The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Blanca Missé:

As the confrontation between the US and Venezuela intensifies, we find ourselves at a pivotal moment where international, working-class solidarity is very much needed. Across 2025, the government of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela has faced growing pressure from Washington with naval deployments in the Caribbean, lethal strikes, unsuspected drug trafficking vessels departing from the Venezuelan territory, and an escalating rhetoric of national defense from Caracas. In response, one US senator even described the possibility of ground operations in Venezuela. And meanwhile, Maduro has invoked emergency powers, mobilized militias, and signaled that his regime is preparing for military confrontation rather than compromise with the US On the domestic front, Venezuela’s electoral landscape remains deeply contested. The July, 2024 presidential election in which the official results declare madura as a winner has been widely criticized as lacking transparency and democratic legitimacy. And in the most recent parliamentarian and regional vote, in May of 2025, Maduro’s party swept nearly all governorships and legislative sits.

But we must point out that this last election was largely boycotted by most of the opposition parties, those for socialist and social movement activists in the US and around the world, we must put together these twin developments to ask, what does solidarity with the Venezuelan people look like today? When the Venezuelan states under the leadership of Maduro is both resisting US imperial pressure and simultaneously suppressing internal descent of working class people, how can an international working class movement support a genuine democratic and social advances in Venezuela, while at the same time opposing all Imperialisms and all imperialist interventions into the country? And this episode, we are going to explore all of these challenges with our wonderful guest, Simone Rodriguez. Porras Simone is a Venezuelan researcher and a journalist, a member of the socialist and Freedom Party of Venezuela, and the author of Que FCA Chavismo, why did Cham Fail from 2018?

And he’s also a regular contributor of Venezuelan voices.org. Welcome, Simone. We’re really delighted to have you here in our show, solidarity without exception, to talk about the situation in Venezuela today and how working people in the US can better understand what is happening and stand in solidarity with the Venezuelan people. Now let’s start by laying out the big picture here, because when we discussed the current escalation of the US military and Venezuela and the growing economic pressure, the Trump is yielding on the country. We also need to understand the relation between US imperialism and Venezuela for the past 25 years. And I’m going to ask you something that is really difficult, but is really needed and will be welcome by our auditors, which is to do a rough wide history of what has happened in the past 20 years in Venezuela and more particularly the the United States government has had with this country.

Simón Rodríguez Porras:

So thank you very much for having me. I’m very happy to be able to talk about this fascinating subject and hopefully we can offer a better understanding of this complex history. So this first quarter century has been the time that Chama has been in power. Chavez was selected by the end of 1998. So this political force has been in power now for 26 years, and it came into power with great expectations on the part of the Venezuelan people who were basically fed up with bipartisan regime but had been in power for 40 years. From 1958 when the last military dictatorship had been overthrown to 1998, many people saw it as undemocratic, basically not representative. And in 1989, in fact, we have a mass rebellion in which most parties of the regime had nothing to say, no dialogue, to establish with the people who had taken to the streets, to loot and to rebel against an IMF imposed authority plan.

The only dialogue was the dialogue of bullets. It’s estimated that between 1,002 thousand people were killed by the military, tanks were taken to the streets and so on. So SMO became a political force in this context, the cycle of growth of the Venezuelan economy based on oil, it had encountered crisis as of the 1980s. We have a major devaluation of the national currency and cycles of very high inflation. In fact, the last government before Chavez had reached more than a hundred percent annual inflation per year. So people had expectations of popular participation in politics. A new constitution was drafted, which the decision to draft it was taken to a national referendum. People voted on it. There were some national discussions around its content. And finally, the draft that was written was also approved by votes. These were new experiences. There was also the creation of many new unions, radios, popular radios in the communities were started to operate.

And the state was very flexible towards the establishment of these community media. So this was the characteristic of the initial years of Chinese. And because there was a lot of polarization with the traditional parties, the church, even sectors of the military that had traditionally been educated in doctrines of national security and also anti-communism very strongly, this clash, which was basically sparked by the fear that this popular movement and popular process would get out of hand, not so much because the government wanted it to, but because the government was unwilling or unable to contain. This popular process led to the coup in 2002, which was endorsed by the Bush government. And this really marked a very important chapter in Venezuela and history because, well, for one thing, because the coup failed basically because there was a mass uprising against the coup. It also allowed the government to purge the army of many of its enemy elements.

