[News] Venezuela Locked Down As US Coup Nears
Anti-Imperialist News
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Sun Nov 30 10:55:58 EST 2025
Venezuela Locked Down As US Coup Nears
The US has locked down Venezuela.
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Venezuela Locked Down As US Coup Nears
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Nate Bear <https://substack.com/@donotpanic>
Nov 30, 2025
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The US has locked down Venezuela. All flights in and out of the country
are cancelled. Twenty-nine million people are trapped and at the mercy
of the most bloodthirsty, unrestrained and immoral military in the
history of the world.
Trump tweeted late on Saturday that all airlines should consider the
airspace above Venezuela closed. Across social media people whined that
Trump had no authority to do such a thing. You can’t just tweet the
closure of an entire country’s airspace! A sovereign country! The
funniest tweet I saw said Trump was violating international law. This
received many approving retweets from, presumably, people who have
learned nothing from the last two years. Or the last twenty. Or the last
fifty. Or the last seventy.
<https://substack.com/redirect/65637791-3d7f-4f68-9453-1c57ce15d870?j=eyJ1IjoibHZwcGIifQ.9RIwWbE6EVIB7Jy8lfazxZKfps8R18neRGMKwOiqnRM>
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS INTERNATIONAL LAW.
There is US empire. There is imperial impunity. There is hard power.
There are B-52 bombers. There are eight-hundred American military bases
in eighty countries. There are strike teams. There are death squads.
There is mass child killing. There is enforced starvation. There are
genocides. There is apartheid. There /are/consequences for crossing the
empire, consequences which /are/often cloaked in the language and
justifications of international law.*But concrete, enforceable,
universalist international law that restrains violent state actions,
regardless of the offender? Not a chance. *
The US has extrajudicially murdered at least eighty Venezuelans in the
last few months, claiming they were running drugs, some of whom were
subsequently revealed to be impoverished fishermen just out fishing to
feed their families.
<https://substack.com/redirect/5ec187f8-22c0-4ef6-a686-158abfbc8448?j=eyJ1IjoibHZwcGIifQ.9RIwWbE6EVIB7Jy8lfazxZKfps8R18neRGMKwOiqnRM>
So no, there is no international law.
And yes, despite supposed norms and what the letter of the law says,
despite the fact that the leader of one country /shouldn’t /be able,
arbitrarily, to close the airspace of another, *there’s only hard
power.*Right now there is no air traffic over Venezuela in what appears
to be a prelude for a bombing campaign. A bombing campaign on the fake
pretext that the president of Venezuela, Nicholas Maduro, is the head of
a drug trafficking narco-gang.
Image
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FlightRadar24 image showing no air traffic over Venezuela
At least for Iraq they put in some effort. This latest fiction is
straight out of a Lee Child novel. And it is as laughable and badly
written as any Jack Reacher romp.
If you’re unfamiliar with the pretext the White House is invoking to
launch attacks on Venezuela and oust, or kill, Maduro, here’s some brief
background.
El Cartel de los Soles
The US government says Maduro is the head of a drug trafficking gang
called El Cartel de los Soles or the Cartel of the Suns. This name had
largely disappeared from the public record. But in recent months US
officials have dusted down the archives and revived a name they’re
extremely familiar with. The US government knows all about El Cartel de
los Soles, because they invented it.
This is not a conspiracy. This is a public record fact.
In the late 80s and early 90s, drug traffickers were eluding American
efforts to stop cocaine coming into the country. So the CIA and DEA came
up with a plan: they’d establish their own gang to illuminate and
infiltrate drug trafficking networks. To this end the CIA recruited the
head of Venezuela’s national guard anti-drug unit, General Ramon Guillen
Davila, who set up and operationalised the Cartel of the Suns. Under
Guillen Davila, the Cartel de los Soles shipped 22 tons of cocaine into
US cities. This bait cartel was shut down in 1993 when it lost its
utility to the US, only to be revived in 2025 as a pretext for bombing
Venezuela.
In 1993, US TV news magazine programme 60 Minutes ran an episode on it.
<https://substack.com/redirect/d5105ade-3703-4b92-9778-2ca791cc20df?j=eyJ1IjoibHZwcGIifQ.9RIwWbE6EVIB7Jy8lfazxZKfps8R18neRGMKwOiqnRM>An
in recent weeks even imperially loyal CNN has had to admit
<https://substack.com/redirect/83b8c3fd-7b5a-4171-bdf0-686f988cfead?j=eyJ1IjoibHZwcGIifQ.9RIwWbE6EVIB7Jy8lfazxZKfps8R18neRGMKwOiqnRM>that
this pretext might be a little far-fetched.
