Venezuela Locked Down As US Coup Nears

The US has locked down Venezuela. All foreign airlines have cancelled flights in and out of the country. Twenty-nine million people trapped and at the mercy of the most bloodthirsty, unrestrained and immoral military in the history of the world.

Trump tweeted late on Saturday that all airlines should consider the airspace above Venezuela closed. Across social media people whined that Trump had no authority to do such a thing. You can’t just tweet the closure of an entire country’s airspace! A sovereign country! The funniest tweet I saw said Trump was violating international law. This received many approving retweets from, presumably, people who have learned nothing from the last two years. Or the last twenty. Or the last fifty. Or the last seventy.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS INTERNATIONAL LAW.

There is US empire. There is imperial impunity. There is hard power. There are B-52 bombers. There are eight-hundred American military bases in eighty countries. There are strike teams. There are death squads. There is mass child killing. There is enforced starvation. There are genocides. There is apartheid. There are consequences for crossing the empire, consequences which are often cloaked in the language and justifications of international law. But concrete, enforceable, universalist international law that restrains violent state actions, regardless of the offender? Not a chance.

The US has extrajudicially murdered at least eighty Venezuelans in the last few months, claiming they were running drugs, some of whom were subsequently revealed to be impoverished fishermen just out fishing to feed their families.

So no, there is no international law. It is an aspirational idea.

And yes, despite supposed norms and what the letter of the law says, despite the fact that the leader of one country shouldn’t be able, arbitrarily, to force the closure of another country’s airspace, there’s only hard power. Right now there is no air traffic over Venezuela in what appears to be a prelude for a bombing campaign. A bombing campaign on the fake pretext that the president of Venezuela, Nicholas Maduro, is the head of a drug trafficking narco-gang.

FlightRadar24 image showing no air traffic over Venezuela

At least for Iraq they put in some effort. This latest fiction is straight out of a Lee Child novel. And it is as laughable and badly written as any Jack Reacher romp.

If you’re unfamiliar with the pretext the White House is invoking to launch attacks on Venezuela and oust, or kill, Maduro, here’s some brief background.

El Cartel de los Soles

The US government says Maduro is the head of a drug trafficking gang called El Cartel de los Soles or the Cartel of the Suns. This name had largely disappeared from the public record. But in recent months US officials have dusted down the archives and revived a name they’re extremely familiar with. The US government knows all about El Cartel de los Soles, because they invented it.

This is not a conspiracy. This is a public record fact.

In the mid-80s, drug traffickers were eluding American efforts to stop cocaine coming into the country. So the CIA and DEA came up with a plan: they’d establish their own gang to illuminate and infiltrate drug trafficking networks. To this end the CIA recruited the head of Venezuela’s national guard anti-drug unit, General Ramon Guillen Davila, who set up and operationalised the Cartel of the Suns. Under Guillen Davila, the Cartel de los Soles shipped 22 tons of cocaine into US cities. This bait cartel was shut down in 1993 when it lost its utility to the US, only to be revived in 2025 as a pretext for bombing Venezuela.

In 1993, US TV news magazine programme 60 Minutes ran an episode on it. And in recent weeks even imperially loyal CNN has had to admit that this pretext might be a little far-fetched.

The US then is inventing a story within a story. The Trump administration is reviving a bogeyman the US created in the first place, and is placing a new bogeyman in Maduro atop their original creation, all so they can kill them both. This is the Frankenstein’s monster of regime change operations. Lee Child meets Mary Shelley.

And on this fiction, Justice Department lawyers are drafting a legal rationale for an attack on Venezuela, a rationale that will allow Trump to conduct military strikes (almost certainly a decapitation operation against Maduro) without congressional approval. Trump’s tweet suggests the rationale is drafted and the attack is imminent. The forces are already in place following a massive military build-up in the Caribbean over the last few months.

And just to be clear, Venezuela isn’t even a top five drug producing country in Latin America. Colombia, Peru and Bolivia are far and away the regional leaders in production. And Venezuela isn’t a particularly important transit point either. Logistically it doesn’t make sense. Most volume comes overland through Mexico not thousands of miles across the ocean.

So no, this isn’t about drugs. This is about two other, related things: hemispheric dominance. And oil. Lots and lots of delicious oil.

US puppet Machado

They have said so themselves. Just the other day Republican congresswoman Maria Salazar (the child of Cuban exiles and, predictably therefore, a rabid proponent of intervention in Latin America), said that offing Maduro “would be a windfall for us when it comes to fossil fuels.” In an interview with Fox News she gushed that “Venezuela has larger reserves than Saudi Arabia.”

And the US puppet that comes to power after Maduro, most likely Maria Corina Machado, will gladly hand those reserves over. She also said so herself. In an interview with Donald Trump Jr in October (yes, you read that right), she said, with a frantic look in her eyes, “Forget Saudi Arabia, I mean we have more oil than them, I mean endless possibilities! We will privatize our entire industry for you. American companies will profit greatly!” Machado is also a crazed Zionist who has described Israel’s struggle as Venezuela’s struggle. This is the woman who just won the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s all so wildly outrageous and transparently evil that it would be funny if the consequences for millions of people weren’t life or death.

Machado on Trump Jr’s podcast

This new regime change episode has echoes of 1989, when the US invaded Panama to remove Manuel Noriega, the leader of Panama and a former CIA asset who was paid millions by the US for spying on left-wing groups in the country. Noriega was a legitimate drug runner, and the CIA overlooked his side hustle because of his value as an anti-communist, anti-socialist agent. He also, in the end, like all those who foolishly get in bed with US imperial power, outlived his usefulness.

In the case of Maduro, however, the claims of his drug-running status are entirely fictional.

But nothing has, or will, stop the US in its bloodlust and oil-lust. America is a sick, twisted and depraved structure of global imperial control. And we should recognise why a decapitation strike is the form of attack we’re about to see. Because for the last two years, first under Biden and then under Trump, the US has gleefully authorised its revolting Middle East proxy to undertake such strikes. In Lebanon, in Iran, in Yemen and in Qatar, Israel, with US weapons and intelligence, has assassinated scores of political leaders. The unadulterated manly power of missile-striking an opponent to death just can’t be matched. To men like Trump, Netanyahu, Biden, Obama and all those before them, the frisson, the glory, the control, and the domination such an attack broadcasts is the peak of power. This god-like power is, for these men-beyond-laws, the peak of human existence itself.

The oil is the prize. A display of American military power in the region a bonus.

So Venezuelan airspace has been closed, by US decree, to most airlines.

Dozens of flights a day no longer operational.

No international flights. No freight. No deliveries.

A country waiting for the benevolent bombs to fall as US empire continues its decades long global rampage of terror in the name of oil and resources freedom.