The kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro on January 3rd was a shocking escalation in the United States’s ongoing strangulation of Venezuela. This has immediately provoked questions about the domestic Venezuelan power struggle and the demise of the Bolivarian Revolution.
Our guest, Gabriel Hetland, is an associate professor at SUNY Albany and the author of the award-winning book, Democracy on the Ground: Local Politics in Latin America’s Left Turn. Below is a transcript of our January 14th episode of Confronting Capitalism, edited for clarity. You can also listen to the full episode on Apple or Spotify.
Vivek Chibber
This is an important analysis for us because it’s one of the most overt and aggressive actions that the Trump administration, or any American administration, has taken in many years, in invading another country so brazenly, essentially kidnapping its leader, who, for better or for worse, says that he was elected into office, and bringing him to the US to try it in a foreign country. It’s one of the most amazing events we’ve seen in decades in the United States and in the hemisphere, in fact.
I wanted to speak with you because you’re the author of a terrific essay in the Fall 2024 issue of Catalyst called “From Chavez to Maduro,” which examines both the origins of Chavismo in Venezuela and the remarkable transformations that it brought about, its constriction as a political movement so that it becomes more personalistic, more authoritarian as the years go on, and then after Hugo Chávez’s demise, the rise of Maduro in a much more personalistic, much less democratic continuation of the so-called Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. What appears to be the sudden demise of the Bolivarian Revolution calls for analysis and, maybe, some sense of where it might go in the future.
Gabriel Hetland
I totally agree that this is a stunningly open display of US imperialism without any pretense whatsoever. There’s a sort of pride that Trump and other officials have in it, and it speaks to all sorts of complicated questions about the trajectory, and past, present, and future of the Bolivarian Revolution within Venezuela.
Imperial Meddling
VC
Gabe, one of the things that really stands out for me is how easy this was for Trump — how quickly he managed to get his forces into the country, how easily he got Maduro, how easily he captured him, and then whisked him out without any real resistance, and, in the aftermath, how pliant Delcy Rodríguez has been. Let’s try to understand these dynamics, because I find them pretty stunning.
First of all, let’s start with the actual capture itself. Is there evidence that there was some kind of cooperation from inside Maduro’s administration with Trump and his forces?
GH
Yeah, so a lot is speculative. We don’t know the full story right now, but there have been reports in The New York Times and elsewhere that the CIA had some plant within Maduro’s security apparatus. I have seen other reports that Delcy Rodríguez has gone after a high-level member of the presidential guard and suggested that he was the plant.
But it was tactically successful, and there’s no dispute about that. It was relatively smooth. But I think we don’t want to underplay the fact that there was significant resistance from Venezuelan and Cuban security forces. There was something on the order of 70 to 100 deaths — there are somewhat conflicting reports about that, including 32 security forces. There are reports about one of the US helicopters taking fairly heavy fire, and it apparently almost went down at one moment. Six to seven US armed forces were injured in some way. One somewhat seriously, but no one died. So there wasn’t a real fight.
I think it didn’t just go down as a simple handover, by any means. But the fact that it was so smooth suggests the possibility of some collusion or collaboration. We don’t know exactly, but I think we do know that there were discussions going back months between the Trump and Maduro administrations.
I don’t think we know whether or not, or the extent to which, Delcy Rodríguez, or her brother, Jorge Rodríguez (who’s another high-level official within the interim government), Diosdado Cabello (who’s the incredibly powerful interior minister), or Vladimir Padrino López (the defense minister), were actively collaborating. But certainly, once it happened, Rodríguez went along with Trump.
And I think there are a couple of ways to understand that. One is that she has a gun to her head, like literally. Trump has explicitly said that if you don’t do everything we say, you will suffer a fate worse than Maduro, seeming to imply that they’ll either arrest her or kill her. That would be sort of the only obvious fate worse than what he had. So that’s one factor. She’s just under incredible pressure and constraints from the US government right now.
The other factor is that what the US is asking her to do is very similar to what Maduro himself wanted to do over the last couple of years. So, the US is forcing Venezuela to give oil to the US, to provide the US with access to its oil markets. But Maduro actually wanted much more access to US oil markets. And the only reason he had significantly shifted to China, Russia, and, to some extent, Iran was that the US had closed off its oil markets.
So, a lot of the changes happening are not entirely unwelcome. Although I don’t think we want to dispute the incredibly coercive conditions under which they’re happening, the nakedly neocolonial imperial sort of plunder of Venezuela’s oil sector. But, you know, this is a regime that was looking for that.
