US Draws Venezuela into Petrodollar Rescue Operation / By W.T. Whitney Jr.

_{South Paris, Maine}

A lightning U.S. military attack on January 3 succeeded in capturing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, National Assembly member Cilia Flores. They are now lodged in a New York prison, awaiting trial on narcotrafficking and weapons changers.

Speculation based on the historical record suggesting that the U.S. military might overturn Venezuela’s government has not materialized. Until recently, the U.S. government has, in fact, worked strenuously to destroy Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, the political project led by President Hugo Chavez from its onset in 1999 until his death in 2013, and afterwards, until January 3, by President Maduro.

Under that banner, Venezuela’s government has taken on U.S. imperialism, collaborated with revolutionary Cuba, promoted regional unity, and moved toward socialism. Responding, the United States supported or financed a failed military coup in 2002; a strike against the state-owned oil company in 2003; violent, recurring street demonstrations; and countless dissident organizations. U.S. economic sanctions have been devastating. The U.S. in 2019 named Juan Guaidó as a puppet Venezuelan president.

Now, for the U.S. government, reaction to revolutionary stirrings in Venezuela fades into the background. The mission now is that of propping up U.S. economic hegemony in the world. This rests on the U.S. dollar continuing to serve as the world’s dominant currency. That lofty position is maintained through the dollar’s role in the marketing of oil.

Venezuela harbors vast oil reserves and is, therefore, an object of U.S. strategizing. U.S. planners, it seems, are relying upon an intact Venezuelan state – which is the case now, given an annual growth rate recently of close to 9%. The specter looms of regime change in the chaotic style of U.S. endeavors in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to speak of Libya. In the case of Venezuela, the stakes are high and risk is to be avoided.

As 2025 closed, the destruction of small boats, the killings of crewmembers and a great U.S. naval fleet hovering off the coast did suggest the possibility of regime change. But narcotrafficking charges against Venezuelan leaders and the labeling of Maduro as a dictator qualify more as flimsy pretexts for the capture of Maduro than for replacing a
government.

That vast U.S. military presence still lingering in the area surely has use now in frightening Venezuelans into compliance with an evolving U.S. plan. They would be dreading horrendous consequences.

Moving toward collaboration

Evolving public statements of the U.S. president and of Venezuelan acting president Delcy Rodríguez suggest Venezuela’s government is safe. Rodríguez served as vice president in Maduro’s government. She is the daughter of a founder of the Marxist-oriented and long defunct Socialist League and sister of the current president of Venezuela’s National
Assembly.

In remarks on January 3 at an emergency meeting of the National Defense Council, Rodríguez turned to themes appropriate to the occasion. “There is only one president in this country and his name is Nicolás Maduro Moros,” she declared. She called for the liberation of Maduro and of Cilia Flores. Taking note of pro-government, anti-U.S. demonstrations, Rodríguez insisted Venezuela “will never go back to being the colony of anyone.” She decried “regime change” aimed at “capturing our energy, minerals, and natural resources.”

President Donald Trump speaking on January 4 declared that, “We’re going to take our oil back” and “ “[W]e’re going to run everything. We’re going to run it, fix it.”

The next day, Rodriguez declared, “We extend an invitation to the government of the US to work jointly on an agenda of cooperation, aimed at shared development … [one] that strengthens lasting peaceful coexistence.” Even so, on Venezuelan TV she soon insisted that, “No external agent governs Venezuela,” and that, “Venezuela is on a painful course through the aggression we suffered.”

The two heads of state spoke on the telephone on January 14. Trump reported that, “This partnership between the United States of America and Venezuela will be a spectacular one FOR ALL” and “Venezuela will soon be great and prosperous again.” Rodríguez stated that, “I had a long, productive, and courteous telephone conversation with the President of the
United States, Donald Trump, conducted in a framework of mutual respect.”

Two days later, speaking before the National Assembly, Rodríguez indicated she would “continue shaping energy cooperation” with the United States and that she and Trump were developing “a working agenda for the benefit of both peoples.”

