After US forces removed Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela rewrote its oil law and granted a Pentagon-linked venture century-long rights over 65 billion barrels. The agreement could revive production but will it rebuild Venezuela or extract its wealth?
For almost two-thirds of a century, Washington has tried to make Cuba’s revolutionary government economically unviable. The island survived through Soviet support, rationing, public healthcare, Venezuelan oil and the endurance of its people. Now an American energy siege is turning chronic decline into a struggle for electricity, water, medicine and national sovereignty.
Defence / China / United States / Venezuela
When the United States seized Venezuela’s president, the spectacle was immediate but the real contest was not. China did not respond with noise or retaliation. It responded with doctrine: law, coalition-building, asset protection, and quiet leverage over the systems that matter. The raid was a moment. The struggle over custody, compliance, and power beneath it is ongoing.
Diplomacy / South America / United States / Venezuela / World
A single omitted quotation changes the meaning of a CIA visit to Caracas. When Delcy Rodríguez addressed the families of those killed in the January attack, she placed US intelligence engagement inside a family history of state killing. Western coverage reports the meeting. It omits the sequence that gives it meaning.
Defence / Diplomacy / Geopolitics / Iran / South America / United States
The United States is not short of power. It is short of closure. From Iran to Venezuela, Greenland to the Red Sea, Washington’s reliance on visible coercion is widening its obligations faster than it secures compliance. The result is not imminent collapse or world war, but a growing mismatch between reach, endurance, and political outcome.
Law / United States / Venezuela
Commercial oil tankers linked to Venezuela are being boarded, detained, and diverted on the high seas without a declared war, UN authorisation, or lawful blockade. This article details what is happening, names the vessels involved, and sets out the law governing maritime jurisdiction. It concludes that unilateral sanctions do not justify interdiction and that the seizures amount to illegal takings under international law.
South America / United States / Venezuela
Venezuela is poor because sanctions and enforcement fear strip oil revenue and choke finance. After Nicolás Maduro’s capture, that squeeze has tightened. Tankers hesitate, insurers retreat, payments jam, and crude backs up into storage until output is cut. Ports stay open, yet trade slows to a crawl. Humanitarian exemptions exist on paper, but banks often refuse the transactions. Venezuela’s poor take the first hit.
South America / United States / Venezuela
Venezuela under siege after the Maduro capture claim is not just a military story. It is a governance problem. Washington says it will run things, yet Caracas institutions appear intact and defiant. This briefing maps what control would actually require, why decapitation was a gamble, and what the next seventy two hours reveal about occupation, proxy rule, or stalemate.
The United States claims it has seized Venezuela’s president by force. If true, this is not merely a crisis in Caracas but a rupture in international law itself. When powerful states abduct the leaders of weaker ones, sovereignty becomes optional and rules collapse into permission. What happens next will decide whether law still restrains power or whether force has replaced it.
The US boarding of a Panama flagged tanker carrying Venezuelan oil tests a fundamental question of international law. Can sanctions be enforced at sea without UN authority, or does this cross into unlawful interference with freedom of navigation?
From a BRICS vantage point, the real energy weapon was never just Russian gas or Chinese rare earths. It was Washington’s grip on sanctions, shipping, finance and the dollar system, used for decades against Venezuela, Iran, Iraq and Russia. With U.S. warships off Caracas and new threats over oil and airspace, Venezuela has become the live test of a split world energy order.
The scandal is not that one secretary of war may have ordered a second missile into a sinking boat. It is that after Vietnam, Iraq, Gaza, Yemen and the drone era, anybody in Washington can still act surprised. This long read traces how the war on drugs, frontier thinking and algorithmic targeting have normalised extrajudicial killing and turned whole populations into expendable categories.
Donald Trump has told airlines and pilots to treat Venezuelan skies as closed, turning a security advisory into a de facto air blackout. Caracas has revoked licences for Iberia and other major carriers, Spanish and Venezuelan passengers are stranded, and Latin American leaders warn that a drug war pretext is tipping toward blockade. The legal reality is murkier than the slogan, but the shock is already real.
Venezuela is not a target chosen for democracy or regional stability. It is chosen because Washington is running out of financial room and geopolitical momentum. With interest payments exceeding defence spending and Ukraine draining Europe’s capacity, the United States now sees Venezuelan oil and minerals as a lifeline. “Southern Spear” is not a strategy. It is the reflex of a system under pressure, reaching outward for collateral to stabilise itself.
World / South America / United States
Telegraph Online · Long Read The story begins with about eighty poor men in small boats. Since early September, United States Reaper drones and naval assets have destroyed nineteen craft in the Caribbean and Pacific, killing at least seventy-six people, probably more. Most were Venezuelan or Colombian fishermen and casual labourers moving small loads of […]
American and British warships massing off Venezuela mark not a prelude to invasion but a theatre of pressure fleets circling a crisis that looks like war yet stops short of it. With around ten thousand troops at sea, Washington appears to be testing leverage, not launching conquest. Maritime power is being used as policy: signalling, coercion and the threat of precision strikes dressed in the language of counternarcotics.
Javier Milei’s sweeping mid-term victory was more than a political win. It marked the first real-world test of Austrian economics the belief that free prices, hard money, and minimal state control can rebuild a nation from the ground up. After years of crisis, voters backed his radical plan to shrink government, balance the budget, and restore confidence in Argentina’s currency.
In the span of two months, U.S. naval forces have turned the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific into a theatre of undeclared war launching at least fifteen lethal strikes on boats alleged to be drug carriers, leaving dozens dead and entire crews vanished at sea. Washington calls it counternarcotics. Caracas, Beijing and much of Latin America call it a return to gunboat power extrajudicial killings in peacetime waters under the flag of law enforcement.
World / Argentina / South America
At the United Nations General Assembly in September 2025, Argentina’s President Javier Milei revived his country’s claim over the Falkland Islands at a moment when Britain looks distracted abroad and divided at home.
Latin America is breaking from U.S. dominance as Venezuela, Brazil and Mexico turn to China, Russia and Iran — burying the Monroe Doctrine.
World / South America / Venezuela
Washington thought sanctions would break Caracas. Instead, they built lifelines with China and Russia and hardened Venezuela’s place in the multipolar order.
World / Argentina / South America
BUENOS AIRES — Argentina has grown accustomed to living at the edge of crisis. Inflation has been a permanent companion, the peso a fragile token of trust, and the state an omnipresent but unreliable guarantor of stability. Now, under libertarian President Javier Milei, the country has embarked on its boldest — and most divisive — […]
With United States warships patrolling near Venezuelan waters and Caracas conducting large-scale exercises while advancing a new security pact with Moscow, the Caribbean has become the latest stage for a contest over power, sovereignty and alliances. The question is how long signaling can remain symbolic before it risks confrontation. The government of Nicolás Maduro has […]
Washington’s Shadow War on Venezuela: Bounties, Battleships, and the Long Siege CARACAS — The gray silhouettes of U.S. warships have reappeared in the Caribbean, a show of force not seen with such intensity since the Cold War. Officially, Washington insists the deployment is part of a counter-narcotics operation. Yet in Caracas, and across the hemisphere, […]
South America / Venezuela / World
By Jaffa Levy CARACAS — President Nicolás Maduro appeared on national television this week flanked by his defense minister and closest lieutenants, warning that Venezuela was facing its most serious external threat in decades. The address came as U.S. destroyers and support ships converged in the Caribbean Sea and American surveillance flights resumed from Curaçao, […]