And then the other thing is that both the Trump side and Delcy Rodríguez and the interim government’s side share an interest in stability. You know, Delcy Rodríguez wants to save her skin. She doesn’t want to be arrested or killed, of course. She would like to remain in power. The Trump administration also wants a relatively stable government within Venezuela. And that’s why they didn’t put in María Corina Machado, who absurdly won the Nobel Peace Prize. She’s been a warmonger for two decades. So, that’s why it’s kind of ridiculous.
Machado was the obvious heir apparent to Maduro. And Trump completely and openly sidelined her. And there’s no possibility in the near future that she’ll be anywhere close to power. And the apparent reason for that is probably less that she won the Nobel Peace Prize and that pissed Trump off — although it’s possible that that was actually maybe a significant factor in all of this — but the real reason is that she couldn’t provide any stability. She couldn’t build a government. So those are the various factors behind the current arrangement.
Chavismo Fractured?
VC
What stood out to me was the fact that the inheritors of Chavismo and the Bolivarian Revolution let a foreign country invade and then say, ‘Okay, I’ll play ball with you in the aftermath.’ Now, one possibility is just Delcy Rodríguez’s own corruption. It’s possible that she just wants power.
But the other possibility is that there could be real fissures within the political establishment. And in particular, she might feel that she can’t trust the army, that if the US were to invade and she tried to fight, there really wouldn’t be any organized resistance from within the state by the armed forces. And she’d be left trying to mobilize popular militias or something like that, which the US would probably be able to overcome — or even, the army would actually assist the US in taking power. Do you think any of that is possible?
GH
Yeah, I mean, I think the reason that the army has supported Maduro and is continuing to support Rodríguez at the current moment is precisely the networks of funds that have been funneled to the Venezuelan military and to all sorts of actors within the Venezuelan state. Some of that is legal. A lot of it is illegal and illicit in all sorts of ways through oil, or through other sorts of shell companies, through illegal gold mining, a little through drugs — and drugs are not particularly significant, contrary to what the Trump administration has talked about. It’s not totally insignificant, but it’s not a major thing.
So I think, absolutely, if the military was worried that the flow of resources going to them from Rodríguez was going to slow down or become unreliable, if they were going to be tried for human rights abuses, or, you know, they might talk about war crimes, things like this. If they were worried about that, I think you could see some fissures, but I think there’s such a tight interlocking.
It is true that Rodríguez comes from the civilian side of the Chavista-Madurista project, whereas other key figures, such as Diosdado Cabello and Padrino, are longstanding military officials. So there’s a little bit of room for tension there, but I think they’re so closely intertwined that at the moment, a split is not very likely.
The one factor I think is the most likely to create short and medium-term instability is the oil blockade. That is crucial to have on the table, and if it continues for even weeks, and certainly for months, it will be utterly devastating economically in Venezuela. I mean, this is a country that has been severely devastated for close to a decade and has only seen some modest recovery in the last two years. And with the embargo of their primary product, oil, which is their main way of paying for all sorts of things, that could lead to an incredible lack of resources, including for corruption and other purposes that provide stability in turn.
So if that continues, we could see real instability. Then we could see fissures between the civilian and military wings, and different factions within the military and the civilian wing start going after each other. So it’s relatively calm and stable at the moment, but there’s an incredible potential for that to change soon.
VC
So do you think Rodríguez is maybe seizing upon this as an opportunity to consolidate her own power, and she’s glad to see Maduro gone? Or do you think there are other dynamics at work?
GH
Yeah, I mostly agree with that, except I would say Maduro himself was willing to do all the same things. So, you know, Maduro was completely willing to hand over the entire oil sector to Trump over the last few years, especially the last few months. He was very explicitly offering to do that. So I don’t think that there’s so much of a split between Rodríguez and Maduro.
I think that they realized that Trump wasn’t going to stop until he had Maduro as a trophy. And there was just no possibility of not doing that. And it’s kind of interesting the way Maduro is conducting himself. I think he’s likening himself to Fidel Castro, you know, ‘History will absolve me.’ I don’t think there’s a lot of truth to that, of course. But he’s going to go for it. And it’s possible the US will actually lose the trial against him. I mean, it’s built on such a shaky foundation around drugs and the totally bogus Cártel de los Soles. So, that’s a related but separate question.
