Once Again the Latin American Bourgeoisie at the Feet of Imperialism

Author: Dorian González

On January 10, the formal inauguration of power in Venezuela took place, with Nicolás Maduro assuming office amid controversies surrounding last year’s elections. Ten days later, Donald Trump took office as president of the world’s leading power. These two events, separated by just over a week, provoked divergent positions across the global media. Some have denounced the regime established in Venezuela as a bloodthirsty dictatorship, while looking the other way when imperialism massacres entire regions across the planet and celebrating its so-called democratic elections.

What these regimes have in common is that, within each country, a police dictatorship is imposed in the service of capital’s functioning and the defense of private property. However, it is necessary to establish the significant differences between an imperialist country that extends its regime outward, reinforcing chains of domination, and a semi-colony in which different classes are oppressed by the dominant country. This largely determines the struggle of the peoples of Latin America for their liberation from the northern master.

Some opinions attempt to overestimate Trump’s arrival to government as if it were the end of the Weimar Republic. The regime of the United States has been, long before Trump, one of the most genocidal governments in history and responsible for mass deportations, military coups, massacres, crises, and wars over the last decades. Nevertheless, this State serves only as the political instrument of its parasitic financial capital. For this reason, under this new Republican administrative stewardship, imperialist policy toward Latin America remains unchanged.

On the one hand, history demonstrates that the “democratic concerns” of imperialism in the countries it dominates merely conceal the police and interventionist regime of its transnationals and bankers. On the other hand, North American financial capital ends up subordinating any bourgeois government to its interests, and as a semi-colonial government loses support, the United States will seek another better suited to changes in conditions and the needs of its capital. Hence its policy of attempting to overthrow presidents or direct invasions in Venezuela—without this turning the Maduro government into an anti-imperialist regime, much less an anti-capitalist one.

In recent weeks there has been an exchange of statements on various issues. On the one hand, Trump has bellowed from the White House his intentions toward Latin America: increasing tariffs (also against Europe and China), deporting all migrants, and even reclaiming the Panama Canal. On the other hand, various presidents of the region issued statements which, while recognizing Trump’s power, attempted to “oppose” the U.S. businessman by expressing their willingness to collaborate with the northern empire—but, of course, “with sovereignty.”

Naturally, these declarations are nothing new within the various doctrines applied by the United States in its backyard. Combined with diplomatic maneuvers, they constitute the habitual behavior of imperialism, which needs to increasingly subordinate its semi-colonies, strangle the forces of the proletariat, dismantle the weakened national industry, and break the internal market. Evidently, there will always be disgruntled native capitalists unable to enjoy greater portions of surplus value.

In this second term, Trump has sought to impose tariffs on U.S. imports; however, amid negotiations, only a 25% tariff on aluminum and steel imports (implemented during his first administration) seems to have taken effect so far. This measure, promised by Trump so that “America can be great again,” would of course benefit a handful of capitalist parasites, not the exploited population that will be forced to bear this “sacrifice.” “que Estados Unidos vuelva a ser grande”, por supuesto se haría para beneficio de algunos parásitos capitalistas y no de la población explotada que tendrá que soporte este “sacrificio”.

On the other hand, despite U.S.-imposed restrictions, Washington has renewed Chevron’s oil extraction operations in Venezuela, while Maduro’s military continues exploiting the Orinoco Mining Arc and doing business with other bourgeoisies to maintain their privileges. This is how negotiations proceed under capitalism: while direct interventions are threatened, guarantees are simultaneously given so that oil magnates do not lose out.

Reformism has repeatedly attempted to invent a progressive Latin American bourgeoisie. From the late twentieth century through the first decades of the twenty-first, Latin America experienced genuine revolutionary uprisings that, with the services of the Castro brothers, were contained in order to save the bourgeois regime. From there emerged various projects of “geopolitical unity” such as ALBA, UNASUR, and CELAC, promoted by Chávez’s Venezuela alongside a group of presidents aligned with the Bolivarian project.

The task of reformist leaderships within the proletariat and peasantry was to tie the masses to the bourgeois State apparatus through political alliances with these local bourgeoisies, leading to the weakening and disorientation of revolutionary forces and the subsequent rightward shift of middle sectors that found no solution to their conditions.

What reformism has demonstrated is that it once again places itself at the feet of governments that are nothing more than servants of foreign capital. Thus, when in 2023 Lula reintegrated Brazil into CELAC, he simultaneously accepted the entry of U.S. troops into the Amazon. Likewise, Xiomara Castro, president of Honduras since 2022 and current head of CELAC, has maintained collaboration with U.S. military bases installed in the Central American country.

Trump announced and has begun deporting thousands of migrants to Latin American nations. The region’s presidents had no option but to accept this policy, which threatens the lives and dignity of migrant workers. In the early days, dozens of Brazilians arrived home in handcuffs, provoking nothing more than a protest note from Lula.

Colombian president Gustavo Petro, after speaking with Trump days after publishing a tweet with his “forceful response” to the White House businessman regarding the conditions under which migrants were being sent, was forced to accept the arrival of Colombian deportees on military aircraft. This showed that one can say anything on social media, but in reality there is no choice but to bow one’s head before the empire. Likewise, Sheinbaum, in talks with Trump, negotiated a one-month suspension of tariffs in exchange for sending 10,000 soldiers to guard the southern U.S. border, continuing Obrador’s policy of erecting a wall of bullets and detentions throughout the country against migrant workers. Now Bukele offers El Salvador as a prison for Latin American migrants, while transfers of detained migrants to Guantánamo Bay in Cuba have begun.

This, then, is the grim reality of the so-called Latin American “Axis of Resistance”: the same servile subordination that masquerades as anti-imperialism while yielding to the extortion of U.S. financial capital. Under the command of these native bourgeoisies, we will continue to be the backyard of Yankee imperialism. Domestic officials keep safeguarding imperialist business at the cost of starvation wages, growing misery, and killings of the most vulnerable population. It is cynical how reformism attempts to retell the tale of 1990s Chavismo, without even holding their noses at the disaster left behind by the policy of “twenty-first-century socialism.”

Of course, the solution will not come from the right-wing faction of this bourgeoisie servile to capital either—those who demand direct U.S. intervention to “save” their countries from the supposed threat of “communist governments.” The maneuvers available to Bolivarian governments are limited by their fear that the masses might truly take anti-imperialist struggle into their own hands and throw their diplomatic speeches into the trash. The same occurs in the Middle East, with Hamas’s native bourgeoisie capitulating to the Yankee-Zionist State of Israel.

The only way to truly confront imperialism is for the tasks of national liberation and the conquest of genuine democracy to be taken into the hands of the proletariat, leading the exploited peasant majorities, the urban unemployed, and the millions of youth watching their future shatter under the rising cost of living. In the face of this economic and political misery offered by reformism, a genuine revolutionary Marxist party is needed—one that unmasks the deceptions of native bourgeoisies and their faithful reformist servants within the ranks of the proletariat.

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Down with imperialism!

Forward to the world socialist revolution!

For the refoundation of the Fourth International!