Professor, activist, abolitionist and author of We Created Chavez, Geo Maher helps unpack what's going on in Venezuela from the often neglected perspective of the grassroots.

While the moves of state actors are to be watched and analyzed, Maher argues they alone do not hold the fate of Venezuela in their hands.

Semi-autonomous communities, mostly within the poorer barrios of the country, with roots older than even Chavez, wield a power that goes well beyond that of Maduro or the ruling Party. Maher talks about how those 'communes' and the history of the Bolivarian Revolution will be massive barriers to Trump's Imperialist agenda.

These 'experiments in democracy', as Maher refers to them, may hold some answers to the questions Canadians find themselves asking in the wake of Trump's threats against them. Namely, how do we best protect against US aggression?

Hosted by: Jessa McLean

Call to Action: Contact Your MP and demand Canada lift all sanctions against Venezuela

Related Episodes:

• Lessons From: South America, Alexander Moldovan on the social movements in Venezuela; stories of workers and communities fighting back while building networks of support.
• Canadian Mining Imperialism, on a Canadian landmark legal case that exposed the industry's use of sexual violence, destruction, and death in Guatemala.

More Resources:

• Venezuela Month of Action - International League of Peoples' Struggle
• BBC: US Discussing Options to Acquire Greenland
• Canada's Official Statement on Venezuela
• Guest's Recommended Read: America, América – Greg Grandin
• Canada imposes new sanctions against Venezuelan officials (Mar 2025)

For more Blueprints, including articles and resources for activists: Subscribe to our SUBSTACK

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Greetings, friends. My name is Jess McLean, and I'm here to provide you with some blueprints

of disruption. This weekly podcast is dedicated to amplifying the work of activists, examining

power structures, and sharing the success stories from the grassroots. Through these discussions,

we hope to provide folks with the tools and the inspiration they need to start to dismantle

capitalism, decolonize our spaces, and bring about the political revolution that we know

we need. Welcome to Blueprints Geo. Thank you for joining us. Super glad to be here. I really

appreciate the invitation, Jess. I appreciate your time. It must be a busy one. We're here

to talk about Venezuela. But before that, can you introduce yourself to the audience, please?

Sure. My name is Geo Mar. I'm abolitionist educator located in Philadelphia. I coordinate the

WEB Du Bois Movement School for Abolition and Reconstruction, AKA Abolition School. Look

us up. And, you know, It may seem strange to folks that we're here to talk about Venezuela,

but we understand abolition to be a global struggle. We understand abolition to necessarily be an

internationalist struggle. And for me, know, I, you know, my background is in simultaneously

struggling against police violence and the carceral structure in the U.S. while going back and

forth to Venezuela to see and realize that the Venezuelans have historically been struggling

for many of the same things, community power, community control, community safety without

the sort of carceral. oh apparatus and without global state and imperial militaristic violence.

So for me, these are very much the same struggle. You've talked before about the need to build

or rebuild systems, communities, structures at the same time as we work to smash down systems,

right? To not leave a void. Some of the examples that we're hopefully going to talk about today

of what's going on in Venezuela. uh not the US and state actions, but the grassroots

actions and what came from those actions that might help people resist what's happening now

um to abolish US imperialism. Well, certainly. this is the, mean, this is again, you know,

I think it's really important to start in with some very broad understanding of broad framings.

What capitalism has done historically as it spreads across the globe. And we often refer

to this as primitive accumulation is to destroy communities. Right? Capital cannot extract

resources, labor and wealth without first destroying communal structures. that, you know, again,

that happens globally. It happened in Europe and then it spread across the globe and happened

to indigenous communities. It's still going on. Right? uh Many of those communities in

the global South in particular still persist and struggle. But part of what our task is,

and again, this is where Venezuela and abolition come together in a very clear way, is to rebuild.

When we're talking about, for example, in Philadelphia building communities without police, what we're

talking about is rebuilding community structures. And when Venezuelans are struggling for safety

and security and for sort of self-managed socialism in the communes, they're struggling for very

much the same thing. What does it mean to rebuild community and begin from the question of what

it is that communities need instead of what it is that the global market needs in terms

of oil to fuel its sort of expansive and voracious capitalism? of your other books, I mean I was

looking through your catalog obviously and I'm going we could have an episode on each

one of these. It was was really hard for me to focus. Obviously you've written two on Venezuela

but you have another one, anti-colonial eruptions and the idea that colonialism, imperialism

requires like a dehumanization as well and a light bulb just went off as you were speaking.