The US then /is inventing a story within a story. /The Trump
administration/is /reviving a bogeyman the US created in the first
place, and is placing a new bogeyman in Maduro atop their original
creation, /all so they can kill them both. /This is the Frankenstein’s
monster of regime change operations. Lee Child meets Mary Shelley.
And on this fiction, Justice Department lawyers are drafting a legal
rationale for an attack on Venezuela, a rationale that will allow Trump
to conduct military strikes (almost certainly a decapitation operation
against Maduro) without congressional approval. Trump’s tweet suggests
the rationale is drafted and the attack is imminent.
And just to be clear, Venezuela isn’t even a top five drug producing
country in Latin America. Colombia, Peru and Bolivia are far and away
the regional leaders in production. And Venezuela isn’t a particular
important transit point either. Logistically it doesn’t make sense. Most
volume comes overland through Mexico not thousands of miles across the
ocean.
So no, this isn’t about drugs. This is about two other, related things:
hemispheric dominance. And oil. Lots and lots of delicious oil.
US puppet Machado
They have said so themselves. Just the other day Republican
congresswoman Maria Salazar (the child of Cuban exiles and, predictably
therefore, a rabid proponent of intervention in Latin America), said
that offing Maduro “would be a windfall for us when it comes to fossil
fuels.” In an interview with Fox News
<https://substack.com/redirect/c985237a-2f8a-417a-98df-6468596a9b6e?j=eyJ1IjoibHZwcGIifQ.9RIwWbE6EVIB7Jy8lfazxZKfps8R18neRGMKwOiqnRM>she
gushed that “Venezuela has larger reserves than Saudi Arabia.”
And the US puppet that comes to power after Maduro, most likely Maria
Corina Machado, will gladly hand those reserves over. She also said so
herself. In an interview with Donald Trump Jr in October (yes, you read
that right), she said, with a frantic look in her eyes
<https://substack.com/redirect/0f64263a-2653-4c03-a10b-dc862b4e8838?j=eyJ1IjoibHZwcGIifQ.9RIwWbE6EVIB7Jy8lfazxZKfps8R18neRGMKwOiqnRM>,
“Forget Saudi Arabia, I mean we have more oil than them, I mean endless
possibilities! We will privatize our entire industry for you. American
companies will profit greatly!” Machado is also a crazed Zionist who has
described
<https://substack.com/redirect/a40d38ea-3a4c-4905-81e6-6c5c1390c415?j=eyJ1IjoibHZwcGIifQ.9RIwWbE6EVIB7Jy8lfazxZKfps8R18neRGMKwOiqnRM>Israel’s
struggle as Venezuela’s struggle. This is the woman who just won the
Nobel Peace Prize. It’s all so wildly outrageous and transparently evil
that it would be funny if the consequences for millions of people
weren’t life or death.
<https://substack.com/redirect/11dab287-7a94-42b7-84c6-f7b485c33120?j=eyJ1IjoibHZwcGIifQ.9RIwWbE6EVIB7Jy8lfazxZKfps8R18neRGMKwOiqnRM>
Machado on Trump Jr’s podcast
This new regime change episode has echoes of 1989, when the US invaded
Panama to remove Manuel Noriega, the leader of Panama and a former CIA
asset who was paid millions by the US for spying on left-wing groups in
the country. Noriega was a legitimate drug runner, and the CIA
overlooked his side hustle because of his value as an anti-communist,
anti-socialist agent. He also, in the end, like all those who foolishly
get in bed with US imperial power, outlived his usefulness.
In the case of Maduro, however, the claims of his drug-running status
are entirely fictional.
But nothing has, or will, stop the US in its bloodlust and oil-lust.
America is a sick, twisted and depraved structure of global imperial
control. And we should recognise why a decapitation strike is the form
of attack we’re about to see. Because for the last two years, first
under Biden and then under Trump, the US has gleefully authorised its
revolting Middle East proxy to undertake such strikes. In Lebanon, in
Iran, in Yemen and in Qatar, Israel, with US weapons and intelligence,
has assassinated scores of political leaders. The unadulterated manly
power of missile-striking an opponent to death just can’t be matched. To
men like Trump, Netanyahu, Biden, Obama and all those before them, the
frisson, the glory, the control, and the domination such an attack
broadcasts is the peak of power. This god-like power is, for these
men-beyond-laws, the peak of human existence itself.
The oil is the prize. A display of American military power in the region
a bonus.
So Venezuelan airspace is closed.
Over one hundred flights a day no longer operational.
No domestic or international flights. No freight. No deliveries.
A country waiting for the benevolent bombs to fall as US empire
continues its decades long global rampage of terror in the name of oil
and resourcesfreedom.
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Comment
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Restack
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© 2025 Nathan Bear
UK
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