And well, to summarize a little bit, because it’s a lot of history, basically the model, they established some social programs called MiSiS or missions using religious language. And what the government was doing relied heavily on oil, basically, not only on the oil boom, which lasted quite a lot, but also on a destructive policy of underinvestment in the oil industry, but not as a part of a strategy which we would support of changing the economic metrics of the Venezuelan economy changing to stop relying on oil, which is a very destructive industry as we know. But basically because they were just trying to get as much money as fast as possible without any real strategy for the middle term or long term. So what started to happen was it became clear that it was unsustainable, this economic model, also the government as to its seventh year in power, it started changing.

It introduced the term socialism. So they said, well, we want to open up a discussion to about 21st century socialism as a way to distance itself from 20th century socialism, but without defining what the critiques were to 20th century, so-called real socialism. And finally what happened is that they simply said, well, 21st century socialism is what we are doing. So it wasn’t a very utopian project, but just a label that they put on what they were doing. They were saying, well, this is a new socialism where we have oil multinationals, and they were just, he can also participate if it’s patriotic and so on. So it gave it a cover for its reformist policies and also for authoritarian aspects that it developed once the co threat clearly was very diminished and defeated. So when the government took the offensive, what it proved was that it wasn’t very much interested in broadening popular participation or democracy.

It actually launched anti-union attacks, criminalized the unions. Many union leaders were killed by the mafias linked to the government. Even Chavez himself said, union autonomy was a poison, a counter-revolutionary poison, very strong words. So also because some of the distortions of the previous model, for example, having a very overvalued exchange rate official one that coexists with a parallel or market exchange rate. And this of course leads to corruption inevitably because the ones that get access to the official dollars, the petrol dollars, they get a huge margin for arbitrage. They can either flee capital or resell those cheap dollars in the market and get huge, huge profits. And of course, this is a zero sum game where the loser is, the Venezuelan state itself is what is getting looted. And finally, this started to show real cracks and real limitations as Chaves life was getting near its end.

So the conditions for the very, very deep crisis that we had after 2012 were really created under Chavez. But the one who has to put his face up and deal also in a catastrophic way with the crisis itself is Maro. That is the reason why sometimes Chavez’s image is much more popular and better regarded than Maduro’s. What happened afterwards was, well, we had 80% contraction of the economy, which is really extraordinary for a country that was not in war, a country that was not suffering any natural catastrophe in any way. Also, almost a quarter of the population suffered a mass forest migration. About 8 million Venezuelans in the last, basically the last 12 years have gone out of the country due to this economic collapse. And well, it has to be said that although the sanctions have contributed to the country not recovering, really the process of destruction started much before the sanctions themselves in Trump’s government applied in 2017 these financial sanctions.

And in 2019 the oil sanctions which are still in place. But in fact, it was Obama who first declared Venezuela to be an extraordinary threat and created the conditions upon which then Trump built up his own policy of pressure against the Venezuelan regime. So to sum up, I think that it has been a contradictory relationship between Venezuelan government and the US for one part. In fact, the US supported the 2002 coup and has been applying heavy pressure after Obama’s declaration of an extraordinary threat. But at the same time, US oil companies operate in Venezuela have always operated throughout all of this period. The main companies are not Russian or Chinese, contrary to what many people may think it’s actually Chevron, the one that has the biggest investments in the Venezuelan oil industry. And also for most of this period, the main country buying Venezuelan oil has been the us. So those are some elements to have in mind.

Blanca Missé:

Thank you, Simone. That was really great. Thanks for unpacking a very contradictory situation because we had a popular uprising that resulted in a new government which had aspirations for more democracy, more social welfare. And at the same time, unfortunately, it’s not the first time the US attempted a coup to overthrow this government. And this coup combined with the economic pressure among other factors led to the Chavez regime to harden a little bit and start attacking or restricting the rights of working people in Venezuela. And what you explained to us about the Venezuela Union movement is really key, right? The process that brought Chavez to power was a process through which new unions were created. They were independent unions. And what happened with the Chavez regime when it began to change its character around 20 16 20 17, is that it banned independent unions and it demanded that all the unions should be controlled by the state, and it also banned other parties.

