The Venezuelan Squeeze

Decades of Foreplay ... Zero Consent

Oct 30, 2025

It's crucial to understand that the information presented here is not necessarily intended as an attack on the Trump administration specifically, but on the broader Western foreign policy establishment—including politicians, corporations, and tax-exempt organizations that profit from and perpetuate NATO-style globalism, or what is often referred to on the left as “Western imperialism.”

Everything about this article, from the research phase to the writing phase, strongly mirrors the process I used in the two-parter that I wrote earlier this year on Iran.

Read Ryan's Iran Features

I entered the situation with a limited understanding of the history of U.S./Venezuelan foreign policy and then ran searches on all the usual suspects' activities in the region.

Anyone who has read my previous work on this Substack will likely know that the “usual suspects” include, but are not limited to, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and all of the various NGOs and GONGOs that fall under the NED umbrella.

There are many parallels between Venezuela and Iran in the context of U.S. foreign policy.

The coup d’état template used to overthrow Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953 was plotted by what was then called the “Seven Sisters” (who controlled roughly 85% of Earth’s petroleum reserves,) and facilitated by the MI6 and CIA.

This episode marked the initial use of "nonviolent resistance" by intelligence agencies as a strategy for regime change.

A strategy of “nonviolent intervention” is clearly under consideration to pivot Venezuela toward a pro-Western orientation and pressure it to cut economic and diplomatic ties with China. This is an age-old deep state operation that has been inherited by the current administration.

Over the past several months, I’ve detailed the array of covert tactics the U.S. has employed to extend its global influence and align foreign leaders with Western interests. It’s a surreal experience to observe the Trump administration perpetuating the entrenched institutional playbook in its aggressive push against Maduro’s regime. Perhaps they are left with no alternative, given the continued existence of the foreign policy establishment—Trump may not have initiated this situation, but he must confront it.

It’s things like this that make the GOP’s recent refunding of the National Endowment for Democracy make a little more sense.

From an outside perspective, it sometimes appears that Trump is not dismantling the deep state; rather, he is assuming control over it. Whether it is for better or worse remains to be seen, though I remain just as hopeful as I am skeptical.

One of the things that I love about the Badlands is the dialogue we are able to have with the audience. I try not to marry myself to any single interpretation of the various aspects of the greater information war and will always revise my opinion when presented with a strong argument.

In the paraphrased words of the late Dr. Zev Zelenko, “I am always seeking to enhance my understanding of the truth,” so please, do not hesitate to correct me or provide added context wherever applicable, as discerning the myriad complexities and misdirections that are endemic to modern geopolitics must be a group activity.

That being said, here’s the situation in Venezuela as I have come to understand it.

Basic Historic Context

The United States has been pursuing regime change in Venezuela since at least the early 2000s, targeting the socialist governments of Hugo Chávez (1999–2013) and his successor, Nicolás Maduro (2013–present). These efforts intensified after Chávez’s nationalization of oil assets and alignment with U.S. adversaries like Russia, China, and Iran.

In our two-part series on Iran, we described the country as the “treasure chest of the Middle East.”

Venezuela can be described as the “Iran of Latin America,” an Iran that’s only 1,300 miles from the U.S. as the crow flies.

Naturally, the U.S. foreign policy establishment and the suite of corporations that typically benefit from “democracy promotion” operations have long been interested in Venezuela.

This interest is due to both its geostrategic location and vast resources, including sizable oil reserves. As of 2023, estimates place these reserves at 303 billion barrels, making up approximately 17% of the world's proven reserves. This figure surpasses Saudi Arabia’s 259 billion barrels and is more than five times the United States’ 68 billion barrels.

Currently, China buys ~90% of Venezuela’s oil exports, providing Maduro with economic lifelines and expanding Beijing’s footprint in Latin America through loans and infrastructure deals. U.S. dominance would redirect these flows, limiting China’s resource security and debt-trap diplomacy while curbing Russia’s military aid (e.g., arms sales and training).

Regarding Venezuela’s location, it shares a border with Colombia, which is essentially the “Pakistan of Latin America.” Much like Pakistan, Colombia is a sort of clearinghouse for covert U.S. operations in the region. It serves as a frontline partner in U.S. security and counter-narcotics operations, but with significant trade-offs: internal instability, powerful non-state actors (cartels, guerrillas), human rights concerns, and a history of leveraging U.S. aid for domestic political survival.