And I was looking through the timeline of what's happened in Venezuela, particularly in the

last year, of the way the US first positioned Venezuelans living within the US as criminals

and deporting them and uh helped frame them as less than, know, and as the enemy within.

And I think some of that like helped set the stage. I mean, that's not really what we were

here to talk about. It was just kind of all the kind of bits that you've gathered throughout

your writings has, I think, going to make for an interesting conversation here on what might

be going on within the grassroots movements right now in Venezuela. Yeah. The fundamental

argument of that book, think it's, I'm glad you brought it up. The fundamental argument

of that is that sort of racial and colonial power uh relies on dehumanization, of course.

That's the structure of it. It requires the insistence that these people don't matter,

they're invisible, they're outside of the frame of reality. And that helps to justify colonialism

and the absolute brutal exploitation and even genocide, of course, of peoples, you know,

which is the ultimate telos of colonial power. But, you know, part of what that book tries

to argue is that that's It also creates a vast blind spot that is a weakness for colonial

rule, right? It creates a hubris, in other words, this sort of radical arrogance whereby, know,

colonial power misjudges its own capacities and underestimates the poor, underestimates

the colonized, right? And we see this everywhere. We see it on October 7th with a, you know,

the sort of surprise, you know, resistance attacks that were, you know... you know, that the IDF

should have expected but couldn't expect, right? But also the first place that I saw this and

understood this was actually in Venezuela, right? The Bolivarian process begins with a mass rebellion

in 1989 against uh neoliberal structural adjustment. And elites in Venezuela were absolutely shocked

by this rebellion. They were shocked that people rose up. They were shocked that people threw

the political system into chaos. It's this chaos that then creates the possibility of a revolutionary

process. But the fact that they were shocked speaks to the fact that they themselves had

been blinded by their own hubris, by their own power. And I think we should always be looking

for that, always understanding the way the systems of power are underestimating those they're

up against. So when you look at this sort of strike on Venezuela, this apparently very effective

and very clean military operation, we need to think about what kind of arrogance and hubris

is built into that and what it makes possible. We see it very clearly in the fact that the

US government feels as if Venezuelans will be celebrating in the streets. And that is

a fundamental misjudgment of the reality on the ground. It's a misjudgment of the solid

ideological foundations of the Bolivarian project, even though that's a project that's been in

crisis, economic and political crisis for some time. uh But the Venezuelan people are more

ideologically developed, more conscious, more organized than many other people on the planet.

And so to underestimate their capacity to resist is a potentially fatal mistake for the US.

We're going to dive right into that because I think it's the one hopeful thing, not that

we can just rest on hope. We'll have follow-up guests on to talk about the organization, organizing

that's happening within Canada, within the United States, against the imperialists. But you

also, think it brings you to one of your books, We Created Chavez, where It's not just a blind

spot uh for our enemies. We tend to feed into it sometimes when we look back at the Chavez

era. It's figure-based, state-based, right? It was, and you know, even called Chavistas.

So we attribute a lot to political personalities. In the same way, folks are attributing a lot

of this strictly to Trump. We'll challenge that as well, but. Let's talk about what you discovered

in terms of that era and the foundations that were created in, you know, tough economic

times, in political crisis that helped lay the groundwork for that kind of resistance

that you're talking about that we're hoping they'll face. It's, know, the fundamental argument

of We Created Chavez was, as the title suggests, right, that this was not the work of a single

Revolution is never the work of a single individual. Individuals can't make revolutions, right?

Individuals can uh intervene in specific historical moments of opportunity to play incredibly important

roles, and that's exactly what Chávez did, right? He uh intervened in a moment of the crisis

of the old system, and he helped to propel forward this sort of project. But the Bolivarian project,

the Bolivarian Revolution, was one that predated him. Bolivarianism emerges, and this is what

I show when we created Chávez. out of the Venezuelan armed struggle of the 1960s and 70s and about

out of the sort of strategic debates and conversations and attempts to build different kinds of movements

and the failures and the sort of building on those failures, right? Moving from the guerrilla

struggle to the development of mass-based uh sort of uh political front organizing in poor

neighborhoods around Caracas, uh mass-based sort of revolutionary organizing demands around

territory and space, the emergence of grassroots assemblies in the aftermath of the Caracasso,

that mass rebellion in 1989, all of that is happening, right? And it's in that moment,

in a direct response to the 1989 rebellions that Chávez attempts a coup in 1992. Again,

he's not some individual military, and this is something that I people misunderstand on

a fundamental level, because we're told this is a military strongman, individual caudillo.

