Venezuelan
leaders’ fever dream of a US invasion finally becomes reality
Maduro
and Chávez used fears of American aggression to tighten their grip on power –
but now an even greater fantasist has imposed his will on their country
Rory
Carroll
Sun 4 Jan
2026 10.00 GMT
It was
the fever dream of the revolution, a dark fantasy spun so many times – each
version wilder than the last – until it almost became a joke: the Yankees are
coming.
Hugo
Chávez, who ruled Venezuela from 1999 to 2013, conjured the scenario again and
again, warning that the US president and his henchmen in the CIA and Pentagon
were mobilising forces to strike.
Spies,
saboteurs, assassins, special forces, mercenaries, missiles, poison,
submarines, fighter planes – the empire would stop at nothing to smite
Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution and overthrow its leader.
“Would it
be so strange that they’ve invented the technology to spread cancer and we
won’t know about it for 50 years?” Chávez said in 2011, when he was being
treated for cancer. He evoked US submarines prowling off Caribbean beaches and
airborne troops attacking Caracas.
It was,
in large part, theatre. A confection of claims to justify authoritarian rule,
burnish anti-imperialism credentials and delegitimise opponents. Over time,
even some supporters rolled their eyes at tales of the Yankee bogeyman.
Yet now,
13 years after an ailing Chávez passed power to his protege, Nicolás Maduro,
the fever dream is real. On Saturday US forces bombed Caracas and seized Maduro
and his wife, Cilia Flores – the “empire” of Chávez’s rhetoric made manifest.
No UN mandate, no congressional approval, just raw military power.
Amid the
shock and uncertainty about what happens next there is a surreal twist. For
years Chavismo – the ideology bequeathed by the late president – exaggerated
the US threat in order to cry wolf. When the wolf showed up he turned out to be
an American version of Chávez.
Donald
Trump’s populist authoritarianism echoes the Venezuelan strongman: both masters
of thunder and dazzle who polarised voters, intimidated opponents and hijacked
institutions. The real estate mogul obviously differs in myriad ways from an
army officer who embraced socialism – but his ability to tap grievances, break
norms, suck up all the oxygen and turn power into a TV show are pure Chávez.
It
transcends irony that Trump’s greatest spectacle is the operation to abduct
Chavismo’s heir. As international law lies in shreds, and Venezuelans swing
between hope and dread, history has completed a bizarre circularity.
In 2002
George W Bush’s administration tacitly backed a coup that briefly ousted Chávez
– a move that elicited comparisons to the cold war era, when the CIA toppled
leftist leaders across Latin America.
Chávez,
backed by barrio-dwellers and the military, regained power, won fresh electoral
mandates and spent the rest of his reign taunting Bush as a donkey, a cowboy, a
devil. After the 2003 US invasion of Iraq – justified by false claims about
Saddam Hussein’s weapons arsenal – many around the world agreed with Chávez
that the US president was indeed more dangerous than a monkey with a razor
blade.
Chávez
made repeated claims of US plots against him. Given CIA efforts to kill Fidel
Castro and US military interventions in Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989, and
Bush’s post 9/11 overreach, a strike against Venezuela was plausible. But none
came. The US continued to buy Venezuela’s oil and sat back while Chávez
hollowed out his economy.
Maduro,
taking the reins in 2013, continued the fiction of an imminent US military
threat. With the economy cratering and voters rebelling, Maduro needed to rig
and steal elections to stay in power – and a Yankee bogeyman was more useful
than ever. The dictator talked up limited sanctions by the Obama and Biden
administrations as a blockade.
In recent
months Trump deployed his own distortions and fabrications. He accused Maduro
of heading a “narco-terrorist” cartel that was “flooding” the US with drugs –
an extrapolation of Venezuela’s role as a conduit for Colombian cocaine, which
mostly goes to Europe. Trump also accused Venezuela of a role in his debunked
claim that Joe Biden stole the 2020 US presidential election.
On
Saturday Trump claimed a victory for the ages. “This was one of the most
stunning, effective, and powerful displays of American military might and
competence in American history. No nation in the world could achieve what
America achieved.”
The US
raiders cut the power supply to Caracas thanks “to a certain expertise that we
have”, paving the way for a flawless operation that evicted a tyrant, Trump
said.
In his
mausoleum, Chávez must have spun. He used to blame power cuts – the result of a
crumbling energy grid – on CIA saboteurs. He used to say the gringo superpower
wished to reimpose the 19th-century Monroe doctrine of US pre-eminence in the
hemisphere, and here was Trump declaring a “Donroe doctrine” of “dominance”.
That
extends to the US running Venezuela for an indefinite period, said Trump.
“We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and
judicious transition.” He added: “We’re going to have our very large United
States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions
of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and
start making money for the country.”
Trump
clouded the picture by saying the US would cooperate with Delcy Rodríguez, a
Chavista who was Maduro’s vice-president and has reportedly been sworn in as
president.
Venezuelans,
including the millions who have fled, are about to find out if they have woken
from a fever dream or slipped deeper into nightmare.
* Rory
Carroll was based in Caracas as the Guardian’s Latin America correspondent from
2006 to 2012 and is the author of Comandante: Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela.
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