Both Colombia and Pakistan maintain U.S. Forward Operating Bases (FOBs); both countries have served as training centers for local proxies (Mujahideen, Central American Police, etc.); and both countries have pipelines for covert funding pass-throughs (CIA>ISI black budget, Plan Colombia, Mérida Initiative).

Carroll Quigley referred to this sprawling marriage of government and corporations as the "Anglo-American Establishment," and the video below offers a brief but solid primer on how this establishment (via the IMF, the World Bank and middlemen consulting firms) has spread itself like AIDS to foreign countries.

The Chavez Era

You don’t have to be a socialist to admire the chutzpah of Hugo Chavez.

Chavez was a Venezuelan politician, military officer, and revolutionary who would serve as president of Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013—except for a brief period of about forty-seven hours in 2002, which we’ll be getting to shortly.

The story of his ascent to power begins with Caracazo, or sacudón, the name given to the wave of protests, riots, looting, shootings and massacres that began on 27 February 1989 in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, and surrounding towns.

The riots and protests erupted primarily in response to the government’s neoliberal economic reforms, which triggered sharp increases in gasoline and transportation costs. Over nine days of intense clashes, security forces and the military killed an estimated 2,000–3,000 people.

The Caracazo riots sparked widespread public outrage, paving the way for Hugo Chávez to launch a coup attempt three years later in 1992. Though the revolt failed spectacularly and landed him in prison, it simultaneously transformed him into a national hero.

Many Venezuelans—especially the swelling ranks of the impoverished—viewed him as an outsider capable of ending the political elite’s orgy of corruption, scandal, and debt.

Released from prison in 1994, Chávez swept to the presidency in a 1998 landslide. He had not yet publicly declared himself a socialist, yet Venezuela’s entrenched rulers—from both dominant parties—viewed his embrace of Bolivarianismo, invoking Simón Bolívar to champion vague domestic reforms and anti-imperialism, as a mortal threat.

Though the old elite lost the executive with Chávez’s victory, the civil service, judiciary, bureaucracy, state oil company, and pockets of the military remained independent strongholds, primed for counterattack.

For the first five years of his presidency, Chávez was forced to adopt a defensive posture.

In April 2002, he survived a U.S.-backed coup, and would be restored to power after 48 hours by mass protests from thousands of loyalists. Months later, the country’s business elite—determined to block Chavista plans to redirect oil profits into social programs—launched an “owners’ strike” that paralyzed petroleum production.

GDP plunged by an estimated 27 percent, and Chávez’s approval ratings cratered. But by early 2003, the owners’ strike had collapsed, allowing him to channel oil revenues into his sweeping health, education, and housing programs.

The opposition’s final serious attempt to unseat him came with an August 2004 recall referendum. Having regained his standing, Chávez won that election with 58 per cent of the vote.

In the regional elections that followed, his hodgepodge coalition of leftist parties took 20 out of 22 state governorships and 270 out of 337 municipalities. Two years later, in 2006, Chávez was re-elected again, carrying every state with more than 62 per cent of the national vote.

This is the familiar surface story of Hugo Chávez, but beneath it raged a quieter, far less reported war.

This quieter war pitted Chávez against the U.S. foreign policy machine—the same sprawling apparatus of intelligence agencies, think tanks, NGOs, and corporate contractors that has spent decades perfecting the art of “making the economy scream,” as one Nixon aide famously put it about Chile.

John Perkins, a self-described former “economic hit man,” laid bare the playbook in his 2004 memoir, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, explicitly naming Chávez as a target who refused to comply:

“We were trained to find countries with resources our corporations covet—like oil—convince them to borrow huge amounts from the World Bank or IMF, then ensure the money goes to U.S. contractors. When the debt becomes crushing, we demand privatization of their treasures as payback....”
“…Hugo Chávez of Venezuela is a perfect example of what happens when a president refuses to play our game. He nationalized his country’s oil, used the revenues to help the poor, and told us to go to hell. So we labeled him a dictator and set out to overthrow him.”