So another point that you bring to our attention is the fact that the US economic pressure against Venezuela was not something specifically done by the Republican party, but actually the highest sanctions began under the Obama regime. And that makes us realize that there is a combined policy, a similar policy both from Democrats and Republicans in power, which is to put forward the project of US imperialism and extract its needs and its benefits from Venezuela. And probably the fact that Chavez and then Maduro say they’re a socialist country, help us understand what fuels this right wing imperialist rhetoric. But you also pointed out that this proclamation, that Venezuela socialist is a little bit paradoxical, given that you, US corporations today still directly benefit from extracting profit from oil in this so-called socialist country. And maybe that’s something we want to interrogate a little bit later. What is really the nature of the economy of Venezuela.

At the same time, you’re telling us that there is a relation of both oppression, clear oppression from the US to Venezuela and elements of a dual cooperation to extract value. And it’s a very contradictory situation, which is not unique to Venezuela, meaning that imperialism works by oppressing countries, subjugating countries, and at the same time making deals with elites, the capitalist powers that rule these countries that they’re oppressing. At the same time, I also would like us to talk a little bit about the situation today with Corina Machado, who has been all over the news because she won the Nobel Prize. And maybe you can tell us a little bit more about what is her background and how do you interpret this figure that has been elevated as the opposition to the regime and as a new hope for a more democratic Venezuela, and at the same time is truly demonized in Venezuela as the representative of reaction. So how do we position ourselves in a situation where we want to advocate for democratic rights of the Venezuelan people and the right to have free elections? And at the same time, the person who is portrayed as the alternative to Maduro is Corina Machado who seems to have relations with the far right.

Simón Rodríguez Porras:

Great. So the first thing I want to point out is that because there are so many simplifications, sometimes even Cartoonishly portrayals of the Venezuelan history and its situation, some people say, well, it’s been a dictatorship now for 26 years, or some say no, it became a dictatorship last year when it did electoral fraud. I have a different assessment. I think it’s clear based on all evidence that Chavez did have a majority popular support and did win elections, even if we have in all capitalist democracies the issues of economic power and all the distortions that come into play. But in fact, Chavez did win elections and also perhaps more decisively he could lose elections because the difference between more democratic government and one that is less democratic is that, well, dictatorships never lose. But Chaz did lose a referendum on a constitution reform in 2007, and then he in 2010 just barely won.

But so it was possible for the government to lose. And in 2015, after Travis’s death, also the government lost by a landslide vote in parliamentary elections when the opposition, this traditional right wing opposition, we should differentiate when we talk about opposition sectors between there’s a left opposition, some of which comes from Chavismo itself and some which has always had an independent stance towards Chavismo. And there’s this traditional opposition which is linked to traditional sectors of the Burgis that have been displaced by this emerging burgi linked to Chavismo. So this 2015 moment is crucial because the government, well, it applied a state of emergency at first only in the frontier region to persecute Colombian refugees and do mass deportations. And then it de facto and also formally at some point extended the state of emergency nationwide and for broader reasons than just what had been initially used as justification for the persecution of Colombian migrants.

This should be a cautionary tale for everyone. That persecution of migrants is always a threat to the democratic rights of everyone. So after they lost the election, it was a different kind of fraud. They didn’t change the result, but what they did was that de facto annul the National Assembly, they deprived it of the possibility of making laws of calling ministers to be interrogated by the parliament, all of the normal duties and rights of EO parliament. So this was something new. This had never happened before, both the state of emergency and the annulment of the parliament. So after that election have never been cleaned. And also something that started to happen was it had started with Chavez, but intensified greatly with Maddo was that the government intervened political parties through the judicial system to allocate the legal representation of parties to sympathizers of the regime.

This was done not only against right wing opposition parties, but also against the left wing. One of the most recent instances of this was the confiscation of the legal representation of the Communist Party of Venezuela, which is one of the most traditional and one of the oldest parties in the country, has more than 80 years since it’s creation. And although it had supported Chavismo until 2021, more or less, it grew critical and then it simply was intervened under. That’s why as of the last two or three elections, the left cannot have its own candidates in Venezuelan elections. So in this context, we have to say that there is a paradox in the sense that while there is a democratic cause in Venezuela, which is the struggle to have democratic rights, to be able to organize, to be able to do a workers’ strike, to be able to participate in elections, have your vote respected, which is not so abstract.

