The Media Is Blowing a Big Story in Venezuela

As to whether a regime change war is inevitable, there is no clear consensus. Other knowledgeable observers remain skeptical that the U.S. will actually launch a full-scale attack. They point out, rightly, that the 1989 invasion of Panama, the closest recent parallel, required 27,000 American troops to take over a country of 2.5 million people. So far, the U.S. has “only” 6,500 soldiers in the Trump-mandated Caribbean task force, and Venezuela’s population (28.5 million) is 11 times that of Panama in the late 1980s.

Let’s hope the skeptics are right. But the Trump administration is unlike any other in U.S. history. Two major hawks, Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller, are pushing the hard-line policy toward Venezuela, each apparently bent on outdoing the other. Rubio is thought to be setting up a presidential run in 2028. Miller has a pathological hatred of Latinos dating back to his youth (chronicled in a superb biography, Hatemonger, by Jean Guerrero). There are signs that either or both are convincing an increasingly addled Donald Trump to launch a more lethal air war, and possibly even an invasion. Surely many mainstream reporters are aware of Rubio’s and Miller’s true motivations, but the conventions of corporate journalism mean they have to ignore them and pretend in their reports that the arguments are purely principled differences over policy. 

There is absolutely no doubt that Venezuela’s internal opposition, led by the Nobel Prize winner, Maria Cortina Machado, won the July 2024 election in a landslide and that its candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, should be sitting in the Miraflores presidential palace instead of Nicolás Maduro. What’s more, the Maduro regime continues to hold political prisoners; Torrealba cited the case of Enrique Márquez, a moderate former presidential candidate who was jailed only because he publicly doubted the fraudulent election results. Torrealba said, “For many months Márquez was held incommunicado, which is a form of torture.”