The method is always the same: first, seduce a target government with gargantuan loans from the World Bank, IMF, or friendly megabanks; second, ensure the money flows straight to U.S. engineering giants like Bechtel or Halliburton for white-elephant infrastructure projects; third, when the debt inevitably becomes unpayable, twist the knife—demand privatization of state assets, especially oil, as the price of restructuring.

If the target refuses, move to Plan B: fund opposition media, “civil-society” fronts, and business federations; stage “spontaneous” protests; and, if necessary, green-light a coup.

Chávez had read the script. He knew Venezuela’s state oil company, PDVSA, was the ultimate prize—then among the world’s top five crude exporters, pumping 3.5 million barrels a day.

He also knew the old elite inside PDVSA had spent decades siphoning profits into Miami condos and Zurich accounts while the slums of Caracas festered. In 2002–2003, after surviving the coup and crushing the owners’ strike, Chávez moved fast: he fired 19,000 PDVSA managers, replaced them with loyalists, and redirected the gusher of petrodollars into social programs.

Washington’s response was swift and multipronged.

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) quadrupled its Venezuela budget, funneling millions to opposition NGOs with bland names like Súmate and Primero Justicia. Additionally, U.S. military advisors quietly revived Plan Ávila, the urban-counterinsurgency blueprint once used against the Caracazo.

When Chávez began trading oil for Cuban doctors, Chinese rail stock, and Russian Sukhois—bypassing the dollar and the traditional middlemen—the Treasury Department started drafting sanctions that would later metastasize into today’s maximum-pressure campaign.

Chávez’s sin was not incompetence; it was defiance. He proved a country could nationalize its crown jewel, fund it’s social programs, and still pay its debts.

I am no champion of socialism, but no one can deny that Chavez had serious cojones.

On 20 September, 2006, Chávez made a profound speech at the UN General Assembly, where he said George W. Bush‘s address the previous day could be described as “The Devil’s Recipe”:

“Yesterday the devil came here, in this very place, it still smells of sulphur”

By the time he died in 2013, the quieter war had already become the loud one we live with now: asset freezes, secondary sanctions, recognition of parallel governments, and a refugee exodus engineered to bleed the revolution dry.

An interesting aside RE Chavez’ death …

Chávez reportedly died of a heart attack in 2013 while recovering from prolonged respiratory and other complications after multiple surgeries and chemotherapy for cancerous tumors in Cuba. Suspicions about his assassination intensify due to the unclear details surrounding his illness and treatment.

Among those who were suspicious was Igor Kirillov, the commander of the radiological, chemical and biological defense forces of the Russian Armed Forces.

In 2022, Kirillov claimed that Chávez was poisoned to death by his nurse from 2003 until 2011, Claudia Díaz, who had allegedly collaborated with US special services and later ended up in the US herself. Kirillov indicated that Russian doctors and the forensic examination found an atypical course of Chavez’s illness.

Kirillov was himself assassinated in 2024. [Additional sources: #,#]

The Maduro Era

Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s hand-picked successor, inherited a Venezuela that was already long under siege. A former bus driver and union organizer who had never attended university, Maduro lacked his mentor’s charisma and battlefield credentials. What he did inherit was Chávez’s enemies—both domestic and foreign—and a global oil market that was about to crater.

Maduro won a narrow, contested election in April 2013, defeating opposition candidate Henrique Capriles by 1.5 percentage points. Keeping with its standard modus operandi, the U.S. State Department immediately refused to recognize the results, setting the tone for the next decade.

Within months, the Obama administration imposed its first sanctions on Venezuelan officials accused of human rights abuses and drug trafficking—targeted measures that would balloon into economy-wide strangulation under Trump.

By 2014, oil prices had collapsed from $110 to under $50 per barrel. Venezuela, which derived 96% of export revenue from crude, saw its foreign reserves evaporate overnight. Hyperinflation followed; the IMF later estimated 1.7 million percent in 2018 alone.

The Maduro government responded with price controls, currency pegs, and mass importation of subsidized food—policies that accelerated shortages and black markets.

This situation created fertile ground for our friends at the CIA, USAID, NED and the State Department to do what they do best.

Venezuela saw waves of “nonviolent” street protests in 2014, 2017, and 2019. This playbook should seem familiar by now, as it’s not unlike what we’ve recently covered regarding NED/USAID shenanigans in Ukraine, Serbia, Georgia, Lebanon, etc.

