The Curse of Venezuela: Between American Arrests and Historical Control

In a blatant escalatory move, U.S. President Donald Trump announced the capture of Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and their deportation by air out of Venezuela. This announcement is not just a political maneuver but a blatant act that violates international law and humanitarian law, confirming that the United States is not acting out of a concern for rights or the spread of democracy, but according to its oil and strategic interests, restoring a model of historical control over Venezuela.

Venezuela is not a failed state; it is a state that has been deliberately failed. What is happening there is not the result of economic misfortune or isolated socialist mistakes, but the outcome of a long war waged in the name of democracy, while oil was the real target. The United States did not enter Venezuela to defend human rights or to combat drugs, but to control the largest oil reserves in the world, using sanctions, starvation, and economic collapse as political weapons to subjugate a country that decided to break free from obedience.

In this sense, the Venezuelan crisis cannot be read outside its long historical context. The story of Venezuela is not an account of a sudden failure but a prolonged path of organized impoverishment that began in the colonial era and does not end with Maduro. Since it succumbed to what can be called "the Spanish curse," Venezuela has been treated as a land for plunder rather than as a state capable of development. The Spaniards sent nobles to rule the local population and exploited the fertility of the land for growing coffee and cocoa, while imposing a strict ban on manufacturing and independent exporting, forcing the colonies to send raw materials to Spain, which then resold them as finished products. Thus, an economy was born without production, and its inhabitants were uprooted from their relationship with the land, transforming them into laborers within a rentier system.

While the world was witnessing the industrial revolution and moving towards innovation and technology, Venezuela seemed to benefit from this backwardness. When oil was discovered in large quantities in the twentieth century, the country entered a new stage of illusion: a formally modern country, but one based solely on oil. American investments knocked on doors, bought concessions, and took charge of oil wells and their mechanization. American interests in Venezuela were and still are purely oil-related, and everything else is merely political rhetoric for media consumption.

With Hugo Chávez, the country entered a different phase formally, but it did not emerge from the core of the crisis. Chávez raised slogans of social justice and succeeded in improving the conditions of rural and marginalized sectors, but he turned the state into an ideological tool and managed the economy with a political mindset rather than an institutional one, leading to administrative collapse and declining productivity.

Maduro inherited a nearly collapsed economy, and American sanctions increased, which were not aimed at protecting the people or their rights but at rearranging influence and control over the energy sector. The currency collapsed, most transactions moved to the black market, and millions of citizens, including academics and professionals, emigrated, while those who had no means of escape were left vulnerable to daily poverty and hunger.

Here, the announcement of Maduro and his wife’s arrest gains additional significance: it is a direct extension of the long American policies that treated Venezuela as an open ground for intervention, where direct force is employed to alter power balances and reshape international law according to unilateral interests. It is a stark model of "the bullying of powerful states," where national sovereignty is violated, international laws are replaced with standards of power and influence, and smaller states become mere arenas for conflict over resources and strategy.

This direct intervention reflects the continuation of a long pattern of imposing influence on Venezuela and reaffirms that any government attempting to rely on the independence of its political decision or control over its natural resources faces a public and serious threat from major powers, far from any ethical or legal considerations.

Venezuela is not a poor country; it is a impoverished state, a victim of a long rentier economy, destructive American intervention, a foreign-bound opposition, chronic mismanagement, political corruption, brain drain, and looming national wealth for internal and external interests. It could have been one of the richest countries in the world, but wealth without a productive state, without institutions, and without accountability turns from a blessing into a curse.