It has to do with concrete things like why Venezuela has a less than $1 monthly minimum wage than the dictatorial conditions of the country translate into very brutal anti-worker realities such as that most of the income is not computated through wage, but through bonuses is informal payments. So this is really quite an economic counter-revolution, even in capitalist sense. You were talking about how the multinationals benefit from this situation. Well, it’s clear nowhere in the world will oil workers give so much surplus value because these are the lowest wages for oil workers in the world. Quite an accomplishment, right? So in the sense that the paradox or the contradiction I wanted to point out is that the traditional right-wing opposition has not really had a democratic vocation in the sense of having confidence in the popular masses or having a strategy based on popular action. The triumph in 2015 led to really a disaster where even though they had won a majority, the different sectors of this traditional opposition couldn’t come together with S on what to do with that political capital.

And what ended up happening is that the masses were the ones that took the initiative in 2017 in really a mass movement of protests. Some people linked it in its dimensions to what happened in 1989. There were many similarities because for example, some of the same sectors of the popular barrios in Caracas that had used to be the popular base of chavismo rioted and rebelled, there was looting, there was hunger, there were many similarities, but really this sector of the opposition was really surpassed by reality. And then what ended up happening is, well, they came up with this strategy of having white O proclaim herself as a interim president. So these are always very strange formulations in its relation to law, because what the law says is if there is no president, then the president of the National Assembly takes his role in order to organize new elections in a very short period of time.

But obviously Wao was not organizing elections, nor could he. But this seemed to be like a strategy of having a parallel government, which usually is the prelude to an invasion when you say, well, the legitimate government is another one. Well, it’s a prelude to then having a military way to enforce this symbolic or political formulation, but it never actually existed. When you read John Bolton’s book, he clearly states that the idea was to exert pressure and through basically psychological operations forced the Venezuelan government to capitulate and this wasn’t going to happen. And in fact, that failed experience I think makes it harder for this to happen for many reasons. But anyway, regarding Maria Karina Machado, her leadership builds up in this period of time in a peculiar way because for example, she was very critical of Wado. She said that in fact, wado was responsible for this sort of as aate because he did not invoke the treaty of Inter-American assistance, his military treaty.

And because he did not do it, then there was no US invasion as if Huo could simply pick up a phone and say, please invade. And they would follow his orders. Evidently us imperialism is the boss, not the other way around. But it was a way for her to out flank Wado from the right. And then when Wado became involved in corruption scandals, because he was handling money that the US confiscated and gave over to Guo and his cronies to manage what many people perceived in Venezuela regarding Wao and most of the right-wing opposition was that they were more concerned with their own personal interests and with becoming rich, basically with corruption than with any kind of political change. So because at the same time, the Madura government was heavily antagonizing with Machado, which was of the more extreme sector of the right wing, because the Maduro government always tried to portray any opposition as fascist.

So they see what is the most similar to fascist. Well, that’s what’s more convenient to portray as representative of the opposition. It backfired because actually they inflated Machado’s figure. And this combined with the fall or the destruction of the prestige of the other traditional right-wing opposition leaders paved the way for her to, in 2023, win more than 92% of the primary election to pick a presidential candidate to have a comparation basis. In 2012, she also participated in primaries and only took 3% of the vote. So she rose from three to 92 in almost a decade. And so this has been part of the process. What I personally find more objectionable to Mao’s politics is that it feeds into Trump’s persecution of Venezuelan migrants. This is a complete betrayal of many of the people who even support her because she has used this strategy of feeding into us narratives such as, well, the Venezuelan government is the leader of a drug cartel.

Drug cartels are terrorists, therefore, and also migration is used as a weapon using the narrative. Madura is exporting migrants who are terrorists who are drug traffickers into the US to and also to other countries in the region. So while there was already persecution against the migrants in the region and in the us, she was giving tools and the political legitimacy to what has been really horrendous under government Trump. Trump has sent Venezuelans to be tortured in El Salvador or in Guantanamo. It’s really outrageous. And to have someone who claims to stand for the democratic rights of Venezuelans, but only if Madura is the one who’s violating their human rights, not if her allies are doing it, then this is really horrible. And her alliance, for example, with the Patriots of the European Union within Netanyahu of Israel, which is of very little practical value, actually, these are in the world context rather extreme.