Chávez comes from the military, but he also came from a very specific kind of military

background, which was a progressive military background. There's an entire sort of history

of this in Venezuela. And on top of that, he was in direct contact with the armed revolutionary

underground. His brother was a member of the armed revolutionary underground. The former

guerrilla leaders that had sort of been active in the 70s and 80s were working with him to

build a framework for what ultimately becomes the communal project. That was already developed

in the 1990s. The idea that the goal was to dismantle this brutal um and sort of bloated

oil state and to replace it with a federated structure of councils across Venezuelan society,

A radically democratic alternative, you know, to build socialism. All of that had already

developed, right? Chávez came to play an important role in that. And I'll be clear, an incredibly

important role, right? Grassroots movements had no better ally than Hugo Chávez. He was

able to leverage and move uh a political movement and also elements of the state structure in

ways that Nicolás Maduro, for example, has not been able to, right? Just simply out of capacity,

right? And so Chávez was the kind of person who would be able to sort of himself empower

and try to, you know, support these grassroots struggles. His last will and testament, meaning

this speech he gave in 2012 called the golpe de timón, uh was fully dedicated to sort of

locking in his legacy as the communal project, right? And the communal... called the sort

of communal state. uh Again, this idea of overcoming and surpassing the traditional bourgeois state

structure with a collective and radically democratic project. That is what Chavez-Moh stood for.

ah And again, it's kind of uh frustrating to have to repeat over and over again the fact

that it's not about individuals today, right? And when I wrote We Created Chavez, was, It

was confronting the reality that people on the right, people on the left, anarchists, socialists,

fascists, like everyone, everyone saw this as an individual phenomenon. They hated Chávez

or they loved Chávez. Today we're seeing something very similar, which is the idea that, ah first

and foremost, idea that simply taking out Maduro and Silvia Flores means the revolution is over,

which is nonsense. But also simultaneously, this idea that the process itself could only

occur and only operate through these kinds of of kind of individuals. And we need to resist

that. We need to understand that the process is not even the leadership of Delci Rodriguez

and Dios Alcabello and those who are in power now. The force of the Bolivarian Revolution

has always been the revolutionary grassroots organizations. can't imagine a better defense

against imperialist aggression than the type of federated network that folks are aspiring

to build and have built to some degree. You call them like experiments in democracy and

I've seen stabs at it in Canada. Nothing significant. Can you describe some of these examples, the

communes that you talk about? Just generally, I think it's hard for people to imagine. I

think when you say commune, if folks have done their history, maybe they know about the Paris

Commune. Otherwise, it's a bit of a phenomenon. And I think facing Trump's aggression and

there's rhetoric here in Canada for you to know that, you know, we also have a lot of

oil and he's not been terribly, you know, shy about how he feels about annexing us. So there's

discussion always in the best way to defend against something like that. And unfortunately,

it often goes to arming the state to the teeth, arming our neoliberal states. with all of

the tax dollars we can scrape together. And so let's kind of demonstrate what an alternative

way we can spend our energy and our resources to actually uh fend off not just US aggression,

but um the damages and impacts of capitalism. Yes, absolutely. And again, this on the

one hand emerged and began to emerge organically in Venezuela in the course of the struggles

against neoliberal power in the 70s and 80s uh in the struggles for community self-defense.

So you had popular militias forming in the 70s and 80s that threw the police out of poor

neighborhoods and took control of security themselves, right? But at the same time, I don't want

to act as if these are not influenced by broader ideological tendencies because these people

are communists, right? They had come out of the armed struggle or were influenced by Che

Guevara or were influenced by other sort of like segments of the left and that is the

vision that they brought to these kind of strategic questions. So this is emerging in the 70s and

the 80s. Again, I mentioned the popular barrio assemblies that emerged after 1989. uh And

it's always important to understand in the context of Venezuela that there is a pattern

where things emerge from the grassroots and then are picked up by the government and picked

up by the state and formalized. And there's always something that's lost in the process

of that formalization, but it's also a very powerful process to expand. you know, the scope

of collective power. So Venezuela, when it rewrites its constitution in 1999, centers and, you

know, supports popular participatory power, although it doesn't specify exactly what that

looks like. That then provides leverage for the government in beginning, particularly around

2006, to make a more radical turn, right? The first few years of the Bolivarian process are

social and welfare, right? Free education, free health care, redirecting oil wealth to make

up for what's often referred to as the historical debt. of neoliberalism uh and the extreme poverty

that it had created. The more radical term is a question of reshaping political power.