But basically, Rodríguez and Maduro were pretty aligned in a lot of ways. And Rodríguez was actually doing all sorts of things to try to revive the Venezuelan economy, which Maduro supported. And I think that’s one of the reasons she was attractive to Trump, that she’s one of the architects of this modest economic recovery they’ve had over the last two years, including reaching out and trying to attract foreign capital. And that was supported by Maduro.
There’s been some ideological degeneration of the Chavista project under Maduro for the last couple of years, for sure. I don’t want to dispute that entirely, but it’s a project that has really been about keeping themselves in power to a very significant extent.
And I absolutely agree with your main point that key figures within the regime realized that getting rid of Maduro or going along with it — you know, those are two separate questions — was the best way for themselves to maintain their own power and positions. So, I think it was about making Maduro into a trophy. The deal was that Maduro would leave, and the rest could continue, and the US agreed to that.
Popular Mobilizations
VC
There’s another constraint, though, that comes in from the other side. My reading is that the party doesn’t feel that they could really mobilize the population to defend Maduro. And so there’s no huge nationalist upsurge to defend Maduro or to bring him back. I just think that they think they can’t do it.
They also probably feel that the regime itself has lost so much credibility and is so unpopular that to let the genie of popular mobilization out is something they don’t want to risk. And you’ve seen that right in the aftermath, they’ve cracked down. They’re going from neighborhood to neighborhood under the pretense of finding collaborators. But what they’re probably actually finding is potential dissidents, potential organizers against the regime, and throwing them in jail.
But this constrains them as well, because now the problem is that, if they have any smarts, the opposition will use the defense of Venezuelan oil and Venezuelan sovereignty to mobilize against Rodríguez. So, there’s going to be a nationalist current that is going to be easily whipped up as a defense of Venezuela’s resources, much the same as you had in Iraq, which is going to constrain both Rodríguez, as well as Machado, if they have elections and she wins the elections. This is going to constrain both of them in terms of the kind of alliance and cooperation they can put in place with the United States.
GH
Yeah, so the popular base of support for Maduro, Delcy Rodríguez, and the government within Venezuela has absolutely diminished over the years. And there’s very little doubt that the 2024 election was not actually free and fair. We still don’t know exactly what happened there, but it seems that there was massive opposition to Maduro.
Of course, Maduro was operating under major constraints in a context of profound US sanctions, which made recovery all but impossible. But there was a lot of frustration with the economic management, there was a lot of frustration with the political repression, which often targeted the Left explicitly and also targeted popular sectors quite a bit — sometimes in a political way, sometimes in a more law and order or even frankly, racist way.
And so, there hasn’t been a huge nationwide mobilization, but there have been some popular mobilizations in defense of the Chavista project. And I would say, they’re bigger than they have been in a long time. So, I do think there will be an upsurge of nationalist sentiment, some of it taking an explicitly left-wing direction in Venezuela. There are some officials in the interim government and the previous Maduro regime who remain revolutionaries. I think that project was not entirely extinguished, although very fractured and degenerated in all sorts of ways.
The question about the opposition is complicated because the indisputable main leader for the last couple of years has been Machado. And she has been entirely supplicant to Trump. I mean, she’s gone along with the boat bombings, she promised to give Trump all the oil, which is not very different than what Maduro was talking about doing and what Rodríguez is doing under force and constraint. But she is not going to put up any opposition to the US control of oil.
Machado is going to do everything she can for a long time to get back in the good graces of Trump. She will see that as her main possibility for future power. And so, I think the right-wing organized political opposition is going to be in a state of disarray, based on the sidelining of Machado and on the fact that they’re going to support Trump, but they’re also going to be opposed in some ways to the Rodríguez government in Venezuela.
So the Venezuelan right-wing is in a really weird position, where they’re sort of supporting what’s happening, but also not supporting the current Venezuelan government carrying it out. So that means that the opposition to the Trump project will not come from the government, it will not come from the right-wing opposition, which has been the main organized force for years, but from a more scattered popular sector and leftist forces that have been very repressed for a number of years, and themselves are in very difficult economic and political circumstances. So I would expect, over the months to come, we will see expressions of that.
And there are indeed popular organizations and leftist organizations that have been opposed to Maduro and Trump for a long time in Venezuela. But I don’t think they’ll get much traction in the near future. It’s just going to be a really challenging situation.
I think if we look at the long term, some of the things you’re saying are definitely going to happen. People are tweeting out that the next Hugo Chávez has been made now. And I think that’s absolutely right, that, you know, 10 years from now, you could easily see a similar figure, a sort of Left populist come to power in Venezuela and say, ‘This is all a wreckage, we need to get rid of the US and all the people who are going along with them.’ But in the shorter term, that’s not a likely prospect.
