Over the past four months, President Donald Trump has engaged in a war with Venezuela, though no one in his administration will openly admit it. Through military encirclement, economic sanctions, covert operations, the bombing of civilian vessels near Venezuela’s coast, a “total and complete blockade” of Venezuelan oil, and the outright theft of several tankers carrying Venezuelan oil, the Trump Administration is trying to pressure and overthrow a South American government that, for the past twenty-five years, has challenged U.S. influence in Latin America and the Caribbean. On January 3, the United States illegally bombed Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, and kidnapped the president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, accusing them of drug trafficking. However, the U.S. Department of Justice has since acknowledged that the cartel it accused Maduro of leading is not an actual organization.
The Trump Administration has made clear its objective to usurp Venezuela’s oil and other natural resources and reassert U.S. military, economic, and political power throughout the Western Hemisphere, including through the use of violence and war. In doing so, the truth has become undeniable: This is a war of domination.
As aggression from the United States has escalated, grassroots organizations in Venezuela have vehemently rejected U.S. intervention and, in concert with the government, have organized to resist U.S. air and land attacks. Many of the same groups have now participated in massive rallies demanding Maduro’s release from U.S. custody.
Despite the seizure of Maduro—and U.S. threats to take long-term control of the country—the ruling party, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), remains in power. Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as interim president, while other prominent officials of the Maduro government remain in their positions. Trump has threatened a second wave of attacks if Venezuela’s government does not sacrifice its oil wealth to U.S. companies and sever ties with Russia, China, Iran, and Cuba. However on January 9, Trump announced he had canceled plans for any second attack.
Pablo Uchua, who researches the military in Venezuela, told The Conversation that the Venezuelan military has been preparing for a possible U.S. attack since April 2002, when a U.S.-backed coup overthrew then-President Hugo Chávez, who was popular among the country’s poor majority, and imposed a neoliberal administration. Two days later, a popular uprising restored power to Chávez. During his tenure, Chávez launched the Bolivarian Revolution (named for nineteenth century Venezuelan independence leader Simón Bolivar), a socialist-oriented political process aimed at rejecting the neoliberal policies that were punishing the poor, reclaiming national sovereignty, and promoting regional unity throughout Latin America.
During the Bolivarian Revolution, socialist thinking and the idea of communal development became prominent in Venezuelan society. Venezuela’s urban workers and campesinos participated in the political process more than ever before, including through the creation of a nationwide network of self-governing communes, which Chávez described as the basic “cells” of Venezuelan socialism.
The grassroots networks that emerged during the Bolivarian Revolution are now organizing alongside the Venezuelan government to form a widespread front against this latest chapter of U.S. imperialism in South America.
Social movements are deepening their participation in Venezuela’s widespread communes, says Hernán Vargas, a spokesperson for ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America) Movements, a network of hundreds of grassroots organizations across Latin America and the Caribbean, including around fifty in Venezuela. As Ángel Prado, member of El Maizal Commune and minister of communes since 2024, said in an interview with Monthly Review, a Venezuelan commune is a “grassroots organization within a specific territory, where self-government is established with a political structure that legislates, administers resources, and manages its own means of production.” Communes played a substantial role in mitigating the impact of U.S. sanctions, especially during the most difficult years from 2016 to 2021, and the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Prado, “Despite the blockade, the pandemic, and the economic crisis, there is not a single barrio in Venezuela without some level of grassroots organization.”
In response to Trump’s threats to seize Venezuelan resources, El Panal Commune in Caracas issued a statement declaring: “Faced with this imperialist offensive, the Venezuelan people respond with the war of the whole people—not as an abstract slogan, but as a concrete practice of defending life, territory, and sovereignty.”
Venezuelans have also volunteered in droves to join the National Bolivarian Militia, a civilian force that is being trained by the Venezuelan military. During the previous four months, reports have suggested that the Venezuelan military is preparing a guerrilla-style response to a U.S. invasion. In October 2025, according to The Guardian, Venezuela’s interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, “appeared on television clutching a heavily annotated copy of a book about the ‘military thinking’ of the Vietnamese revolutionary Ho Chi Minh.”
Prior to his abduction by U.S. forces, Maduro urged the military to conduct their training according to the concept of a people’s war and called for “a prolonged, active, and lethal popular resistance” against foreign aggression, adding that the people, along with the armed forces, “bear the responsibility for keeping this country as it is: peaceful, free, and independent.” Maduro’s administration claimed that more than eight million citizens have joined. This figure is disputed by some Western media outlets, including CNN and BBC, and in the context of U.S. attacks, reliable estimates are hard to come by. A 2024 report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies estimated that the militia had 220,000 members prior to Trump’s aggressive military buildup in the Caribbean.
Simultaneously, the ruling PSUV is overseeing local elections for “street collectives,” Vargas tells The Progressive. The street collectives are effectively local work teams, and their duties include defending their neighborhoods from U.S. military aggression and guaranteeing food and water for citizens in the event of war. The Venezuelan government claims these groups cover 264,000 streets across Venezuela. Every collective is made up of no fewer than nine members. With a nine-member collective on each of the 264,000 streets, this means that more than two million Venezuelans would have been elected to these collectives for street-level defense and resilience. Some, though not all, are also militia members.
“The collectives discuss the most important issues in each street,” Vargas says. “They organize the population and prepare for different necessities in the scenario of a U.S. aggression against Venezuela—they organize the population for food sovereignty, for the defense of each territory, they gather social intelligence for any possible attack that could happen in any community.”
El Maizal Commune, a vast, self-governed rural territory in western Venezuela, contains twenty-eight communal councils. Lana Vielma, an El Maizal communard in her early twenties, tells The Progressive that following Trump’s military buildup in the Caribbean, “the communards were one of the first movements to enlist [in the National Bolivarian Militia] and place themselves at the service of the homeland.” At El Maizal, she says, communards have been busy “carrying out reconnaissance, preparations, and training, practicing techniques to face aggressions.” She asserts that if the United States should launch direct attacks on Venezuelan soil, it will result in “a war of the entire people, like in Vietnam.”
The commune, whose main sources of income are livestock farming, vegetables, and herbs, also runs a school for “political, ideological, and technical training,” Vielma says, where members of urban social movements have taken courses about political organization and communal development.
Vielma’s resolve is palpable: “Venezuela is written with a ‘V,’ like Vietnam and victory. We have already defeated empires. If they colonize us again, we will respond with greater political maturity, with better preparation and organization. We are always ready to take up any fight.”
Certainly, the national mobilization, the formation of street-level collectives, and the strengthening of the communes indicates that the Venezuelan government and a vast portion of the population has chosen resistance over submission.
Trump’s statements and actions have laid bare the stakes: This is a war for Venezuela’s land and resources. And Venezuelans will fight back. As the El Panal Commune has stated, “Here there is a revolution, here there is an organized people, and here there is an irrevocable decision for independence.”