Around 2006, Stix the Form would refer to as communal councils. They emerged across the

country. were 30,000 communal councils developed very quickly. And these were spaces in which

small communities, local communities would come together, debate and discuss what they

needed, and then... appeal to the government for the resources to carry out those projects.

do we need a basketball court? Do we need roads? Do we need water? You know, uh and this is

how the council began to operate after 2006 in a very radically participatory way, right?

Essentially public planning through collective participation. This was, again, a formalization

of the kind of barrio assemblies that had emerged spontaneously, right? The generalization of

that kind of project. One of the not shortcomings, but one of the limitations of the communal

councils is that they were uh political institutions more than anything else and that they had

to uh appeal. The resources would come from then from the central state. uh And so as they

got here, and again, this came from the grassroots level, you know, before even the government

began to speak in these terms, the grassroots sectors were saying, no, we're building communes

now. We're building something bigger. We are bringing and incorporating production into

these communal councils. And so the formalization of this then occurs in, although it had been

emerging, the formalization occurs around 2009 with the launch of the project of building

the communal state, which brings together communal councils, in other words, political institutions,

in conjunction with what are called social production enterprises and, you know, worker

run and worker managed factories, right? And so at this point, you have a slightly larger

unit, but it has production involved. right? And so the what's called the communal, communal

parliament has representatives of all of those different entities coming together directly

democratically deciding on what you know, deciding what to produce, how to produce it, how to

distribute it, sell it, who would work, how much they would get paid, any any sort of

surplus, what you would do with a surplus, how would it be kind of reinvested in the community.

So you're moving, in other words, from the political toward also the economic, right? And when you

do that, you're moving towards something sustainable, in other words, something that can fund itself,

right? And there weren't many communes that reached a fully sustainable status, right?

But there were some, right? They were producing huge amounts of corn, for example, uh and selling

that, you know, and using that to fund their own sort of local development. uh And it's

really important to understand in the context of an oil state then, that becoming sustainable

means rolling back colonial legacies of unsustainability, right? The focus on oil meant that Venezuela

was not producing food. It was importing all of its food. And so when you have communities

taking the control, not only political power, but economic power into their own hands, it

means they're producing the things that they need. That there's a sort of reassessment that's

sort of happening. So this is the sort of way that the communes begin to develop after 2009.

They're never big enough, but they became significant and they became unified along what are called

broader corridors and broader axes where they would trade amongst each other, barter trade

without sort of commercializing, without selling. They would trade coffee for chocolate for,

you know, oh beans for corn. m And, you know, and that began to develop into an alternative

kind of power structure. They began to develop the federated structure of state level councils,

national level councils that would all, you know, operate in a similar way. And, you know,

alongside the traditional state, the goal ultimately is for the state to disintegrate and no longer

be relevant. But they never reached, of course, that point of. you know, of power. And I want

to return to the point that you asked me a question, which is the question of defense, right? Because

again, at the same time that you have this dynamic of the spontaneous emergence of assemblies

and popular power, that goes hand in hand with the spontaneous emergence of self-defense militias,

right? Of communities defending themselves. And when the councils are formed and when the

communists come together, they are empowered to defend their communities, right? They're

empowered to set up a security patrol, to set up a way, you know, for these communities to

defend themselves. And again, I'm thinking about West Philadelphia, right? I'm thinking about

the fact that that is the definition of a community that does not need police, right? It's a community

that organically is able to keep itself safe. And when that comes to imperialism, think you're

absolutely right. And there was a very interesting debate way back in 2007, around the question

of the military, right? Again, there's a radical tendency within the military structure and

the military hierarchy. ah But during this moment of debate, there were these former generals

who were like, listen, like, do we, we don't even need the military hierarchy. We don't

need the generals and the lieutenants. We don't need that vertical structure. What we need

is what was referred to at the time as the people in arms, right? We need to understand our

self-defense against imperialism is a horizontally organized one across all of society. Now that

argument didn't fully take, right? But there. There are elements of that, right? There is

the development again. If you see the state, I mean, the movements organically developing

upward, you see the state reaching down. You saw the development of a militia structure,

a formal militia structure across the country, which is incredibly important, but was still

subject to the military hierarchy. And here in these moments of crisis, you know, here

I'm talking about the past 10 years, but also in this moment today, this becomes very important,

right? Because... you have a small number of individuals within a military hierarchy that

can make powerful decisions about whether or not to sell out this project, whether or not

to abandon it, whether or not to defect to the side of US imperialism. And that's going to

that pressure is only increasing. you know, I want to be super clear that the Venezuelan

military has not seen those defections. Right. uh Partly because of a project of a process

of kind of cleansing, whereby over the course of many, many years, sort of treasiness generals

would pop their heads up and Chavez would get rid of them and they would attempt something

and Chavez would get rid of them. But you know, the pressure that Venezuela has been subjected

to for the last 10 years, any other country would see a coup. Any other country would see

generals, you know, standing up and trying to take power. And they have, right? Well,

they haven't, I mean, they haven't from within, right? No, not Venezuela. mean, other countries.

