It is 2025, and I really should not be shocked that I need to remind people that war is bad for an invaded country. Seeing as there are sectors of the American population that assume Palestine and Ukraine are not being devastated by their respective invaders, it’s not hard to assume that the more warmongering segments of the U.S. government (that is, all of them) would be eager to extend its nation’s “freedom” to yet another unsuspecting nation. What does surprise me, though, is the absurdist cruelty through which the government keeps seeking casus belli (a justification for outright war) and the utter insanity of those who want to be bombed sooner and harder all in the name of American democracy. At the same time, as a born and raised Venezuelan, I probably should have gotten accustomed to this level of ontological lunacy years ago.
On Sept. 2, President Donald Trump ordered a strike on a boat supposedly manned by 11 “Tren de Aragua Narco Terrorists” (per Trump’s Truth Social post). Their crime? Sailing on international borders with the alleged intention to traffic drugs into the U.S. Even foregoing the notion that killing non-aggressive civilians for a crime that does not carry either life sentence nor the death penalty under U.S. federal code is wrong, there is no proof that the boat, or any of the other Venezuelan boats that were struck down by the U.S. air force afterwards, were carrying “Tren de Aragua Narco Terrorists.” The New York Times investigation by Julie Turkewitz reveals that there is a strong possibility that at least one of the men in that boat was a “fisherman with four children who left one day for work and never came back.” And yet, these unknown men, whose innocence is both likely and disregarded, are slandered endlessly beyond their graves by Trump administrative officials, making them the punchlines of their dehumanizing cruelty.
In an X post Vice President JD Vance made on Sept. 6, he stated that “killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.” Additionally, he presented this extralegal international aggression and senseless loss of life as a positive action in comparison to that of the Democratic response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine by tweeting “Democrats: let’s send your kids to die in Russia” and “Republicans: actually let’s protect our people from the scum of the earth.” Marco Rubio, former Florida senator and current Secretary of State, is a “pick-me” Latino whose greatest pleasure is throwing his own community under the bus. He has been one of the main pushers of Trump’s foreign policy with Venezuela and has encouraged waging war on what he calls “narcoterrorists,” led by Venezuela’s President Maduro, with the Venezuelan government being positioned as “a terrorist organization and organized crime organization that have taken over a country so that they can become the leaders so that they can become billionaires.”
For all intents and purposes, the U.S. government has positioned Venezuela as a bug to be squashed in the name of American salvation, with any innocent civilian being at risk of being passed off as yet another one of those “narcoterrorists.” And yet, this positioning as the scum of the earth does not phase my countrymen. Instead many just can’t wait to get a taste of the M4 carbine and Blackhawk helicopter brand of American freedom.
As a rule of thumb, the great majority of Venezuelan immigrants believe, like I do, that Nicolas Maduro is a horrible president that has fostered a cruel, corrupt government with keen incompetency and thoughtlessness. Most would actually argue that I am a bit too lenient for not believing he is the Antichrist incarnate. Many of these exíles regard Trump’s actions as a Holy Grail, an avenue by which Maduro can be overthrown in the bloodiest and most gratifying way, restoring the golden Venezuela from the 80s in a sort of military-enforced time-travel. It does not matter by what methods or means, it does not matter whether we sell the very land under the feet of Venezuelans who have stayed to a new set of masters; they are ready to risk anything to “liberate” the nation. They see this liberation at the hands of the U.S. government as a man-made Rapture, where those who are righteous and true patriots will survive to see the new-Old Venezuela.
What these Venezuelan expatriates forget to account for is that American liberation has a track record for being self-serving, disastrous and bloody. In Latin America alone, the United States has been responsible for some of the most inhumane regimes the continent has ever seen. A famous example of American interventionism is the forceful deposition and assassination of President Salvador Allende and the subsequent imposition of General Augusto Pinochet as President of Chile in 1973 until 1990 (which led to the death, torture or disappearance of more than 40,000 Chileans). Another is the coup d’etat against President João Goulart in 1964 by the CIA-backed Brazilian military junta whose count of 20,000 victims of torture, disappearance and political assassination is now seen as severely undercounted as it is hard to amount in the 21 years it kept control.
Whenever the United States gets involved in Latin America, death and repression follows, but outright war hasn’t been waged since the Banana Wars. The Trump government is not talking about implementing a puppet state, nor is it proposing that Maduro is an illegitimate president and attempting to put in their own candidate as they did in 2020. Instead, they are actively dehumanizing Venezuelans and committing bloodshed before Venezuela has even shot its first bullet. I want to live to see the day Venezuela is free, but I also want to see Venezuela alive. And it shouldn’t be too much to ask for my countrymen to stop courting the devil, as all he will do is rob us from all that made Venezuela the country we love. Yet, I have the feeling that many of the pro-Trump Venezuelan immigrants—who argue that they are “one of the good ones” and who can count on the president to spit in their face and call them rapists and murderers—would prefer to see endless carnage on Venezuelan soil and violent repression to take over every single aspect of Venezuelan society as long as it is no longer under the name of Maduro.