These street protests all followed the same choreography: barricades in middle-class neighborhoods, clashes with National Guard units, and viral videos of tear-gas canisters and Molotov cocktails. The death toll mounted—43 in 2014, 120+ in 2017—while NED grantees like Foro Penal documented “systematic repression” and trained local journalists to livestream the chaos.

Author’s Note - I am not trying to paint a picture of Maduro as a good guy. He is guilty of human rights abuses, opposition bans, financial corruption, and facilitating drug trafficking; you know, all of the same things most world leaders are guilty of. The United States often overlooks the actions of world leaders who share these proclivities, so long as they are pro-U.S. and pro-NATO.

Behind these protests, the U.S. was busy building a parallel state.

In 2015, Obama issued Executive Order 13692, declaring Venezuela an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security” of the United States. The label was laughable on its face—Venezuela’s military budget was smaller than the New York City Police Department’s—but it unlocked the legal machinery for asset seizures and financial isolation.

Enter Juan Guaidó, the Alexi Navalny of Venezuela.

On January 23, 2019, Juan Guaidó, a 35-year-old industrial engineer and president of the National Assembly, declared himself interim president in a Caracas plaza. Within hours, the U.S. recognized him. The European Union, Canada, Brazil, and most of Latin America followed.

Russia and China stood by Maduro.

What followed was a masterclass in 21st-century regime-change theater:

The Treasury Department froze $7 billion in Citgo assets (PDVSA’s U.S. refining subsidiary,) and handed control to Guaidó’s shadow government.
On February 23, 2019, Guaidó orchestrated a televised “humanitarian aid” convoy at the Colombia–Venezuela border. U.S.-branded trucks loaded with USAID rice and medicine (and likely weapons) were blocked by Venezuelan troops. The aid burned—both sides accused the other of arson—and the images ricocheted across global media. (Declassified cables later revealed USAID had budgeted $60 million for the operation, including payments to Colombian protesters.)
In May 2020, Operation Gideon—a seaborne invasion led by former Green Beret Jordan Goudreau (interview at the bottom of this article) and funded by Venezuelan exiles in Florida—landed two speedboats on a fishing beach west of Caracas. Within hours, they captured or killed most of the 60 mercenaries. Maduro paraded the survivors on state television; Goudreau claimed Guaidó had signed a $213 million contract (which Guaidó denied).

Guaidó is the product of a decade-long project overseen by Washington’s elite regime change trainers. While posing as a champion of democracy, Guaidó has spent years at the forefront of a violent campaign of destabilization in Venezuela.

On 1st February 2019, Dr. Jill Stein—while linking to an excellent Gray Zone article—tweeted:

“Who is Juan Guaido, self-proclaimed Venezuelan president? His US-funded Popular Will party is known as the most violent faction of Venezuela‘s rightwing opposition, with a history of sabotage, brutal street violence and a nasty habit of burning people alive.”

The Guaidó experiment collapsed by 2021. Hyperinflation had been tamed through partial dollarization, but the parallel president governed exactly zero square meters of Venezuelan soil. The Biden administration quietly phased out recognition in 2023, shifting to “maximum pressure lite” while negotiating oil-for-debt swaps with Chevron.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) estimates 40,000 excess deaths between 2017 and 2019 due to sanctions—figures the State Department disputes, but has never independently refuted.

Venezuela’s oil production, once 3.5 million bpd under Chávez, bottomed at 300,000 in 2020. PDVSA’s rigs rusted; skilled engineers fled to Guyana and Trinidad.

Yet Maduro survived.

How?

Two powerful friends: Beijing and Moscow.

Beijing restructured $60 billion in loans, accepting delayed oil shipments. Moscow refinanced military contracts and dispatched Wagner-linked technicians to guard gold mines in the Orinoco Belt.

Beijing didn’t just lend Maduro money; it re-engineered his debt to keep the oil flowing, even if delayed. The $60 billion loan restructuring (spanning 2016–2019) converted maturing obligations into long-term, oil-backed commitments. Venezuela pledged future crude shipments—often at below-market rates—to service the debt.

This wasn’t exactly charity.