Absolutely. And so that's all to say that like the military hierarchy is more dedicated to

the revolution than many other places. But it's still like, you know, it's still true that

the best defense against US imperialism is the grassroots, right? And so, you know, I want

to be very, very aware about the way that that grassroots power is what's going to matter

the most when it comes to preventing and making Venezuela ungovernable for any kind of US imperial

intervention or, you know, proxy government. You've thrown a lot of years out there, you

know, and to give us an example of how long this has been going on. Can you give us an

idea, because like I hinted earlier, a lot of the discussion, we love to hate Trump, obviously,

and he's a fucking tyrant, right? There's no doubt about it. There is something wholly

different about him, but this is not new in terms of US-Venezuelan relations. It's not

that new in terms of US-South American relations or US foreign policy, but it's... Like again,

it does feel a little bit different, but can you first give us maybe some Coles notes, Venezuelan

US relations history to understand why, why Venezuela specifically? And maybe it'll give

us a clue as to why right now. No, it's a great question. We go all the way back. You can

just go all the way back. And, and, and actually I'm reading from people that haven't read Greg

Grandin's new book, America, America. It's absolutely breathtaking sort of hemispheric

history. And so please read that because part of what Greg shows is the ways that the US

was worried about Venezuela and the book's not all about Venezuela, but it has large pieces

on Simon Bolivar, on the independence struggles and the way that that fed into and was opposed

by US settler ideology. The debates happening in the US government were in reaction to the

alternative unity that Simon Bolivar was posing, which wasn't even revolutionary, revolutionary

wasn't socialism, but it was national sovereignty, right? And it was the unification of South

America under the umbrella of the Gran Colombia, right? This broader sort of coalition uh and

federation of government. So you can go all the way back. But in recent history, uh it's

important, as you've already suggested, to understand that this is a bipartisan aggression

against Venezuela, that it has been ongoing, but particularly under Chavismo has seen both

parties dedicated to overthrowing Venezuela. And we should think about the rhetoric that's

being thrown around today. Hugo Chavez was consistently called a dictator by Democrats and Republicans,

even when they knew that that was a fucking lie. Even when Chavez, in what Jimmy Carter

called the cleanest elections on earth, won 66 % of the vote or 61 % of the, like a huge

landslide victory, Hillary Clinton was still going out and calling Hugo Chavez a dictator.

ah What you saw were different strategies, right? You saw an attempted coup in 2002. Under the

Bush administration, not led by the Bush administration, but under the Bush administration, then you

saw Obama come into power and using softer means, funneling money through USAID into the Venezuelan

opposition. The goal was to get rid of uh Chavez through elections. Of course it failed because

people didn't want a return to neoliberalism. They wanted Chavez more. And now you have,

of course, Trump returning to this very specific and brutal form of intervention in the support

of a broader project of propping up a kind of faltering imperial power. um The uh very

open reference point for Trump is the Monroe Doctrine, which people may understand from

the sort of 1820s as a framework that was, uh again, the Monroe Doctrine emerges in opposition

to simultaneously what Simon Bolivar and others are trying to build outside of... the US

sphere of influence. So the Monroe doctrine is saying we're protecting Latin America from

European powers. That's how the right often tries to frame it. But the reality is this

is our backyard. We get to do what we want. And what that looks like is direct intervention,

the emergence of US imperialism as a force beginning particularly in the 1890s, right, with the

so-called Spanish-American War, the seizure of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Philippines, Guam.

And this uh opening up a period of direct military intervention, marine landings across Latin

America, Central America, um and, you know, of course, a direct, the understanding that

the US has a direct material interest in the natural resources um in Latin America, the

markets, the goods, um and direct trade, right? So Venezuela becomes very important. And it

is important, concretely speaking, for its size, for its location, for its natural resources.

And it's also important because of more recently the alternative that it is offering, right?