CIA Director John Ratcliffe conferred with Rodríguez in Caracas. Washington officials had been talking with interior minister Diosdado Cabello prior to January 3. U.S. State Department officers visited in Caracas on January 9 “to conduct technical and logistical assessments aimed at a potential reopening of the US embassy in Caracas.”

The impression here is of Venezuela being assigned a job description and of the United States applying pressure so that Venezuelans comply and cooperate. For what’s ahead, the United States needs partnership, specifically a cohesive and functioning Venezuelan government.

A plan in the works

President Trump has repeatedly declared that the United States wants Venezuela’s oil. Why would the world’s largest oil producer want more oil?

According to misionverdad.org, “The main target was not [Venezuela’s] oil reserves … but rather the currency in which they are traded. By breaking the commercial and financial blockade and negotiating crude oil outside the dollarized system, Venezuela opened a real breach in the petrodollar monopoly that had existed since 1974.”

A report from Francisco Delgado Rodríguez states that the United States “had no choice but to leave the entire [Venezuelan] government intact” and claims too that “controlling the world’s main oil reserve, in Venezuela, serves to sustain the dominance of petrodollars. Without that, everything else will go downhill sooner rather than later.”

According to middleeastmonitor.com, “Venezuela holds the highest proven oil deposits in the world, with a reserve of about 303 billion barrels, or about 17 per cent of world reserves, far surpassing Saudi Arabia.” Plus, the fact of “Maduro selling oil in and avoiding the use of the dollar was a direct threat to the Petrodollar system, which had been the foundation of the American global economic hegemony over the past five decades.”

Realities intrude. One is that the U.S. government after 1971 was no longer setting the dollar’s value in terms of gold. Inflation emerged, and in 1974 Henry Kissinger struck a deal with Saudi Arabia, the world’s major oil producer and exporter. The U.S. government would protect the Kingdom militarily and require that Saudi Arabia demand dollars in payment for the oil it sells, also that Saudi Arabia invest 80% of its oil revenue in U.S.
Treasury and corporate securities and bonds.

The requirement that nations buy Saudi oil with dollars stimulated demand for dollars. Increased demand has enabled the U.S. government to borrow money at lower interest rates than do other borrowers.

Most importantly for purposes here, the dollar, the world’s dominant currency, fuels the commercialization of petroleum. The linkage of one to the other, the so-called petrodollar system, accounts for U.S. power over the world economy.

According to economist Michael Hudson, “Control over oil is one of its key methods for achieving unipolar control over the world’s broad trade and dollarized financial arrangements” He adds that “Venezuela … has been supplying 5% of China’s oil needs.”

Analyst Kasper Bjørkskov explains that, from 2018 on, “Venezuela has sold 100% of its oil exports to China, with transactions settled in yuan, not dollars. Moreover, Venezuela became an official BRICS+ partner nation in 2024, gaining access to the bloc’s alternative payment systems.”

As of January 2025, Saudi Arabia itself was selling oil to China in exchange for yuan.

Bjørkskov concludes that, “Venezuela represents an existential threat to the petrodollar system, and by extension, to American global power itself. … This is about the slow-motion collapse of the architecture that has supported American power for half a century: the dollar’s role as the world’s dominant reserve currency. And Venezuela, improbably, has become ground zero in the fight to preserve it.”

Ultimately, the U.S. government has every reason to promote a setting that favors the production and export of oil in great quantities – oil that will be sold in dollars. It will stick with Venezuela’s current government. The task of keeping a historically-disobedient Venezuela in line is left for another day.

_{W.T. Whitney Jr. is a retired pediatrician and political journalist living in Maine.}

U.S. Drug War Arrives in Ecuador, with Baggage / By W. T. Whitney Jr.

_{^{Photo via People’s Dispatch}}

_{South Paris, Maine}

Joined by other U.S. officials, Laura Richardson, commander of the U.S. Army’s Southern Command, was in Ecuador January 22-25 to confer with government leaders there about U.S. military assistance. They included recently elected, and very wealthy, President Daniel Noboa. She mentioned to reporters an “investment portfolio…worth $93.4 million including not only military equipment … [but also] humanitarian assistance and disaster response, [and] professional military education.”

