Declaration by the Executive Bureau of the Fourth International 27 October 2025
Economic blackmail and threats against Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Argentina are part of a new phase in US policy toward Latin America. But the greatest danger falls on Venezuela, whose government Trump is determined to overthrow. . The deployment of 10,000 soldiers, a massive arsenal in the Caribbean, and attacks that have already killed more than 60 rafters threaten not only Venezuela but the entire region. It is the urgent duty of activists around the world to raise their voices and mobilize against US interventionism under Trump.
Unprecedented military deployment in the Caribbean
The central target of the US offensive is undoubtedly Venezuela. With unprecedented stridency and brazenness, the imperialist leader and his secretaries of state and war, Marco Rubio and Peter Hegseth, have already decreed that criminal drug cartels are "terrorist organizations", considered Maduro as the head of a cartel that does not exist (the Soles cartel), and offered a $50 million reward for information leading to the capture of the Venezuelan.
Most threateningly, they have deployed around 10,000 marines to the Caribbean, with aircraft carriers (the largest in their navy), torpedo boats and nuclear submarines, warships equipped with medium-range missiles, B-52 bombers, and the technological capacity for large-scale data analysis, in a maneuver defined by geopolitical experts as a "seismic realignment." Puerto Rico has been remilitarized, and military cooperation agreements with Caribbean countries have been used to build an army infrastructure that appears to precede a large-scale attack on the country that was the scene of the great Bolivarian revolution. Over the past two months, these forces have carried out seven attacks on rafters (alleged traffickers), resulting in 46 deaths and two arrests.
On October 15, in a move unprecedented even during the Cold War (CIA operations were secret), Trump announced that he had authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to carry out operations in Venezuela. According to the Washington Post, the president signed a document authorizing the CIA to carry out covert operations in foreign countries, ranging from clandestine information gathering to training opposition guerrilla forces and carrying out lethal attacks.
On Sunday, October 19, in a further escalation, US forces carried out a deadly attack against what was supposedly a ship belonging to Colombia's ELN group in the waters of the Pacific Ocean. In response to Gustavo Petro's justified protest, Trump insulted the Colombian president as a “drug trafficker" and head of "a weak and very bad government," threatening, as usual, with tariffs and funding cuts, while at the same time revoking the US visas of Petro, his family, and his advisors. While Petro recalled the Colombian ambassador to Washington, Trump said at a press conference — in response to a journalist — that he does not need a declaration of war for his operations against trafficking in what he considers his waters. "We go there and we kill them."
Trump's top advisers are reportedly urging him to invade Venezuela to overthrow Maduro, according to open speculation in the US. Of course, the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the far-right Venezuelan leader María Corina Machado – which, if it weren't serious, would be one of the worst jokes of our time – is part of a deliberate plan to reinforce what the hawks see as the alternative to Maduro. The Trump administration appears to be forcing a transition to a far-right government led by Edmundo González Urrutia and María Corina, who has already called for sanctions against Venezuela, without any concern for their effects on the impoverished population and is now handing over the fate of the nation to the boots of Yankee soldiers.
It may seem unlikely that the US would invade by land countries whose governments it accuses of complicity in drug trafficking, such as Venezuela, Colombia, or Mexico itself. A prolonged ground invasion would meet with strong resistance from the armed forces under Maduro's command, possibly with widespread support and sympathy in the region, meaning a new and closer Iraq. Entering a war of this magnitude contradicts Trump's rhetoric to his domestic audience, to whom he has promised to "end the wars." Furthermore, there are signs of opposition to such a solution from sectors of the US military high command, as evidenced by the early resignation of the head of the Southern Military Command, Admiral Alvin Hosley, on October 16.
In any case, prudence dictates that we should not rule out the possibility of any warmongering "madness" on the part of the neo-fascist leader. At the very least, based on his rhetoric, he may opt for drone or aircraft attacks against specific targets in Venezuela in a continued attempt to weaken the government.
A return to the past
Since the first days of his return to the Oval Office of the White House, Donald Trump, emboldened by his neo-fascist hawks, has kept Mexico under heavy tariff and police-military pressure (so that the Sheinbaum government will stop the flow of migrants at the border and combat local drug cartels). CIA drones fly over Mexican territory in the supposed search for cocaine and other drug laboratories.
Trump has meddled in Brazil's internal politics to defend his friend Bolsonaro, convicted of attempted coup (imposing 50% tariffs on Brazilian exports to the US and opening a trade investigation against Brazil's timid policies to restrict US big tech companies). Not even Argentina, governed by his compadre Javier Milei, escapes threats and blackmail: in mid-October, commenting on a new US$20 billion loan from the IMF to the country, Trump conditioned his continued support for the Southern neo-fascist libertarian on a victory for Milei's party in the October 26 parliamentary elections, in which the possibility of the president's neo-fascist coalition finally controlling Congress is at stake (with low chances). "If [Milei] loses, we are not going to be generous with Argentina," Trump said. The episode points to the normalization of the rhetoric and practice of the US government's direct interference in the internal political affairs of sovereign states. (It seems that Trump's move was one of the factors explaining the Milei administration's victory in the elections.)
The combination of gestures, punitive rhetoric, and enormous military deployment constitutes an attack on Latin American neighbors not seen since the invasion of Grenada in 1982. In the context of the substantive change that Trump's White House is imposing on the global power relations that have been in place for the last eight decades, US policy toward Latin America is taking a turn toward the interventionist past of military aggression and open political interference that had already marked the imperialist power's treatment of the entire South during the Cold War.
A call for international anti-imperialist solidarity
The accusation that Maduro and senior Venezuelan government officials are members of cartels, stupid as it is, seeks to justify the violation of the principle of self-determination of peoples and the territorial sovereignty of Venezuela. There is an unprecedented warmongering offensive in the region, which must be forcefully rejected by socialists, social activists, and progressive sectors, regardless of what they or we think about the government of Nicolás Maduro, its anti-worker, anti-popular policies, and its anti-democratic drift.
It is time to call on the democratic, anticolonial, progressive, and revolutionary forces of the world, and of the region in particular, to defend the territorial integrity of Venezuela, the Caribbean countries, and all of Latin America in the face of attempts at military or political intervention, that is, attempts to define "from above and outside" (read: in the Oval Office) the political course of sovereign countries. It is the Venezuelan people who must decide on their government, without any interference. It is the sovereign peoples of Latin America and all corners of the globe who must decide on their tyrants, their parliaments, and the trials in their judicial systems.
We must demand that the governments of Lula, Petro, Boric, and Sheinbaum do their utmost to prevent any possibility of military aggression and political intervention in Venezuela. It is positive that Lula offers himself as a “mediator,” as he did in his meeting with Trump, but all these governments must be vehement and even repetitive in rejecting any US initiative against Venezuela.
The Fourth International's solidarity with Venezuela includes demanding that Maduro restore political freedoms for the social movement, the left, and the workers of Venezuela. This is the path, together with legitimate popular military mobilization, to build genuine national and regional unity against imperialist aggression. Only the broadest unity of action can contain, resist, and defeat the ongoing aggression.
US troops and weapons out of the Caribbean Sea!
No more bomb attacks!
Demilitarize Puerto Rico now!
US hand off Venzuela and Latin America.