And in many countries, fringe actors, they don’t contribute anything only in a negative sense. They add to the perception that any Venezuelan asking for democratic rights is somehow linked to macha, to right-wing conspiracies, to US imperialism and so on, which is not the case for the majority of people who oppose Maduro, people who oppose madura, not because they want to be a US colony or anything like that, or because they are fascists in many cases because they are opposing fascist like policies in our country, like the jailing of union leaders, the killing of indigenous leaders. Even in democratic sense, government is very conservative. It has jailed people based on their sexual orientation and really horrible things. So this is the situation I think that for us, we have to reject the bombing of ships in the Caribbean. This is something that Machado has endorsed publicly.

More than 40 people have been killed in this war crimes by the Trump administration. And the idea that if there is drug trafficking in a country, this is something that is not unique to Venezuela. In fact, there’s more drug trafficking in other countries like Colombia or Ecuador, which is a US ally, that this warrants the US the right to then bomb those countries or to declare their governments as terrorists. This is very dangerous and this is a threat to all of Latin American, not only to Venezuela. I think that many Venezuelans might have high expectations on US intervention because of a long history of defeats and the despair, but we have the responsibility to say the truth, to say that Trump is not a friend of the Venezuelan people. He has shown his willingness to persecute and violate the human rights of Venezuelans. And even when Wao was in his interim presidency show Trump took more than $500 million from stolen assets to build his border wall.

I think that who opposes the Maduro regime for its corruption, rightly so, should also be very wary of the US taking control of Venezuelan assets and simply stealing them because they’re applying this criteria. The thief that steals from a thief is, pardon? These are things assets and wealth that belongs to the Venezuelan people. And Venezuelan people should be able to recover it at some point, not use it to fund reactionary projects of folks like Trump. So also I think that our solidarity with Palestine, with other oppressed peoples should be a natural and obvious thing. So in this regard, I think we should oppose military US intervention in the US like all other intervention, including economic and diplomatic intervention because it’s not oriented to democratic rights of Venezuelans. It’s just furthering the interest of US imperialism.

Blanca Missé:

Thank you, Simone, for laying out so clearly what a perspective for a left opposition in Venezuela is today and for giving us more detail about the recent years in Venezuela. Because you explained clearly that there was a first period of the Chavista regime that although it was a bourgeois nationalist regime, not a socialist one, there was still some democratic rule and elections and the possibility to have union participation, political participation and contest the rule of power. But there was a change you pointed out around 2015 and then more clearly around the social explosion in 2017 when actually the regime turned on its people and became less democratic. And we are seeing today that when we talk about the Venezuelan opposition, we need to make from the get go a very clear characterization of which opposition are we talking about? Because there’s different class sectors and political interest in this opposition.

There’s not one opposition but many oppositions in the plural. And so there is a working class opposition, the one that is enduring the low wages, the conditions of exploitation and misery. Many of them have family members that left Venezuela. We know that 8 million Venezuelans have to leave the country because of the economic conditions. And among these left opposition, we have the union leaders, the communists and socialists, some of them who are political prisoners today. And then we have the capitalist conservative bourgeois opposition that is in exile that has close ties with the us, with the governments in the European Union. And this is the one that has been trying to overthrow in many ways or get rid of Maduro, the Chavista regime to put in place a more reactionary, neoliberal, subservient regime to imperialist powers, to western imperialist powers. And I think the most interesting thing you told us about Corina Ello is she actually was a fringe character of the opposition.

She wasn’t the far, far right, not popular at all. And it was actually the fact that Chavez and then Maduro chose her as the character to demonize and to represent the opposition as if anyone in a opposition with a regime was necessarily a far right person that actually increased her popularity. And what is a paradox today is that she embraces prot Trump discourse against migrants, including Venezuelan migrants in the us, and she supports the genocide in Palestine. And the fact that Malo has been elevated by Maduro is a big paradox of this regime. Actually, what you’re trying to explain to us is that the way for the Venezuelan people to get out of this situation is to reject both Corina, Machado and Maduro and find a way for the future of Venezuela, all the Venezuelan people that rejects any form of intervention that looks for a form of their own.