Prompting the visit was recently intensifying crime and turmoil manifesting as prison riots, escapes from prisons, and assassinations of political figures. A homicide rate of 5.8 per 100,000 persons in 2017 increased to 43 murders per 1000 Ecuadorians in 2023.

In the “grip of drug gangs,” Ecuador has been receiving cocaine and other illicit drugs produced and processed in countries such as Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil. From Guayaquil and Esmeraldas, ports in Ecuador, the goods move on to U.S. and European consumers. The cartels’ former routes, through Central America and the Caribbean, are less active.

Ecuador’s government recently decreed a state of “internal armed conflict.” Its Army now has charge of domestic security. From 2017 to 2023, governments under presidents Lenin Moreno and Guillermo Lasso arranged for privatizations, fiscal austerity, and a reduced package of state services. Resources are lacking to deal with powerful region-wide drug cartels now operating in the country. U.S. military intervention would fill the gap.

The U.S. so-called drug war, as waged in Latin America and the Caribbean, began during the Nixon administration. Notable examples are Plan Colombia from 1999 until 2015 and the Merida Initiative, applied to Mexico from 2007 until 2021. The U.S. media provocatively associates drug cartels with international terrorism. U.S. drug war spending has reached $1 trillion over four decades, says a report.

Ecuador’s situation has special features. Analyst Pablo Dávalos sees “convergence among political power, organized crime, and narcotrafficking to allow [Ecuador’s] use of the dollar as its national currency to enable money laundering.” Organized crime “controls vast areas” and Ecuadorians “refusing to pay extorsions are being systematically eliminated.”

Eloy Osvaldo Proaño of the Latin American Center of Strategic Analysis points out that the “neoliberal recipe reduces institutional presence, which weakens control of borders and facilitates penetration of criminal gangs.” What President Noboa has proposed “is part of a regional plan of paramilitaries occupying wide areas to instill terror, tear apart the social fabric and subdue populations.”

The “22 organizations declared [by Noboa] to be ‘terrorist groups’ … have a capacity of maneuver and omnipresence enabling them to control territories and prisons, even to penetrate the institutions [of the state].”

Ecuador recently became the leading recipient of U.S. military assistance in Latin America and the Caribbean area. More is on the way. Ecuador’s defense minister indicated the U.S. government will be “investing” $3.1 billion in military assistance over seven years.

Planning has been elaborate:

· The FBI in 2017 assisted the “lawfare” campaign of President Guillermo Lasso against President Rafael Correa, his progressive predecessor.

· The U.S. Congress on December 15, 2022, approved the United States-Ecuador Partnership Act of 2022.

· A memorandum of understanding was signed in Washington in July 2023. It covers U.S. efforts to strengthen Ecuador’s military capacities and combat the drug trade.

· A binational agreement was signed on August 16, 2023 for cooperation in building the capacity of Ecuador’s military, police, and judiciary.

· President Lasso in Washington on September 28, 2023 signed agreements allowing U.S. troops and naval personnel to deploy in Ecuador.

· Ecuador’s foreign minister signed a status of forces agreement with the U.S. ambassador on October 6, 2023 relating to privileges, immunities, and guarantees for U.S. armed forces personnel.

· Ecuador’s Constitutional Court on January 11, 2024 ratified the U.S.- Ecuador security agreement.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro in September, 2022 recalled an earlier conversation with General Richardson about “the failure of [U.S.] anti-drug policies.” He mentioned to her that, “It’s our obligation … to say that and also to propose alternatives that don’t allow a million more Latin Americans to die.”

Petro has company. Many progressives in the United States and elsewhere also regard the U.S. drug war as a failure. Facts are on their side:

· Narcotrafficking has increased despite drug war.

· Moneys spent on drug war is money not spent on preventative programs and poverty reduction.

· U.S.-assisted militarization of targeted countries undermines democratic renewal.

· Drug war means profits to weapons suppliers, narco-traffickers, and money-laundering banks and businesses.