The Rise and Fall of Chavista Socialism
VC
Maduro is probably going to try to present himself as a revolutionary figure who’s been trounced by imperialism and will call on the masses to rekindle his legitimacy and the revolutionary fervor. But at the same time, we know, as you showed in your article, that he essentially had to steal the 2024 elections. So, how did we get from the promise of Chavismo and this egalitarian project in the early 2000s to the inheritor of Chávez’s project having to steal an election?
GH
Yeah, so to start at the beginning, the Chávez project was complicated and contradictory, but it had profound and important successes. It reduced poverty, reduced inequality, and fostered a degree of popular empowerment in Venezuela that was not only impressive but, to some extent, reached heights not seen in too many other circumstances.
It was built on really challenging foundations, to say the least. It had Chávez’s charisma, but it also had an inherently unstable oil base. It was built on a lot of corruption within Venezuela, which Chavez allowed to flourish. And some of the ways he handled elite opposition were by creating parallel structures within the Venezuelan state, which didn’t bolster the existing state. And so, it allowed for the existing state corruption to continue alongside a new wave of corruption.
When Maduro took over, he inherited all of those problems and not that much of the good stuff. I mean, he didn’t have Hugo Chávez’s charisma. He faced an emboldened domestic opposition that saw blood, based on the fact that he wasn’t Chávez and that he won the 2013 election by a much smaller margin — less than 2% compared to Chávez regularly winning by more than 10 points, sometimes up to 25 or 26 points, even in previous elections. And then the price of oil fell in 2014 and remained relatively low for a couple of years. There were also some currency policies that Chávez had put in place that Maduro maintained, which were very, very dysfunctional.
And so, when Maduro got into office, he initially acted like he was going to continue the Chávez project, but immediately confronted all this massive opposition in the streets, some violence from the opposition in 2014, a plunging oil price, and then, tightening US sanctions, first under Obama, and then massively tightened under Trump. And so, the US sanctions are not the origin of Venezuela’s economic collapse, but they made it impossible to restart the earlier successes.
And Maduro’s response to that was to harden a form of authoritarianism within Venezuela, and to become more and more autocratic year after year, and distance himself from the Chávez project in very explicit ways. This included going after former ministers of Chávez, Chavista organizations, and leftist parties within Venezuela, many of whom had been core to the Chávez project.
By the time you get to the 2024 election, the relationship between Maduro and Chávez is very tenuous. In Maduro’s rhetoric, he rarely used the word socialism in his speeches. Moreover, during his inauguration in January 2025, he openly said, ‘We want business, we want business to come into Venezuela, I am your partner.’ The main business federation in Venezuela, Fedecámaras, which had supported the 2002 coup against Chávez, wound up supporting Maduro’s reelection and said nothing about the profound questions about this in 2024, or even in the months afterwards.
So Maduro’s project had become extremely distinct. It was a project some would call a neoliberal form of capitalism. I don’t know if that accurately captures it, but it was certainly moving in a very capitalist, right-wing direction in many ways. It was very repressive, very open to foreign capital, and did little in terms of popular power or social benefits for the population. This, of course, happened under very difficult circumstances, but year after year after year, there was very little of the revolutionary project left.
And that speaks to the current moment, that while we have seen some mobilization against Maduro, the base of hardcore Chavistas is very, very reduced compared to what it was in the height of the Chávez years.
Weakness in the Opposition
VC
I’m puzzled that Trump and perhaps the Venezuelan elite themselves feel that, for now, it’s not realistic for Machado to come to power because she wouldn’t be able to provide stability. And Trump himself said that. But in 2024, the opposition supposedly won the election, or at least had so much support that Maduro had to go out of his way to make sure that he did a Trumpian fantasy of essentially stealing the elections, which is what Trump wanted to do in 2020. It’s puzzling to me that they feel this is not enough to have a secure replacement government in the aftermath of Maduro’s capture. So help me understand that.
GH
Yeah. So I think they’re right, but on the surface, it is a little bit puzzling. I think there are two main factors when you peel that back.
One is that Machado has taken a position of fierce anti-collaboration with anyone in the Maduro government. She’s painted herself into a corner that is very difficult to extricate herself from at the moment. Even in Iraq, we saw the US government turn to remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime and bring them back into the government after a period of time. So the idea that you could rule Venezuela without having some sort of deal, some sort of negotiation, some sort of compromise — that is, if you’re Machado — with the Maduro and Rodríguez government, is absurd. I mean, you’d have to have some continuity, or it would just be a mess. And so she’s the most hardline expression of that.