And that means in many ways, like fighting for the freedom of all of the unionists or political prisoners and empowering that independent opposition, that working class opposition in the country. There is a factor here I would like us to discuss, and one of the main obstacles for these independent way out in the country, which is the role of the US oil corporations, because we do remember that multinational corporations of fossil fuel production played a big role in the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan. And there’s now the understanding that Trump’s newfound interest in controlling the destiny of Venezuela, and this launching of this new fake drug war actually is probably linked to the desire of the US to regain a deeper control on Venezuela’s oil and gas resources. And so the question I will have for you is how do you read the role of US corporations like Chevron in Venezuela? And also do you think that Venezuela could have had a different political path of economic development if it had managed its oil resources in a different way with the arrival of Chavez to power? Because when we’re trying to imagine this left opposition, this working class opposition in Venezuela, and knowing that you’re also a socialist, one of the questions we would like to imagine together to draw a map for is what would be the path to a truly independent Venezuela,

Simón Rodríguez Porras:

Right? So my interpretation of Trumpist policy is that it’s best understood when one remembers, there was this statement by Marco Rubio who said basically what many people who advocate for multipolar schemes of inter imperialist competition advocate as a positive thing, but for me it’s simply a reality and that the US is coming to terms with its reality. He said, well, basically that the US had to admit it wasn’t the only power in the world and that it had to concentrate its efforts on some regions. So this points to sort of going back into the spheres of influence, geographical spheres of influence, doctrine that was, well, most of the 20th century existed through the Yalta accords, and then maybe they’re trying to build new understandings, therefore they’re interesting in having some sort of Ukrainian capitulation to Russian imperialism and basically to be able to concentrate more on what the US imperialists consider their backyard, which is Latin America and the Caribbean.

So this Caribbean policy, which to me is not just about Venezuela, but as I said before, is an aggressive policy against all Latin America has to do with this doctrine, which he laid out some elements of it basically saying, well, we should concentrate on where we are strongest not to try to rule all of the world, but conce to other imperialist powers there fears of influence and have hours. And in this sense, it was clear that this would translate into intensifying militarization and all sort of pressure and threats against this region, which for most of the last quarter century has been politically not completely under its control. We have seen phenomenons of semi-independent or at least popular movements, which strongly endorse an independent course for our countries. And that this in a distorted way reflecting into policies of government and what was called the pink tide and so on with its limitations, obviously this is not something that us imperialists like and they are seeing, well, now we have an opportunity to take back influence and fight off Chinese and Russian influence in the region for them then Venezuela is in the sense, a very strategic place to be at the spearhead of this policy.

To what extent is oil a decisive factor? Well, I would say obviously it’s part of the equation because they are the largest oil reserves in the world, and this is not a secret for anyone, but not only oil, Venezuela has huge water reserves, for example. This is something that is not usually discussed, but it’s very important, biodiversity city, gold reserves, rare earth, cobalt, other minerals which are of strategic importance. So this is obviously part of the thing. However, then I would add some nuances. For example, the fact that the US can get Venezuelan oil in a cheaper way than a costly invasion simply by having Chevron sell it the oil. So if Trump wanted tomorrow to, in fact, there’s a contradiction as they are now threatening to bomb Venezuelan territory, there are licenses that give exemptions to Chevron from the existing oil sanctions. So they are allowing Chevron to exploit and sell Venezuela oil.

If they were to come to an agreement, say next month, and they said, well, we want Venezuelan oil but exploited by Chevron, I think Maru would be more than happy to reach an agreement in that sense because it has been Venezuela’s oil policy for many years now to hand over through the policy of joint ventures. And while at the beginning, joint ventures guaranteed a majority of stakes for the Venezuelan state, actually this has to been ed, and now there are some projects at which Chevron has 60% majority. So these are things that could be negotiated. Therefore, the mad regime is not in any sense, coherent or consistent defender of sovereignty or national interest. He’s defending his interest as a ruling click. So I think that the decisive thing is not oil because they could get it in other ways, and they are in fact getting it to a degree.