· The United States, the great consumer of illicit drugs, bears responsibility for not reducing consumption.

This consensus resonated at the Latin American and Caribbean Conference on Drugs – for Life, Peace, and Development that took place September 7-9, 2023 in Cali, Colombia. President Petro and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador had called for the gathering. Attending were officials of 19 regional nations and representatives both of observer countries and international social organizations.

The object was “to rethink drug policies in response to the failure of the punitive strategy imposed by the United States.” The most impactful recommendations emerging were these:

· Change basic assumptions by recognizing the failure of the U.S. war on drugs.

· Contain the drug problem internally by dealing with structural causes of poverty, inequalities, lack of opportunities, and violence.

· Block drug trafficking through “principles of justice and through development.” Fight poverty by giving people opportunities, youth especially.

· Explore legal modes of drug consumption.

· Reduce demand through “universal prevention” and attending to mental health problems.

Why does the U.S. government fight narcotrafficking in Ecuador? Its agenda is full already. Its prohibitions on narcotics use at home are less than effective.

Here’s a hint. Indigenous peoples organized by Ecuador’s Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities (CONAIE) carried out week-long national strike in June 2022. At issue were labor rights, rescuing the environment, poor families’ unmet needs, and support for small farmers. A people’s political resistance movement evidently exists there.

Leonidas Iza, the CONAIE leader, now speaks out in regard to General Richardson’s visit. He told an interviewer that, “We struggle for the Ecuadorian people” and that, “We are ceding not only military sovereignty, sovereignty over our country but even more: we are submitting to their desire to control our resources.”

All is revealed. What’s happening is nationwide political resistance striking at U.S. economic and political interests abroad. The U.S. government characteristically takes protective action in such circumstances.

Drug war serves as a cover for putting U.S. troops and U.S. proxies on the ground for preventative purposes. In Colombia, under Plan Colombia, the U.S. military joined up with Colombia’s Army to confront leftist insurgencies. A U.S. military presence would have been handy in Peru and Bolivia to ward off indigenous mobilizations led, respectively, by former presidents Pedro Castillo and Evo Morales.

_{W.T. Whitney Jr.}_{is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine. W.T. Whitney Jr. es un periodista político cuyo enfoque está en América Latina, la atención médica y el antirracismo. Activista solidario con Cuba, anteriormente trabajó como pediatra, vive en la zona rural de Maine.}

The Implications of New US Troop Arrivals in Peru / By W. T. Whitney Jr.

_{^{Starting from June 1, the United States will deploy its regular military units in Peru | Photo:gestion.pe. / https://orinocotribune.com/}}

Beginning in June, detachments of U.S. troops will be arriving in Peru and staying until December 31, 2023. Peru’s Congress, supported by only 6% of Peruvians, on May 26 approved a resolution introduced in January that “authorized the entry of naval units and foreign military personnel with weapons of war.”

U.S. military personnel are heading for Peru on a training and advisory mission. U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force troops will be active throughout that country. Most of them apparently will stay for less than the allotted seven months. They are bringing weapons and equipment. The U.S. Southern Command appointed a Peruvian general as “deputy commanding general-interoperability.”

They arrive following massive popular protests that erupted in reaction to Peru’s rightwing Congress on December 7, 2022 having ordered the arrest of the democratically-elected President Pedro Castillo. His politics were progressive. The protests provoked violent military and police repression; over 70 Peruvians were killed. Demonstrations peaked in February, but will revive in July, according to reports.

Castillo remains in prison, and his replacement, former Vice-President President Dina Boluarte, is widely reviled. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights recently issued a report documenting “serious violations by the police and military” that took place shortly after she became president. Peru’s Public Ministry, investigating “the presumed crime of genocide,” required that Boluarte testify on June 6.

The U.S. troops will be arriving amid an upsurge of Peru’s underclass. Peru’s mostly rural, poor, and indigenous majority did elect the inexperienced Castillo as president in July 2021. They are now calling for Boluarte’s removal, new presidential elections, and a Constituent Assembly. Six of ten Peruvians regard the current political crisis as stemming from “racism and anti-indigenous discrimination,” according to a recent poll.