All of those things matter. And there's a lot of debate today, right? It's not just about

oil, but it is very much about oil. Where the US government does know that to prop up its

power, it needs access to cheap oil. And what better cheap oil than what is located very,

very close to the US. A strategically useful kind of oil for US refineries. And again, very,

very close and easy to import. Does not require any passage through the Suez Canal. require

any sort of other sort of power, especially for a Trump regime that is trying to uh de-emphasize

wars in the Middle East and criticize those at the same time that it's sort of upholding

wars in the Western Hemisphere. So oil is incredibly important. Rare earth minerals are incredibly

important. Gold is incredibly important. The amount of resources in Venezuela is crucial.

capitalism on a sort of... 500 year historical scale has to destroy community to access those

resources. And not only is that always a project, but in this case, it had to destroy this project

that was defending those resources for Venezuelans. So you've got the resource question. You have

the location question in terms of strategic power in the Western Hemisphere. Again, the

US is very concerned about China and Russia, China primarily. m And having those resources,

wanting those resources is one thing, having them in the hands of China is a very different

thing. So it's competition. It's also this idea of projecting power, of saying, of exaggerating

your own power by acting in ways that are sort of dramatic and violent and brutal. And so

it's showing. And this is something that Trump does systematically, which is to engage in

kind of dramatic or exaggerated action or threats. whether it's tariffs or military action, and

then say, okay, now everyone else has to negotiate on this new basis, right? So attack on Venezuela,

negotiate with Mexico, renegotiate with Colombia, know, try to pressure these other countries

and to dismantle the left-wing hegemony that had existed. And here we can see the Venezuela

piece as a sort of culmination in some ways of something Trump has been and the Democrats,

but fundamentally Trump has been up to for several years now, which is to pick apart and

dismantle left-wing power in the region, right? Supporting Argentina, supporting the sort

of quasi-dictatorship of Bolsonaro in Brazil, uh now supporting, of course, the emergence

of a neo-fascist in Chile, uh these coups in Bolivia and elsewhere, the right-wing turns

in Central America. And again, bipartisan, it's Obama and Hillary Clinton who helped to carry

out a coup in Honduras. which has led to right-wing sort of And uh all of this is about dismantling.

Again, we think back to Simon Bolívar. Bolívar was not just trying to free Venezuela. He was

trying to build a regional uh framework for what he called the Gran Colombia, the larger

Great Colombia, right? Broad Colombia. In other words, a system of regional integration, which

was a key project for Hugo Chávez. We can't go this alone. Therefore, we need to build

alliances, whether it's the Bolivarian alternative or Mercosur or the Bank of the South or other

lending institutions to not rely on the World Bank. So, you know, if we enter into financial

crisis to be able to call upon allies, all of that is incredibly important, that sort of

safety net structure. And that's another key piece of what Trump has been dismantling and

is trying to sort of, you know, consummate today. Speaking of those other state actors,

those other players that he set his sights on, he's named some of them at Columbia, Mexico,

Cuba, Greenland, and the intimidation factor, I hadn't thought about that. I mean, obviously

we'd experienced it here in Canada. It was very effective tactic. Not only did it shape the

negotiations between the two states and whatnot. but it allowed our government to really turn

right sharply under this guise of uh nationalist protectionism. Do you anticipate this working

that way in South America, where folks are going to have to negotiate the same kind of

economic adjustments, structural adjustments that have been typically required under neoliberalism

now just with threat of military intervention instead of a big loan from the bank. Yeah,

no, it's difficult to foresee what's going to happen. First and foremost, it's important

to understand that people have been shocked by the very quick turn that Trump made to

working with the existing Venezuelan government, right, which is the Bolivarian government.

This is the Chavista government. And so people were shocked when he very quickly dismissed

Maria Corina Machado's possibility of being installed as a leader. uh But it shouldn't

be that shocking, first and foremost, because Trump is not interested in even the thin veil

of democracy, right? It's not even a primary motivator for him. Not to say that that would

be a democratic move at all, but the point was, you know, that the idea that Maduro was somehow

a dictator was not an important one for him, right? It's not true, but it's also not important

for him. know, corresponding to that is the fact that the US government simply can't do

the things. that it's claiming that it wants to do, which is to run Venezuela. The opposition

cannot run Venezuela. Trump cannot run Venezuela. The only people that can run Venezuela are

the Chavistas and the Chavista government apparatus. Secondly, what's going to play out in the trial

will be very, very interesting. I'm a little shocked that he's giving Maduro and Silvia

