* Venezuela Isn’t a Set of Talking Points – It’s a Country With a History
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Most people in the United states encounter Venezuela not as a country with a history, but as a set of talking points. Those talking points – about mass migration, economic collapse, sanctions, authoritarianism – circulate without much attention to how they were produced, what they leave out, or whose interests they serve. That lack of grounding has mattered in recent weeks. When news broke that the United States had kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores, many people were caught between competing narratives: reports of celebration among some Venezuelans, warnings about fascist imperial expansion, and reminders of the U.S.’s long, costly record of failed regime-change efforts. That collision of narratives made clear how little shared context exists for interpreting what the U.S. was doing – and to what end.
Geo Maher is a political theorist and longtime scholar of Venezuelan politics whose work examines popular power, the Bolivarian Revolution, and the role of U.S. intervention in shaping Venezuela’s crisis.He is the author of several books on these themes, including We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution (a bottom-up account of Venezuelan social movements and the Bolivarian process) and Building the Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela,wich explores the participatory politics of Venezuelan communal institutions. Geo also recently hosted an informal, ask-me-anything-style conversation on Facebook that stood out for its clarity and careful attention to context – qualities often missing from mainstream coverage.
I wanted to build on that conversation by asking Geo questions aimed at orientation rather than reaction. In this interview, Geo offers some historical and political context that makes current events legible, and may help readers think critically about what comes next.
Many readers have heard the phrase “the Bolivarian Revolution” but don’t actually know what it refers to. What was the Bolivarian project, and what was it trying to change in Venezuela?
As the name suggests, the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela finds its roots long before hugo Chávez himself took up the name as a mantle. In recent Venezuelan history, it has come to name a struggle against imperialism and global capitalism and for the construction of a revolutionary alternative to export-oriented progress grounded in Venezuelan reality and based on dire
In U.S. media, Venezuela’s crisis is often framed as the unavoidable result of “socialism” or government incompetence. You argue that sanctions are central – not incidental – to what followed. How should people understand the role sanctions played in pushing Venezuela into catastrophe? I’ve read repeatedly that the country was already spiraling before sanctions were imposed. Is that inaccurate?
Now, building socialism in a capitalist world is an uphill struggle, we should be clear about that. By which I mean that the attempts to institute socialist price controls and other measures in Venezuela were severely punished by the global capitalist system. But for me, as I have long argued, this was an argument for more socialism, not less, for shifting fully away from any reliance on the private sector and the painful in-betweenness of half measures.
But yes, despite all of the misdirection today, there is no way to overstate the impact of sanctions and their murderous brutality. I don’t think most Americans truly understand how the sanctions work. Again, this began under Obama but was made much worse by Trump in 2017, with an economic analysis by Mark Weisbrot and Jeffery Sachs (yes, the Jeffrey Sachs), concluding that sanctions had led to 40,000 deaths in just 2017-2018 - many more have died as.Today, these sanctions are in reality a total blockade that is strangling the Venezuelan economy, making it impractical to produce and even sell the oil necessary to import the basic food and medicine necessary for everyday Venezuelans to survive.
You’ve been very clear that declining support for Maduro does not equal growing support for the Venezuelan opposition. Why is that distinction so important, and how does it challenge the way Venezuela is usually discussed in the U.S.?
This is an important point: of course a decade of economic catastrophe has decreased support for Maduro - this is only natural, and it’s the stated goal of the sanctions. But it has long been true that this doesn’t simply translate into support for a widely unpopular opposition, and still less for its policies (where it even offers policies at all). This is especially true of the most visible and intransigent opposition leaders like Machado, who thanks to her longstanding support for U.S. military intervention will never enjoy the support of the majority of venezuelans. machado, and many other opposition leaders, have no solution to the economic crisis beyond simply handing Venezuela’s oil back over to U.S. multinationals.
You’ve questioned whether “authoritarianism” is even a useful category for understanding the Maduro government, describing it instead as marked by inertia and weakened authority. What does that framing help us see more clearly – and what questions does it raise about repression and political prisoners?
It’s incredibly important: we want a revolutionary process to have authority, a collective authority grounded in the desire for social transformation. Liberalism offers the separation of powers, disguised as a safeguard against tyranny, but which functions by design to sow inertia and make radical change (from the right or the left) impossible. We ourselves are living through that inertia today, where we see the impossibility of actually transforming a political system in which the electoral college, Supreme Court, and Senate operated as conservative brakes on change.
Maduro has from the beginning struggle to coalesce and exercise authority in a context of crisis, so the framing doesn’t bring much clarity to the situation. The true measure for me is and has always been the question of how grassroots revolutionary movements can interface with elements of the state to press for radical change. This dynamic was powerfully present under Chávez but has waned in recent years, and if anything, crisis and imperialist aggression have strengthened the hands of other, more conservative sectors of Chavismo.
Your work highlights communes, communal councils, and territorially rooted movements as key sources of resilience. How have those forms of popular power survived the crisis, and where have they been most damaged?
As I argued in Building the Commune, grassroots struggle
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