But these broader imperialist geostrategic doctrine of the spheres of influence and how it translates, and by attacking Venezuela sending disciplinary message to all of the region. That’s my interpretation. The other question you asked was what could have been a different course history? Right. So this has been the of Venezuelan debates for more than a century, since Venezuela became an oil dependent economy and an exporter of all onelan bojo intellectual, he coined this phrase, he said, we have to petro to so oil, which means to translate oil wealth into other forms of producing wealth, to diversify. And Venezuela has either the military regimes, the bipartisan regime, Mahalo all failed at this. We had a brief nationalization period between the late seventies and the nineties, but then it has always been under control basically of foreign multinationals, and it has not been possible to really diversify. So I think what has not been tried and as socialist we think it should, is to put the oil strategy in the framework of an economic strategy, a national economic strategy, which is based on a democratic planning of development, which opens to discussion with academics, union leaders, the popular sectors, everyone, what type of country do we want to build?

How do we want to go about building it? In what pace, what rhythm can we steer away from the production of oil? How can we invest in other ways of producing energy even how can we be a vanguard for a different type of economy? This should have been the focus, but there were problems from the beginning because one of the key things that Chaz, in his first electoral program, he promised two things. One was to nationalize the oil industry, and the other one was to reduce investment in the oil industry because basically the argument was that there was corruption in these investments. So he said, well, we will drive down investment and we’ll nationalize, but he never nationalized. And the de investment strategy, what it ended up doing was ruining the oil state sector and make it more dependent upon the private multinationals. So really it was very backwards the results of this.

So basically, yeah, what I mean is you need to have a state owned oil industry in the context of democratic planning of the economy for it all to come together in a coherent way. Because when every sector is trying to take its own pieces of the pie and with no regard to any collective purpose, we have what has been happening before shaman with cha, often it’s talked about the corruption as a state phenomenon, but there was huge corruption in the private sector as well, because one of the things that were promoted by this huge gap in the official and unofficial exchange rates was that because dollars were given for imports, the private sector and also the state sector would falsify their records, they said, well, we imported a million dollars of whatever merchandise, and it never entered Venezuelan port, and that created shortage of goods and so on and so on.

But it amounts to billions of dollars in this type of frauds. It’s really incredible when you look at the detail because that’s what explains then that only when oil started to dip a little bit, but not even a huge crash in the prices, Venezuelan entered this cycle of depression, and then Maduro did something that worsened things. That was to use the reserves that the Venezuelan state had to pay foreign debt rather, and cutting the imports of food and of other things that the government or the Venezuelan economy was not producing anyway, so it created huge distortions and shortages. Anyway, that’s my opinion on how we could build a better Venezuela. Sadly, this is a very far away illusion in terms of the actual correlations of forces, but I do think that depending on the level of popular organization and participation in the political events of the near future, it’ll change the outcome of things.

It’s not the same to have Maduro ousted by us imperialism and putting up us puppet to replace him. Many people might think that this will magically change Venezuela into a totally different country with high wages and so on. We cannot harbor any illusions on that kind of outcome. Even Maduro could be taken out by other sectors of his regime and they could continue in power. I mean, really the decisive thing for me is if the popular masses have the leading role in the outcome of Venezuelan political crisis and the past and that the Venezuelan people take their destiny into their own hands, then we can start to change.

Blanca Missé:

Well, thank you, Simone. I mean, I think here you showed us that for the future, truly socialist Venezuela will be one when the country moves out of being a dependent commodity producer and starts developing a different kind of economy. And for this to happen and to overcome the failed experiments of the past, you showed us that the number one premise is that working people need to be the ones planning the economy, working people, their unions, the institutions that create democratically should be and can be the ones who can develop an alternative path to that of underdevelopment, which seems to be the one that imperialism, and not just the us, but the imperialist system and the world division of labor has set for Venezuela. Now, I would like to finish our interview today by addressing workers in the US and working class communities, immigrant communities today in the US who are listening to this podcast, and I want you to answer this question for them.

What is the best way to support Venezuelans today? You said clearly that we must oppose all the attacks and military escalation from Trump, all the aggressions to Venezuela, that this is not really a drug war, despite the fact that Corina Machado echoes the lies of Trump. And you also have mentioned that we need to oppose all the sanctions and all the economical stronghold that the US is doing to the Venezuelan economy. You also just mentioned the debt, right? Because we know foreign debt is one of the main mechanisms today of decolonization and oppression, and we know also the Venezuelan economy is economy dominated by these mechanisms. So maybe the difficult question here is what is the role of the US working class in opposing all of these forms of imperialist oppression and at the same time finding a relation with the unions and organizations of the Venezuelan people in Venezuela? So yeah, that’s my question for you. What should working class people do today to support the Venezuelan people and who are their allies and with whom they should try to establish proactive solidarity?