An expression of this is her strong opposition to the military. She has been really opposed to collaborating with them and to the project in general. So that makes it difficult. And for a long time, the Trump administration, represented by people like Richard Grinnell, was apparently asking her, ‘What’s your plan? What’s your plan for governance?’ And she didn’t really have one.
The second important factor is that the support for Machado, as well as for Edmundo González, the candidate she backed in the 2024 election, was not so much support for her political project as it was opposition to Maduro in order to lift the US sanctions. So there’s a bit of a dynamic like 1990’s Sandinismo in Nicaragua, where the population voted for an opposition candidate to get rid of the possibility of the Contra War.
Venezuela is different. This was not a particularly functioning, actually revolutionary government at this moment in Venezuela in 2024. But there was a similar sense that we have to do this, but not a huge level of support for the far-right, very openly neoliberal project that Machado herself had, and still has.
So even if she were to win an election, which she very plausibly could, if there were to be an election anytime soon, she would start to encounter a lot of opposition from popular sectors and other forces. And I think Chavismo would resurge in that context, actually, fairly quickly.
VC
It sounds like what you’re saying, Gabe, is that in the short run, the main constraint on her is that while she has some popular support, she doesn’t really have the cooperation of the political establishment, the army, and the state apparatus inside Venezuela.
But it’s also the case that their allegiance to Maduro and to Chavismo is basically transactional. It doesn’t come from an ideological project or from recruiting people on political grounds into the state apparatus. Now, if that’s true, it shouldn’t be that difficult, on a transactional basis, for a Machado government to win over large chunks of the army and the political establishment and set up some kind of new administration with some degree of popular support as well. No?
GH
Possibly. It’s an interesting question. So, if Trump had insisted that Machado was the person, we could imagine a different scenario in which I would agree that some factions within the military and the government would try to go along with it. They would be willing to set aside all their previous ideological arguments and things like that. But ideology is not totally gone. I mean, there is some sort of sense, and I think it’s more important for popular sectors, which have some ability to constrain the political establishment in particular. And even the military was sort of politicized in a way, I mean, a very complicated way. It wasn’t the way that we might want to happen. But there’s a degree of allegiance to this idea of Chávez and Maduro. And nationalism is an important sentiment. So I think it would be, you know, a complicated project to say the least.
It’s possible that you’d get significant factions going along. The problem is that Machado herself has rejected that possibility for so long. I mean, the core of her identity is the idea that Chavismo is fundamentally evil to the root, and we need to extricate it. It’s almost echoes of Pinochet in a sense. So people would view her with suspicion within the military, within the political establishment. She has not made herself appear to be someone that they could trust in any fundamental way.
VC
But that means that even in the middle and the foreseeable run, Rodríguez is going to be the most sensible option for the Americans.
GH
There’s no likelihood that they’re going to throw her out anytime soon. There’s really no likelihood that she’ll challenge anything the US is saying. I think she’s going to go along with it. I think that we’ll see, especially if they loosen the oil blockade and some revenue starts coming into Venezuela, she could really stabilize herself for a significant period of time.
This is why I’ve referred to this as a regime change without a change of regime, because there’s a profound continuity with the existing state apparatus within Venezuela. And there’s no sign on the horizon that that’s going to go, even though there are a lot of pieces in motion.
US Imperialism and the Pink Tide
VC
It’s going to be delicate, though, because it’s such a significant, almost defining element of Chavismo to resist the US and to paint the US as, for the last 15 years, single-handedly strangling the Venezuelan economy, which is in fact true. And Chávez had his own flaws, and of course, Maduro, and they basically stripped the oil sector for parts and didn’t do anything to sustain it over time. But that was aided and abetted, and kept in place by American sanctions and the strangulation of the economy.
Now, it’s going to be hard for Rodríguez to work hand in glove with American oil companies under the Trump administration. Of course, they’ll be reviving the oil sector, which people will see as finally giving them some breathing room. But she’s going to have to balance the material benefits of that with the ideological cost of appearing like a quisling, somebody who the United States is keeping in power.
GH
A lot of that is accurate. I would say the destruction of the Venezuelan oil industry started under Chávez, but he prioritized social spending through the Venezuelan oil industry, and a lot of corruption was allowed to flourish. He didn’t completely destroy it. I mean, oil production remained decently strong through the end of Chávez’s years and even the beginning of Maduro.