China secured discounted access to heavy crude for its refineries and locked in a foothold in the hemisphere’s largest oil reserves. By 2020, Chinese firms like CNPC were operating joint ventures in the Orinoco Belt, extracting oil that doubled as debt repayment. When U.S. sanctions choked PDVSA’s cash flow, Beijing’s state banks quietly extended grace periods and rolled over principal, preventing default.

Moscow’s support was more overt—and more menacing.

Rosneft, the Kremlin-linked oil giant, prepaid for Venezuelan crude, injecting billions into PDVSA’s coffers. But the real game-changer was Russia’s refinancing of $17 billion in military contracts. Instead of demanding cash, Moscow accepted oil and gold as payment while stationing “technical advisors” in Caracas.

The Wagner Group (now rebranded, but still Kremlin-adjacent) played a darker role.

Starting in 2018, Russian mercenaries—often ex-Spetsnaz—secured illegal gold mines in the Orinoco Mining Arc. These operations, run by Maduro’s inner circle (including the infamous “Cartel of the Suns”), generated off-the-books revenue to pay soldiers, buy loyalty, and fund repression.

Together, China and Russia created a parallel economy:

Oil → China (debt servicing)

Gold → Russia (black-market revenue)

Weapons → Moscow (loyalty of the FANB military)

This triad insulated Maduro from U.S. sanctions, which targeted PDVSA and froze $7 billion in assets (Citgo). While Guaidó’s interim government controlled diplomatic recognition, Maduro controlled the guns, gold, and gas.

Hyperinflation raged, but the regime’s core—military, prisons, and propaganda—remained funded.

In short: Beijing bought time with oil; Moscow bought loyalty with gold and guns. The opposition had hashtags and headlines. Maduro had hydrocarbons and mercenaries.

China and Russia have kept Maduro’s regime afloat, but the cracks are widening.

Hyperinflation may have been leashed through dollarization, and PDVSA’s rigs may creak back to life under Chevron’s watchful eye, and it seems that the West is ready to pounce.

At this drama’s center stands María Corina Machado, another engineer-turned-dissident whose recent triumph—the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize—has cast her not just as a national icon, but as the West’s anointed spearhead in the final push against Chavismo.

Of course, critics lambast the award as the Nobel Committee’s latest endorsement of regime change, exposing the prize itself as a hollow farce.

The recent announcement that the CIA has been authorized for “covert operations” in Venezuela was quite perplexing, as you do not typically broadcast to the world that you are engaging in covert operations. This adds another layer of intrigue.

Critics claim that Machado is no unifier, that her free-market zeal and U.S. ties (decades of NED funding, whispers of CIA briefings) alienate the Chavista base, those slum-dwellers Chávez once lifted with petrodollar largesse. Maduro’s camp, predictably, erupted: state media branderd her “La Sayona,” a vengeful specter from folklore, while loyalist rallies torched her effigies in effigy.

The Nobel Prize gives Machado leverage. She used her acceptance speech (delivered via video from hiding) to thank the Venezuelan people and call on the U.S. and its allies for support. The Trump administration, now in its second term, has responded with tighter sanctions on Russian and Chinese firms operating in Venezuela and increased pressure on Maduro’s inner circle.

Machado is clearly the spiritual successor to Juan Guaido. The White House stated that its recent targeting of Venezuela is due to Venezuela allegedly releasing prisoners into the country, and facilitating the smuggling of drugs into the U.S., but all but the most die-hard Trump supporters believe that is only a pretense to carrying out foreign policy objectives decades in the making.

What happens next is unclear.

Machado refuses dialogue with Maduro unless he agrees to a verified transition. The regime shows no sign of conceding. Sanctions, protests, and diplomatic isolation will continue.

Is this one of those instances where we find out that all of the CIA/DoD/USAID/NED skullduggery is something that this country actually needs to stay on top?

Is the Deep State, as we’ve come to understand it, something that cannot be totally defeated without compromising our place in the world?

Or is regime change simply a tool—its value determined not by its nature, but by the purpose and intent behind its use?

It will be interesting to see how this unfolds.

In the meantime, here’s a highly informative interview with former Green Beret Jordan Goudreau, who was actively involved in regime change operations in Venezuela.

Badlands Media articles and features represent the opinions of the contributing authors and do not necessarily represent the views of Badlands Media itself.

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