Resumen Latinoamericano reports that the U.S. forces heading to Peru will include 25 Special Forces troops arriving with weapons and equipment and 42 other Special Forces troops charged with preparing Peru’s intelligence command for “joint special operations;” 160 additional U.S. troops will be utilizing nine U.S. airplanes.

Eventually, 970 U.S. Air Force and Special Forces personnel will have taken part in the U.S. Southern Command’s so-called “Resolute Sentinel 23.” Previous U.S. military interventions in Latin America have been similarly named. The phrasing of this intervention’s official purpose is odd: “to “integrate combat interoperability and disaster response training in addition to medical exchanges, training and aid and construction projects.”

The coup government, under whose auspices the U.S. troops will be operating, is a creature of conservative political parties and the business establishment. In April it announced plans to privatize lithium mining, thus reversing President Castillo’s efforts to nationalize the processing of lithium. The government is easing the authorization procedures that enable foreign corporations to extract copper. Lawyer and former Castillo advisor Raúl Noblecilla cites control over Peru’s mineral wealth as to why U.S. troops are in Peru; their presence there indicates “how lackey and sell-out governments function.”

Academician Jorge Lora Cam states that “the usurper government” seeks to “deepen extractive plunder with blood and fire … unify the right with left-leaning elements infected by neoliberalism … and prepare for permanent political power.” He adds that under the auspices of “political criminals,” the country’s economy is newly “at risk because Peru’s foreign debt now amounts to $100 billion dollars.”

The imminent arrival of U.S. military forces provoked other criticism. Former foreign Minister Héctor Béjar insisted that, “the spurious government was using the presence of these troops to intimidate the Peruvian people who have announced new protests for July.”

A spokesperson for the Communist Party of Peru – “Patria Roja” explained that, “the entry of U.S. troops in Peru is an affront to our sovereignty and represents explicit backing by the U.S. government of the nefarious Boluarte regime, which is responsible for repression against the Peruvian people.”

The U.S. military, of course, has long interacted with its Peruvian counterpart. Instances include: military exercises in 2017, “Regional Emergency Operations Centers” in 2018, a “naval mission in 1920,” U.S. Army involvement “from 1946 to 1969,” and U.S. training of thousands of Peruvian military personnel from the 1940s on. TeleSur in 2015 reported that, “Hundreds of Peruvians protested Wednesday … against the [anticipated] arrival of 3,200 [U.S.]soldiers with ships, airplanes, and various kinds of weapons.”

Peruvians are hardly alone as a targeted people. Some 800 U.S. bases are distributed throughout the world, and “173,000 troops [were] deployed in 159 countries as of 2020.” The setting is of military intrusion extending over decades in Peru and now across the world. What’s the cost and how are payments arranged for?

The projected U.S. military budget for FY 2024 exceeds $1.5 trillion, according to a recent analysis. There are two sets of military activities and each requires its own funding approach. The U.S. government has to pay for potential war against enemies like China and Russia and for military operations elsewhere.

To portray China and Russia as threats to the U.S. status quo garners so much attention as to spark fellow-feeling for the military- industrial complex, and the funding flows. Rationales for the other kinds of involvement may lack crowd appeal. They are: shoring up the worldwide capitalist economy, serving corporate interests, and countering leftist insurgencies.

We conclude that congressional and tax-payer generosity in response to exaggerated threats to the U.S. status quo and to the worldwide capitalist system may translate into so much funding that enough is left over to pay for U.S. meddling in the other countries.

Panama may be one of them: The Biden administration may be on the verge of sending U.S. troops to the Darién region of Panama “to counter illicit drug trafficking, human trafficking, and irregular immigration.”

_{W.T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine. W.T. Whitney Jr. es un periodista político cuyo enfoque está en América Latina, la atención médica y el antirracismo. Activista solidario con Cuba, anteriormente trabajó como pediatra, vive en la zona rural de Maine.}