Simón Rodríguez Porras:

Yes, thank you for this very important question. I think the arguments used by the US regime to pursue their threats, and they might translate into strikes inside Venezuela and territory in the next days or weeks. They’re very flawed based on falsifications, and it’s impossible not to remember the weapons of mass destruction conspiracy theory that was used by the Bush government to attack Iraq. Nonetheless, we also remember that Hussein was not a friend of the working class. He was a brutal dictator who deserved zero support from unions and workers in the US or otherwise, any other place in the world. So I think both things can be done. We can oppose Trump his threats against Latin America, against Venezuelan, in particular, his brutal anti-immigrant policies, which also affect Venezuelan. I think to oppose the xenophobic and racist Trump policies is a concrete way of solidarity with thousands of Venezuelans who live in the us. And this can be done without falling into the temptation of romanticizing the Venezuelan government, what it actually represents or what the reality of Venezuela is. Because if we make this mistake, then our credibility is injured.

We are seeing as people who have no contractors to reality, people who are ignorant about Venezuela reality, et cetera, et cetera. The people who we can dialogue with is narrowed unnecessarily if we link a opposition to Trump to support of Maduro. I think this is a very important lesson that our socialist and anti-imperialist politics does not need to ignore reality to the contrary, it’s strengthened when it’s based on knowing the facts. And in this sense, my position is not unique in any way. There are many leftist Venezuelan organizations who oppose Maduro. Some, as I said earlier, have been opposing it for maybe the last five years, but some have always been the opposition to Chavismo, and they have, for example, demonstrated in the streets of Caracas against us imperialists in intervention in Venezuela, even though they are persecuted by the government. This is also something because in concrete terms, we have to understand that the fact that Venezuela is a dictatorship actually weakens the possibility of anti-imperialist resistance.

For example, the government says it has huge amounts of militia members. This is not true. And the main reason why the government would not be able to simply recur to popular armaments to give weapons to the people is because it would be the end of their regime. Although doing so would be a path if you want to engage in some sort of irregular resistance to imperialist aggression. So I think for people who have a genuine to know more about Venezuela, about what the left opposition is saying, you can try to reach out to leftist organizations such as the Communist Party of Venezuela, the Socialism and Freedom Party, which is the party that I come from other organizations, Pepe, which means homeland for all. There are many leftist organizations who have this perspective and who can provide lots of information and arguments about why we oppose madura and why we oppose imperialist intervention.

Sometimes maybe it’s possible to combine slogans against us, intervention against sanctions against this type of threat with also demands to the Maduro government to release working class political prisoners to allow collective bargaining to respect the right of working people to a living wage. Sometimes these type of slogans could be combined. These are the recommendations I can make to my fellow socialists in the US to engage, talk with Venezuelan socialists. We do an effort of translating into English, many of these positions@venezuelanvoices.org, but there are other outlets where this type of material can be found. We think it’s a very reasonable position that once it gets more known, it will clearly have sympathy because it will resonate with what most workers in the US and other places think that democratic rights are essential to organizing, to having a better possibility of defending their own rights. And because of the anti-democratic crackdown of the Trump regime on workers, on immigrants and internal oppressed peoples in the us, I think it can be easy for people to be able to fit penicillin people’s shoes, where in many respects, things are a little bit worse because we’ve been treading this path for a longer time.

So I think both struggles are combined, the struggles against Trump and against the mad regime. And hopefully if this confluence of interest becomes a more conscious confluence, then it can help for the building of an international solidarity movement that pursues democratic rights and objectives for the working class worldwide.

Blanca Missé:

Thank you very much, Simone. It was a true pleasure to have this conversation with you. I hope that our listeners got a clear picture of the many challenges Venezuelan working people have ahead, which also includes the challenges of Venezuelan migrants in our country, and most important of the meaning of solidarity, because being in the us, in the belly of the beast, as we say, we have a moral and political obligation to stop our own government for meddling into the affairs of other countries, including Venezuela, and to demand an immediate halt of all the military aggressions and economic sanctions. And we also must actively support the social movements and labor activists in Venezuela who are fighting for the Democratic and economic rights against the government that is weaponizing any form of dissent to stay in power. Please stay tuned for the next episode of Solidarity Without exception.