Flores the opportunity to plead their case and to show the fact that these charges are

absolute bullshit, that they don't. have any bearing on reality. And so that's going to

be very interesting. And, you know, it's going to be a big liability for Trump. And so the

attempted projection of power and threats against the rest of the region operate in that context

of, you know, a very complicated constellation of possibility for even Trump, They're trying

to make themselves look powerful when they actually don't have many cards in their hand. Now, the

threats are coming against Mexico, Cuba, Colombia. Um, and those are very real threats. think

we should take them seriously. Um, I worry a lot about Columbia because Gustavo Petro is

not, it's a very right-wing country. Columbia is a sort of foundationally fascist country,

um, that a lot of work has been put into building a progressive alternative. Um, but it's not

fully, fully established on a solid basis. And, you know, uh, it's possible that Trump

won't want, won't see the need to intervene because Petro is. term limited, know, one

of the struggles will be to find a candidate that can then succeed Gustavo Pedro uh and

win an election. And so I think the US will actually put their resources probably into

trying to win that election for the right. uh Cuba, of course, is a big target. Again, the

US cannot govern Cuba. The Cuban population is more radically organized um and, you know,

ideologically sort of uh solid. than the Venezuelan population, right? And so, but that doesn't

prevent them from trying to, again, trying to take out political leaders or trying to

leverage um some kind of access to, you know, resources and markets and, you the island.

So there are risks and there are threats. But I think the Venezuelan government now is

trying to bide its time and wait out either Trump's sort of shifting sort of interest

and focus, um and then hopefully wait out the Trump government entirely. and see if some

alternative situation can be crafted. And in the interim, the fundamental call for organizers

and solidarity activists, aside from the freeing of Maduro and Celia Flores, of course, uh and

the blocking of any further intervention through probably congressional means, the main call

is to lift the sanctions. The sanctions have absolutely obliterated the Venezuelan economy.

created an economic catastrophe, killed more than 100,000 people, clearly forced an emigration

crisis that we've all seen. And almost every single piece of what the US government is

claiming about Venezuela, whether it's the emigration crisis or the uh violence or so-called gangs

or the question of the oil industry collapse, all of that. is deeply rooted in this sort

of brutality of these sanctions that I think people don't understand just how brutal they

are and just how impossible they make it to actually sort of run an economy and, you know,

manage a country. That is again an old tactic of the United States and then using those economic

conditions for the very excuse for intervention. I want to go, you've done a great job of already

kind of preemptively debunking a lot of the talking points that are circling around. From

the right and from within the left, sometimes we find ourselves sitting there debating on,

was Maduro a dictator? Was he not? Was he far left enough? Was he not? Do they like him

there in Venezuela? Do they not? um Is this, and again, a lot of it is focusing on, is

this a violation of international law? That the media are in the faces of our global leaders.

wanting to at least get them to acknowledge that it's a violation of international law.

They won't even do that. Canada's Carney has completely come out in support of what's happened.

We know why in Canada we have the same ah hopes and dreams in terms of imperialism and settler

mindset here. So that's still to play out. But I sometimes wonder, there's a lot of discussions

that could be fruitful. but that seemed to serve as a distraction a little bit. And I feel like

the trial, if there's anything that I can make sense out of that, is that we will be so absorbed

in this trial and seeing, told you so, he's not a narco terrorist. But like that was never

the point, right? It's expanding imperialist hostilities and... when we get caught up

in all of these discussions and academic discussions on international law, which like, I don't know

after witnessing the genocide for the last two and a half years, how anyone's still caught

up and trying to have charges stick or something like that. I think that just seems like a waste

of our energy. So if you could suggest a line of discussion that is just not happening, that

we have maybe not even brought up here or not spent enough time on that. is far more important

to discuss, especially thinking of your audience is within the Imperial beast itself. No, it's

a great question. I think it's it's especially important for someone like Trump, right? Because

we need to be very clear about the fact that Trump, with all of the shit that he's sort

of engaging in, right, the strategy of flooding the zone with all of these right wing initiatives

all at once. You've got ice in the streets and you've got, you know, like imperial intervention

abroad and you've got attacks on the federal dismantling pieces of the federal government

and. You know, like all these things are happening. The goal is not to win every battle, right?

