The January 3 US military invasion of Venezuela and abduction of President Nicolás Maduro represents a watershed in the crisis of world imperialism.
As the World Socialist Web Site stated, the invasion marks “a total repudiation by the Trump regime of any semblance of legality. It is an unprovoked war of aggression launched in flagrant violation of international law and carried out to reimpose colonial control over Venezuela and all of Latin America.”
The neocolonial character of the assault has been proclaimed without disguise by the White House gangsters. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars,” Trump declared on Saturday.
The Venezuelan operation constitutes a warning to the entire region that any government resisting US dictates faces the same fate. Trump’s threats against Colombian President Gustavo Petro—declaring “Petro is next” and telling him to “watch his ass” in the language of a street thug—underscore that the January 3 attack in Caracas is aimed at establishing a precedent for an eruption of imperialist violence throughout the hemisphere.
Reaffirming his administration’s declared aims of asserting unrestricted domination over Latin America and beyond, Trump said at Saturday’s press conference: “The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we’ve superseded it by a lot, by a real lot. They now call it the Donroe Doctrine.”
The “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, in all its madness, ruthlessness and criminality, reflects the objectively desperate position of US capitalism. In South America, it has been displaced by China as the main trading partner and a leading investor in countries throughout the region. Washington seeks to reassert its lost hegemony by military means.
War and outright colonial intervention by Washington plunge the already decrepit political order in Latin America into chaos. In their answers to the crisis wrought by imperialism, all political factions of the national bourgeoisie are exposed as deeply rotten.
On one side, the supposedly “left” nationalists of the Pink Tide show their total inability to answer Trump’s aggression and their ultimate subordination to the dictates of imperialism. On the other, the fascistic governments and political forces spreading throughout the continent make clear the integration of their ruthless dictatorial aims into the US neocolonial offensive.
Among the first group, the most emblematic statement came from Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was a close partner of Hugo Chávez during the “first wave” of the Pink Tide at the beginning of the century.
On Saturday morning, Lula declared on X: “The bombings on Venezuelan territory and the capture of its president cross an unacceptable line.” As usual, Lula conspicuously failed to name the United States or Donald Trump as the author of said bombings and capture. Instead, he concluded: “The international community, through the United Nations, needs to respond vigorously to this episode. Brazil condemns these actions and remains available to promote the path of dialogue and cooperation.”
This spineless declaration represents the continuation of Lula’s intensifying collaboration with Trump in recent months. As the WSWS documented, Lula has engaged in a series of conversations with the fascist US president, offering to mediate Washington’s plundering interests in Venezuela and promoting Trump’s agenda.
The other Pink Tide leaders—Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico, Gabriel Boric of Chile, and Gustavo Petro of Colombia—issued variations of Lula’s bankrupt appeal to a law-based international order that has already been shattered by the very imperialism that created it.
Chilean President Gabriel Boric expressed his “concern and condemnation for the United States military actions taking place in Venezuela” and called for “a peaceful solution to the grave crisis affecting the country”. This “protest” is pure hypocrisy. Throughout his term, which is now approaching its end, Boric has distinguished himself as the most direct collaborator with US-NATO imperialism among the Pink Tide leaders.
Boric—a prominent offspring of Chilean pseudo-left protest politics—systematically supported Washington’s attacks against Venezuela and countries like Cuba and Nicaragua, justifying the imperialist escalation under the fraudulent banner of combating “authoritarianism” in the region. The Chilean leader has dropped these moralistic pretenses entirely as he offered his collaboration and support to his elected successor, the fascist José Antonio Kast, an open admirer of Pinochet’s murderous dictatorship.
Colombian President Petro who has become an increasingly explicit target of Trump’s offensive—which hasn’t provoked any protests from his cowardly nationalist colleagues—significantly toned down his answer to the latest US attack.
Petro, who drew parallels between Trump and Hitler in the last UN General Assembly in September, limited himself to declaring that “the government of Colombia rejects the aggression against Venezuela’s sovereignty.” As with Lula, Petro made no mention of the United States or Trump, concluding his statement by announcing that Colombia “must maintain open diplomatic channels with the involved governments and will promote, in relevant multilateral and regional spaces, initiatives oriented to the objective verification of facts, and the preservation of peace and regional security.”
The Pink Tide’s complacent answer to the unprecedented US imperialist aggression culminated with the issuing of a joint statement by Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay and Spain. The statement repeated the same hypocritical “concerns” and cynical appeals for “peaceful paths,” “dialogue,” and “negotiation.”
These statements expose the full bankruptcy of the Pink Tide’s nationalist perspective. Their signatories are outraged not by US imperialist aggression itself, but rather by its naked exposure of the real terms set by the imperialist capitalist order to which they themselves are oriented.
In contrast to the Pink Tide’s pathetic appeals to the good sense of the imperialists, the region’s far-right governments and fascistic forces have loudly hailed Washington’s criminal assault on Venezuela. These elements have seized upon it to aggressively advance their own dictatorial agendas.
Argentina’s fascist President Javier Milei, who acts as imperialism’s spearhead on the continent, immediately celebrated the attack. “Viva la libertad, carajo” [Long live freedom, dammit], he posted on X. “Full support to the United States, full support to the US action,” he later declared in an interview.