It’s really US sanctions that utterly destroyed the oil sector in the sense of making routine maintenance and production utterly impossible or vastly diminished. The other piece to this is that the nationalism that has been core to it is really important.
And here’s where I think there’s a slight complicating factor, which is that the Trump administration does need Rodríguez. If they’re going to get oil companies from the US to invest when oil companies are very resistant, by the way — I mean, there are articles in the Financial Times and elsewhere and tweets saying nobody is going to put billions of dollars into Venezuela when they have no idea what Trump will actually do when it’s a decrepit, dilapidated industry that needs a decade to actually recover. But certainly stability will be a prime concern.
If there is stability for a couple of years, then oil companies will think about it. And Rodríguez can say that to Trump. She can say, ‘If you get rid of me, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. The oil companies are going to be even more wary about coming in and actually investing in Venezuela.’ And so I think she has a very limited room for maneuver, but she has stability to offer, and she can tell the Trump administration, ‘You need me. I may need you more, but you need me a little bit as well.’ And, you know, they could replace her with somebody else. That’s certainly true. But if they keep going down the line and doing that over and over, that could lead to some real conflict within Venezuela. So I think that it’s unlikely they want to do that.
But going back to the nationalism question, she’s going to try to keep playing that card in her discourse a little bit. I mean, it’s going to have a sort of lighter note, but it won’t completely go away. And, you know, she’ll also tell people, ‘The US empire is forcing us to do this. What else can we do? We need to feed the people and things like this.’
So it’s going to be a delicate balancing act. And there will absolutely be tensions. And there’s a real possibility for a sort of nationalist opposition to build itself in the coming years. But that will take some time.
VC
Let’s take a step back and look at what remains of the progressive wave inside Latin America. Bolivia’s had setbacks, Venezuela now, of course. Other than Brazil and Mexico, where does one see the possibility of a continuation of a kind of progressive turn inside Latin America?
GH
For the moment, there’s Gustavo Petro in Colombia, but there’s an election happening there in May. And the right-wing candidates have been predicted to win. But I think that there’s a complicated dynamic.
So the nakedness of the US imperial project is going to create problems for the Latin American Right. It’s going to create backlash that could benefit the Left. And we saw this in Brazil earlier this year, when the Brazilian government used its judicial process to prosecute Jair Bolsonaro for his copycat coup attempt in January 2023, when he tried to stop Lula from being inaugurated after Lula had won the 2022 election. And he was stopped at that. And then he’s been prosecuted and jailed. And Trump said, ‘I’m going to slap 50 percent tariffs on Brazil for that.’ And it boosted Lula in the polls.
And we’ve seen similar dynamics in the past. In 2002, Evo Morales in Bolivia was a senator at the time, and the US ambassador called him a narco-terrorist. And it shot Evo Morales from like fourth or fifth to second in the presidential poll and helped propel him to the leader of the opposition. And then he won in 2005.
So when the US empire takes its mask off and is blatantly trying to control Latin America, progressives, leftists, and nationalists can point to that and use that to mobilize. And Petro has been doing that in Colombia over the whole week. I mean, he’s had massive rallies around the country which have attracted, you know, tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people.
And it’s easy to imagine the successor candidate, this guy, Iván Cepeda, from the same party as Petro, who’s doing decently well, kind of surprisingly well in the polls. Most people haven’t thought he had a real chance of winning. But if he’s smart and he can say to conservatives, ‘Do you think that Gustavo Petro should watch his backside?’ as Trump literally told him to do, using more foul language than that. What are the conservatives going to say?
And actually, notably, Juan Manuel Santos, the conservative former president of Colombia, who was the successor to Álvaro Uribe, the far-right president in Colombia, said it’s a great thing that Petro and Trump had this meeting on Wednesday. So he’s been sort of supportive of this reconciliation. And he still represents part of the right-wing opposition, a more moderate right than some of the far-right folks.
I think we could see similar dynamics across Latin America in the coming years. And as the electoral cycle continues there, it’s possible that there’ll be a real boost for anti-imperialist, leftist, nationalist candidates and movements and projects overall.
So I actually think that it’s a bleak situation in Latin America. It’s a terrifying situation. I mean, Trump is openly threatening all sorts of leftist leaders all across the continent. But I think there are reasons to have some optimism for the future of the Left within Latin America, not only despite but actually because of the nakedness of US imperialism.