Trump knows he's not going to every battle. And so if you fall into this sort of like language

of the Democratic Party, I'm going to just say, well, we're going to do this in the courts

and fight him. And we've won this look at this victory. It's like, but he's got 10 other things

going on, right? That's never the strategy, right? It's a strategy of cultivated chaos

and, you know, of misdirection, right? And so you're very right that we need to avoid as

much of the distraction as we can. I still wonder about the trial. I'll still be watching. Because

it's fucking ridiculous. And it's giving Maduro and Cineflotas a platform I did not think that

he would want to give them. So we're going to be, it's going to be very interesting to see

how that plays out and what it introduces. But in terms of the distraction, right, I think

you're absolutely right. uh We can have long conversations about the nature of the current

leadership of the Venezuelan government. The current leadership of the Venezuelan government

is not left-wing enough for me. And that's been obvious if you read anything I've written.

Cool, that doesn't get us very far, right? Because the question is not, it left enough for me?

The question is, how do you build a revolutionary project in a transition towards socialism,

which necessarily involves building a large tent capable of mobilizing people, educating

people, building new institutions and transforming society, right? That necessarily begins not

from the left, it begins from the masses of people and what the people need. And especially

in a context where the crisis is so severe. ah You know, it sets a different kind of,

you know, framework for us. So yes, we could talk about the last elections in Venezuela

and whether we think they stand up to sort of, that's not relevant. The reason we know it's

not relevant is because we know that that's not why this happened, right? We know it's

not about drugs and we know it's not about democracy. Those are two fundamental, I almost want to

say lies, but it's like Trump wasn't even putting much effort into those lies, right? And that

was not even, it was very clearly, he did us the favor of making clear that it's about power

and national and natural resources. So yes, we can skip those conversations. You and I

can have those conversations some other day. This week, this conversation, this discussion

we're having is about the kidnapping of Nicolás ModérN. And so we have Flores in the attempt

to blackmail the Venezuelan government into compliance, right? What do we do in that context?

And again, the question is a question of national sovereignty, which again, I'm not a national

sovereignty. You're more of a smash the state kind of guy, but we know you're let's just

pretend we get there through. And especially when we're talking about struggles in the global

South through defending, you know, the national sovereignty of people to self-determination

over their natural resources and, know, in politics and society. Right. And that is going to be

the fundamental question. Right. And again, the thing, you know, we are doing fundamentally

is is. demanding that our government lift this brutal set of sanctions, right? ah There's

no way to judge if you're an anarchist or a communist. There's no way to judge what's happening

in Venezuela in a context of brutal sanctions. There's no way to sort of second guess this

or that policy of privatization or the rollback of the social gains of the revolution without

thinking primarily about the sanctions that are in place. Once we get rid of those sanctions,

let's have more of a conversation about what that revolution needs to look like. or should

look like, or about how we can kind of interface with it. you know, so we need to lift those

sanctions and we need to prevent more resources being spent. A good comrade here in Philadelphia

said, you know, recently on Facebook, said, they just, they just launched your school district's

budget into Venezuela. Like, how does that make you feel? Right? Look, we are being sort of

starved of resources here because of this sort of military intervention, you know, abroad.

And that is the shit that we need to be focused on, you know, in a fundamental, in a primary

way. I think the way that you've helped frame it today is useful. But beyond that, it

allows us to be a little more hopeful. Because when we look at it just from the state actor

perspective, it seems very dim and grim, and we don't even understand motivations or what's

going to turn out from that trial, who's going to replace him. And that seems to matter less.

Not that we can just lean on the work that's already been done. There's still a role to

play. I just wanted that kidnapping line that you had uh where they've used this kidnapping

to intimidate and influence Venezuela. think you've also made the argument, and I'll just

repeat it, that it's used to intimidate all of us, right? Mostly Central America, they

can probably see themselves in this, but Greenland is, you know, top of the BBC headlines today,

and even Canadians are talking about that possibility. So... whether you think it's political suicide

or the charges can't stick or what might even happen to Venezuela. That might not matter

either, right? If we allow that impact of fear and intimidation to really take hold. em Lots

to think about, but that is so typical of our episodes where we end up with a few more questions,

but we did score some answers from you, Gio. And I very much appreciate em your time. Folks

will find a list of Geo's books linked in the show notes. as soon as you look at it, you'll

say, oh, I want to talk to him about this, that and the other thing. honestly, Geo, like

I said, I could have picked your brain and we could have talked about a lot of these aspects

for ages. But I very much appreciate the time you did spend in our studio here. Thank you.

No, thank you so much for the conversation, Jessa. And, you know, I appreciate everyone

who's listening and who is going to be in the streets pushing back on this. Thank you. That

is a wrap on another episode of Blueprints of Disruption. Thank you for joining us. You can

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