, unfortunately, more appropriate.

Iraq after the US invasion, like Venezuela, to this day does not control its oil revenues, which are deposited in a New York Federal Reserve account. Iraq was until recently under US military occupation, hosting some two dozen bases — a possibility that Trump has recently left open for Venezuela.

In past months, the US has carried out extrajudicial executions on Venezuelan soil and deployed military assets in the wake of July’s double earthquake, including temporarily taking over operations at the Simón Bolívar International Airport and La Guaira port.

Egypt under President Anwar Sadat is likewise a very instructive precedent. Sadat never renounced his predecessor Gamal Abdel Nasser, simply presenting his program as a “correction” of past mistakes.

Yet he progressively dismantled the achievements of Nasserism, rolling back land reform and industrialisation policies in favour of imperialist capital. Sadat also realigned Egypt from the Soviet Union to the US camp, going on to reestablish ties with Israel and abandon the Palestinian cause.

Unable to present a convincing case for the domestic and foreign policy U-turns, official and unofficial government spokespeople have lashed out at criticism from the Latin American left.

Most recently, former Colombian President Gustavo Petro slammed the Rodríguez administration for giving away the nation’s oil to Trump.

Cuba’s Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío recently said that Venezuela remained a “friendly” country, but added that “ally is too strong a word”.

The cost of submission is being borne by the Venezuelan labouring classes, from small farmers hard hit by US agricultural dumping to the urban semi-proletariat devastated by spiraling inflation resulting from Washington’s pilfering of the nation’s export earnings.

For its part, Venezuela’s comprador bourgeoisie, in both its traditional and emergent fractions, stands to reap fabulous rewards from the demolition of the legislative pillars of the Bolivarian Revolution — the hydrocarbons, mining, housing and real estate, labour and land laws.

Rodríguez and her leadership faction likewise benefit from what analyst William Serafino has called the new regime of “co-government” with the Trump White House, tying their fortunes to the latter to outflank rivals and solidify the strategic alliance with local and imperialist capital.

The current acting president is one of the architects of the post-2018 neoliberal economic package that was the fulcrum of a new governability pact with the local bourgeoisie, freezing wages and social spending in exchange for social “peace”. The Venezuelan government’s Faustian gambit was to appease business sectors and maintain a modest economic recovery under crushing sanctions, but at the cost of slowly eroding its popular support base.

While the destruction can be repaired through sustained bottom-up mobilisation advancing a national popular alternative to capitulation, it will likely be the outcome of a medium- and long-term process.

Nevertheless, there are growing signs of revolutionary movements and intellectuals organising to confront the US empire and its local agents and reconquer sovereignty as the cornerstone of any future socialist construction.

What should be clear is that the “Rodrigato” — and the lumpen bourgeoisie it represents — has opted to pact with the Trump administration. Ignoring the acting Venezuelan leadership’s discourse and policies will ultimately hamper the most important task: fighting US imperialism.