The seizure of Maduro and his wife, and the indictment of Maduro in New York are a sad replay of the slighter but also tragic history of the US invasion of Panama in 1989 (four thousand innocent victims) and the seizure and eventual imprisonment of its then leader Manuel Noriega.

But the seizure of Maduro represents something much more significant on the regional and global scale. First of all, while this may not spell the end of the Bolivarian revolution (commemorating, of course, the outstanding continental leadership and heroism of Simon Bolivar, so poorly understood in the US), this must be one of its blackest moments. Secondly this is about a return to the “Rosevelt corollary” to the original Monroe doctrine, a corollary introduced by Teddy Rosevelt which elevated the doctrine from simple opposition to European colonialism to a far more aggressive vision of the US as continental policeman, at liberty to remedy almost any conceivable threat to US influence or interest.

Today’s events have already been seized upon by Corina Machado as pretext for promoting her preference as leader of the new US proxy regime that will attempt to govern Venezuela for the US: Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia (born 29 August 1949) described by Wikipedia as a Venezuelan politician, analyst, diplomat, and opposition figure. A member of the Unitary Platform political alliance, González was its candidate in the 2024 Venezuelan presidential election.

The Venezuelan opposition of course claimed that the election was riven by irregularities, as did the US and its vassals. To his discredit, I believe, Brazil’s Lula expressed his own doubts, thus cementing a new status for Brazil as Daddy’s boy in Latin America. We had by that time lived through the embarrassing mess of US attempts to boost its own (totally illegal) favorite for Venezuelan president, Juan Guaido, and somebody with Lula’s credentials had no business promoting the imperialist version of Venezuelan events, whatever his private misgivings.

I cannot assess what is the likelihood of a Vietnam style guerilla war for the forseeable future, but I would think that it is quite high. I am very concerned about the consequences of all this for Cuba, which has been dependent on fuel subsidies from Venezuela and may now have to switch back to dependency on Russia, and for neighboring Colombia, which has been trying to normalize after half a century of civil war but may now be plunged back into that mire. In the light of Trump’s press conference today, we also have to continue to worry about the implications for Mexico where the chances of US military intervention on the pretext of war with narco-terrorism have now escalated immensely.

Naturally, I will return to these themes in posts over the hours and days to come.