Trump’s Venezuela attack a footnote in West’s history of imperial plunder

In even the most liberal western commentary, U.S. President Donald Trump’s invasion of Venezuela presages the destruction of a rules-based international order, which itself presumes that nations are equal. It’s actually a footnote in the bloody and barbarous history of the colonial subjugation and rapine of the world by the ‘West’.

Latin America has been savagely pillaged for over half a millennium, beginning with Christopher Columbus’s landing in 1492. What followed was a genocide in which the autochthons were either killed or enslaved to work at extracting their own natural resources for the benefit of Europe.

‘Civilising’ mission

The magnificent civilisations of the Mayans, Aztecs and Incas were razed as European ‘civilisation’ was transplanted in its place. In A History of Venezuela, Guillermo Morón recounts this history from an unabashedly Eurocentric perspective, lauding the theft of a country and a continent as a civilising mission in which well-intentioned priests and benevolent conquistadors brought the fruits of European enlightenment to savages stranded on the lowest rungs of the civilisational ladder.

There are references to cruelties, but those remain in metaphorical parentheses. There is a recognition that the native civilisations played some role in the shaping of Venezuela, through cultural intermingling and miscegenation. But Morón’s perspective prevents him from recognising forced assimilation as just another face of barbarous extermination or banishment to the margins.

Morón’s history of the 19th and 20th centuries, independence from Spain and since, notes the preponderance of dictatorship over democracy in Venezuela. But since he can’t see the structures of colonialism/imperialism and neocolonialism/neo-imperialism, he attributes this to the temperament of the people. Nor can he recognise, in the underdevelopment of the region, the structural role of colonialism and neocolonialism.

Indictment of colonialism

Eduardo Galeano makes up for these lacks in his searing indictment of colonialism in Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. Framed in dependency theory, Galeano’s story sees Latin American underdevelopment as a structural byproduct of western development, of mainly Britain in the 17th to the early 20th centuries, and the U.S. from the 19th onwards.

But Galeano’s is not a bloodless accounting of political economy. It is a rich history of peoples that takes readers on a journey from the barbarities of Francisco Pizarro, the illiterate pig-breeder who was given Spanish imperial licence to forage for empire, to the slick boardrooms in U.S. metropolises which provoked and financed coups and massacres every time a Latin American dispensation tried to forge a path to the development of its nations and peoples. Galeano notes with satisfaction the efforts of the Cuban revolutionaries to construct not just an independent economy that worked for all the people, but a just society that was bound by the ties of fraternity and cooperation. It also notes the manner in which U.S. corporate interests funded the coup d’état through which Augusto Pinochet overthrew the legitimate socialist government of Salvador Allende. The U.S. state generously provided training to the putschists.

Coups, and aftermath

Naomi Klein provides agonising details of the manufactured coup in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In its quest to subordinate and exploit Latin America, the U.S. propped up the bloodiest of dictators who were willing to do its bidding. The British did the same in the 19th century and till World War II destroyed its empire and made it a second-rate power.

The development of the core of the world capitalist system, based on the export of the infinitely squeezed surplus value of the peripheries, which is precisely what keeps them underdeveloped and immiserised, required draconian comprador regimes that would keep people — labour power — terrorised and industries denationalised. Galeano shows wonderfully through theory and human stories how metropolitan economic centres plundered natural resources and labour to first fire capitalism and then extend it.

The Venezuela story

Gregory Wilpert takes the Venezuelan story forward to 2006, providing a critical account of Hugo Chávez’s attempts to break free of the stranglehold of the capitalist-imperialist system and build a national economy and society that worked for the poorest. In Changing Venezuela by Taking Power: The History and Policies of the Chávez Government, he concluded that while the ‘Bolivarian’ project was a beacon to the world on account of the possibilities of democratic socialism it contained, it was incomplete, and beset by internal contradictions and external besiegement, again stoked by the U.S. state. There was no unambiguous hope, Wilpert concluded presciently, that the revolution would bear fruit.

There were three main arenas in which Chávez and his party promoted participatory democracy: politics, society and the economy. In trying to remould the political system as more people-centric, Chávez introduced a new constitution in 1999. It made provisions for more accountable governance by including two more branches for auditing, introduced referenda for legislation and recall, which were unsuccessfully deployed against him, and decentralised power to communities. In the economic sphere, the Chávez dispensation gestured at workers’ role in managing industries, promoted the cooperative movement, nationalised some industries, including partially the oil sector, though he failed to curb the dependence on oil, which kept the economy vulnerable to sudden shocks. In the social and economic sector, the Chávez administration made a major break by providing constitutional guarantees for women and indigenous people. He also expanded urban and rural land reforms to give entitlements to the poor, buttressing these with reform of the state health and educational systems.

The failure of the Venezuelan way, as compared to the Cuban path, can be explained largely by geopolitics. Cuba had the benefit of a bipolar world and thus Soviet assistance; in Chavez’s unipolar world of U.S. hegemony, there was just the unremitting ‘enemy action’ of the hegemon and its allies, and no source of succour. And fifth columnists like Maria Corina Machado at hand to derail the experiment. This prompted an authoritarian turn.

For the moment, though, another western capitalist assault has won another battle, hopefully not the war humanity must wage.

The author is a historian and journalist.

Published – February 12, 2026 08:30 am IST