The Repeating History of US Intervention in Venezuela
A look back at The Nation’s 130 years of articles about Venezuela reveals that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
The Nation has been covering Venezuela for a long time—since before Trump and Maduro, before Chavismo, before the drug war. Spread across three centuries, the coverage is most remarkable for the consistency of its themes: struggles between autocracy and democracy, debates over foreign intervention and national self-determination, dispatches about the corrupting role of oil in enriching the ruling class and attracting predatory foreign powers.
The Nation’s first notable story is from 1895, when a conflict over Venezuela’s border with the British territory of Guiana (now Guyana)—where gold had recently been found—provoked President Grover Cleveland to invoke the decades-old Monroe Doctrine: European powers had no right to intervene in the Western Hemisphere. Cleveland’s statement heralded a new era of US chest-thumping that culminated three years later with the Spanish-American War. Alarmed by the president’s rhetoric, The Nation ridiculed the idea that “we are going, in the name of the Monroe doctrine, to assert such ownership of the American hemisphere as will enable us to trace all the boundary lines on it to our own satisfaction in defiance of the rest of the world.”
Regrettably, that is just what the US government did, repeatedly meddling in Latin America to prop up rulers who preyed on their own people and served corporate interests. From 1908 to 1935, Venezuela was ruled by Juan Vicente Gómez, a dictator who governed “by terror and corruption,” as the great Puerto Rican journalist and politician Luis Muñoz Marín wrote in these pages in 1925. Gómez invoked martial law, replaced the constitution, and tortured and imprisoned his critics. “The picture is lurid and grotesque,” Muñoz Marín concluded.
Venezuela had begun pumping oil in 1914. But the profits went not to the people but to foreign companies and local elites. “Gomez has left nothing undone to make foreign capital at home in Venezuela,” The Nation’s Mauritz A. Hallgren noted in 1928. US companies returned the favor with their unqualified support for his regime.
In 1951, with yet another dictator leading Venezuela, The Nation published “Suicide by Oil,” in which the journalist Marcelle Michelin reported, “Venezuela appears extravagantly wealthy. But the Venezuelans to whom black gold has meant a better way of life are the fortunate minority of the cities and oil camps—landowners, business men, factory hands, government employees, corporation bureaucrats. The people of the pueblos and fishing villages go on laboriously wresting what sustenance they can from earth and water.”
Again and again, in reading The Nation’s coverage, one encounters a similar story: malevolent actors, inside and outside the country, conspiring to separate the people from their land and resources—and, with them, the fulfillment of their fiercely held hopes and dreams.
Support independent journalism that does not fall in line
Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding approval rating were abundantly clear: untrammeled corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own derelict sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets.
Now an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular, and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire through the region and into Europe. A new “forever war”—with an ever-increasing likelihood of American troops on the ground—may very well be upon us.
As we’ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war.
In these dark times, independent journalism is uniquely able to uncover the falsehoods that threaten our republic—and civilians around the world—and shine a bright light on the truth.
The Nation’s experienced team of writers, editors, and fact-checkers understands the scale of what we’re up against and the urgency with which we have to act. That’s why we’re publishing critical reporting and analysis of the war on Iran, ICE violence at home, new forms of voter suppression emerging in the courts, and much more.
But this journalism is possible only with your support.
This March, The Nation needs to raise $50,000 to ensure that we have the resources for reporting and analysis that sets the record straight and empowers people of conscience to organize. Will you donate today?