Even more glaring was an official statement of the Argentine government issued on the same day of the attack. Reviving the type of vicious rhetoric of the US-backed military dictatorship that terrorized Argentina’s working class and youth between 1976 and 1983, OFFICIAL COMMUNIQUÉ NUMBER 126 stated:
The socialist regime headed by Nicolás Maduro is currently the greatest enemy of freedom on the continent, fulfilling to this day a role similar to that which Cuba had in the seventies, exporting communism and terrorism to the entire region. Among its operations it has carried out electoral interference in Argentina, Mexico, Colombia and Bolivia; it has employed infiltration strategies in various countries of the continent via mass migration attacks; it has developed alliances with various progressive NGOs to promote the radical left in the world; it has strengthened ties with Iran and Hezbollah; it has given logistical support to Hamas and the guerrillas in Colombia; and all of this has been financed with income from drug trafficking derived from the Cartel of the Suns, an organization that was declared a terrorist group by this Government on August 26.
Variations of Milei’s servile support for US imperialism combined with fascistic denunciations of communism were repeated by other far-right regional leaders.
Paraguay’s President Santiago Penã issued an official statement fraudulently claiming that Maduro was the “leader of a criminal organization formally declared terrorist by Paraguayan authorities” and his “permanence in power represented a threat to regional stability.”
On December 15, Peña’s government signed a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the Washington, laying the legal basis for deploying US “boots on the ground” in Paraguay.
In Chile, while Boric launched his sophistries about a “peaceful solution” in Venezuela, his fascist successor minced no words in supporting Washington’s intervention.
Kast celebrated Maduro’s criminal abduction by the US as “great news for the region” in a post on X. Echoing Trump’s brazenly false pretexts for his neocolonial war, the Chilean admirer of Pinochet defined the Venezuelan government as an “illegitimate narco-regime” from which “criminal and terrorist structures operate that gravely threaten regional peace and security.” He then advocated that “Latin American governments” embark upon a crusade “against narco-trafficking and organized crime” throughout the continent.
In Brazil, the allies of former President Jair Bolsonaro—currently imprisoned for attempting a coup d’état in 2022-23—seized upon the attack on Venezuela to deepen their renewed fascist offensive for power.
Eduardo Bolsonaro, the ex-president’s son, celebrated the invasion underscoring its direct implications for the Brazilian government itself. He wrote on X: “The Venezuelan regime is the financial, logistical and symbolic pillar of the São Paulo Forum. With Maduro’s live capture, now Lula, Petro and the others from the São Paulo Forum will have terrible days, take note of my words.”
The Brazilian fascist speaks with some authority. Eduardo had his federal deputy mandate revoked on December 18 because of his sustained absence from House sessions since he moved in February 2025 to the US, from where he coordinates the activities of the Brazilian extreme right with Trump administration officials.
His brother, Flávio Bolsonaro, reveled in the attack, announcing: “Lula will be snitched on [by Maduro]. It is the end of the São Paulo Forum: international drug and arms trafficking, money laundering, support for terrorists and dictatorships, fraudulent elections.”
The reference to “fraudulent elections” by Flávio, who is launching himself as a presidential candidate for Brazil’s October elections, is not casual. It indicates how the architects of the January 8, 2023 coup attempt in Brasília intend to continue pursuing their dictatorial aims under far more favorable international conditions.
The rotten and reactionary response of all sections of the Latin American bourgeoisie to the US invasion of Venezuela must be taken by the working class as a testament to the inadequacy of all nationalist perspectives in the epoch of imperialism.
The Pink Tide represents only the latest chapter in the history of bourgeois nationalism in Latin America. As the Socialist Equality Group of Brazil observed in its August 2025 statement, “No to US imperialist aggression against Venezuela! For the unity of the working class across the Americas!”:
The history of Latin America has been marked by repeated experiments with bourgeois nationalism—from Perón in Argentina to Vargas in Brazil, from the Mexican Revolution to the Bolivarian movement in Venezuela. All have ended in failure, betrayal, and often bloody repression of the working class. The Pink Tide represents only the latest chapter in this failed history.
The breakdown of the bourgeois order in Latin America under the fire of imperialism and fascism intensifies explosive social contradictions that have direct revolutionary implications.
As the WSWS emphasized in its statement on the invasion, Trump’s regime confronts “a rendezvous with catastrophe” in Venezuela. It cannot reimpose open colonialism, nor can the dictatorial regimes pursued by the likes of Milei and Bolsonaro provide stable forms of bourgeois rule.
Latin America has undergone a radical change since the period of US-backed military dictatorships. The working class has become by far the most massive social force, concentrated in megacities with tens of millions of inhabitants—São Paulo, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Bogotá, Lima—with deep connections to the global economy and the international working class.
If the Latin American workers have not yet given an organized political response to the outrageous imperialist intervention, it is because the old mass organizations—the trade unions and reformist parties—have been completely demoralized and exposed as instruments of capitalism. But a mass response is inevitable, and it will be all the more explosive for its years of suppression. It will emerge swiftly at the same time as new mass organizations genuinely representing the working class will be built.
This coming revolutionary eruption demands a correct program, one which rejects bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalism in all its forms and embraces internationalist socialism.
This perspective requires that Latin American workers orient not toward their “own” national bourgeoisies, but toward their class brothers and sisters in the United States itself in a unified struggle to overthrow imperialism. As the WSWS emphasized, “the fight against war is a fight against the capitalist system that breeds it,” requiring workers to “abolish capitalism, and to establish socialism as the foundation of a new society.”