Venezuela's plan to resist a US invasion

Hi everyone it's Gemma Weir here from the conversation. Before we begin today's episode I'm asking for your support for what we do. Here at the conversation we team up academics with journalists to provide reliable information that helps create a more constructive conversation. We do that in hundreds of articles published on our site every day by editors in our 10 editions around the world and through podcasts like this one. And we make our work available at no cost because we believe that for democracy to thrive people need trustworthy information. If you want to support our mission then please consider becoming a monthly donor. You can do that by going to donate.theconversation.com. That's donate.theconversation.com. If you can donate you're choosing to support a healthier democracy so thank you. Now on with the episode. You're listening to the conversation. Nicolas Maduro is in full swing. It's December the 10th at a rally in Caracas and the Venezuelan president responding to mounting tensions with the US starts to sing. Be happy. La la la la la la la la la. Just be not far. He urges his supporters to be ready to smash the teeth of the North American Empire if necessary. The next day the US seizes an oil tanker off the Venezuelan coast. Venezuela accused the United States of international power. After US troops seized a oil president Trump just announced that he ordered a complete blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers going in and out of Venezuela. Since September US military operations in the Caribbean have killed at least 95 people in 25 strikes. Donald Trump has placed a $50 million bounty on Maduro's head and authorized the CIA to conduct covert lethal operations inside Venezuela. But Venezuela has been waiting for this moment. I'm Gemma Weyer from the conversation and news and analysis platform partnering journalists with academics. Welcome to the conversation weekly where experts explain how we ended up here. In this episode how Venezuelan has been preparing for a US invasion for over two decades. Pablo Oshua you're a PhD candidate in the Institute of the Americas at UCL in London. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. On November the 11th the USS Gerald of Ford the world's largest aircraft carrier arrived in the Caribbean off the coast of Venezuela. Where were you when you heard about this and what was your reaction to it? I was here in London and I have been following this escalation of US military actions in the Caribbean since September when Donald Trump started attacking those small boats allegedly carrying drugs into the US which actually there are lots of questions about whether they're actually doing that and even if they are drug traffickers. But for me it's been a bit of a surreal time because I think that we're kind of sleepwalking into that situation because it's kind of stealthily advancing towards something very dangerous there. Venezuela is a little bit of a unfinished business for Donald Trump. He said in one event and I think it was 23 in Florida that he in 2017 to 19 the United States had very harsh sanctions about Venezuelan oil particularly. When I left Venezuela was ready to collapse we would have taken it over we would have gotten all that oil it would have been right next door. So there was always this kind of feeling that Donald Trump might come back with a real strategy now. This is a region that's very rich in oil it's very rich in minerals as well and it's a region that is increasingly developing relationships with China with Russia Iran and I think the United States wants to reassert its hegemony in the region. To understand how Venezuela has been preparing for this moment we need to go back to 2002 and an attempted coup on the then president of the country Hugo Chavez. Take me back to that moment. What was happening then? At that time Chavez was very popular but the elite in Venezuela had been the ones that held power before Chavez. They decided to to depose him. It didn't last long because Chavez was very popular at the time. A group of military officers who were against Chavez deposed him. So this is the the Cine command and then you had the business man who was the president of the business union takes power as the new president. And the first thing he does is to dissolve Congress. This is a massive contrast with the popularity that Chavez had at the time and the fact that Chavez had been elected legitimately. Within 48 hours military officers who were pro-Chavez went and rescued him and then that's when he realizes that although he has come back he needs to do something to secure his position. What role did the US play here? The investigations that happened after the coup revealed that a lot of money from US taxpayers were sent to Venezuela and opposition organizations that were then involved directly in the coup. So even though the coup was an internal affair it was largely done and conducted with the help of the United States. How did this attempt to coup change Chavez's thinking about security? What did he do in the wake of it? That was different. Chavez is a military officer. So he tends to see security in a broad sense. And understanding that security was not just his own safety but how we make sure that people get food, how to make sure that we distribute oil and so on. And also how do we make sure that this military is not going to stage a coup against me. So the first instrument is to purge the army of the opponents. You promote the people who are with you and then there's a discussion on this new military thinking. Looking at adapting the military to a situation where it had to confront the enemies. There are basically three enemies there. There is the United States, the big one. They are not going to defeat the United States. So they have to come up with some sort of asymmetric warfare framework to deal with the United States. The United States at that time was an ally of Colombia. He was pouring billions of dollars in military assistance to Colombia. So Venezuela has to modernize and update its military according to Chavez to deal with Colombia. It within that context also come the guerrillas because the Colombian guerrillas they are kind of buffer in the Venezuela Colombia border. They are allowed to operate because they are going to make the life of the Colombia military. If they decide to invade they're going to make their life harder. And then there's the internal enemy which is of course a lot more controversial because then who is your enemy? That's the beginning of the military really stepping into things like managing the food distribution and key areas of the economy and key areas of governance as well. However Chavez does keep this to a certain level because he counts on the legitimacy. He wins elections. He is the leader of the Bolivarian Revolution. Okay so you say that Chavez was thinking a lot about sonaries in these three enemies. What was he reading? What was he thinking about in terms of other parts of the world that was influences thinking at this time? The two main influences were Vietnam and possibly at that time Iraq because I mean obviously Vietnamese army expelled the Americans just by making it so hard for the Americans to stay in. And the same thing with Iraq in different ways but also the basic idea here is that the fight is not just army against army. This is fight against people against an army. So Chavez had the invasion of Iraq in the forefront of his mind and Venezuela was named by the U.S. commander of the southern command the most senior U.S. military for the region as the biggest threat to American interests in the region. So he looked at this and said I mean I had this massive giant who's moving onto Venezuela and they have to do something about it. So in 2008 Chavez creates the Bolivarian militia. What was his goal in doing that and how did this feed into his wider thinking? So the militia is the embodiment of the people in arms and they try to reflect the population. So they are civilians who enlist themselves into the armed forces. In the beginning they were in the reserve but then this reserve has now become a fifth branch of the armed forces together with the Army, Navy, National Guard and the Air Force. So they are paid but their origin is from the civilian world. They didn't go through military education. Different units of the militia have different emissions. They have different weapons that they will use and sometimes it's not a weapon. Sometimes it's just surveillance and sometimes it's just to be able to keep the government informed on any suspicious movement of people because the militia has five million people according to the government. So this grown over the years. No way you could train these people as soldiers with the same level of training. So the militia has this idea that if any army comes in they will create the resistance. That's what they call the second stage of the war. I think the Venezuelans might be seen this current moment as the first stage of the war which is naval blockade. You have some bombs here. Very hard rhetoric. So they are preparing now for a second moment when they have to do this kind of a resistance deployment. Okay so Hugo Chavez died in 2013 and he was swiftly replaced by Nicholas Maduro. All the Venezuelan people may have fulfilled the dying wish of late President Hugo Chavez. They've elected his chosen success in Nicholas Maduro as a new president. Did that change Venezuela's thinking about its military preparedness particularly vis-a-vis an invasion from the US? Yes because Venezuela then becomes a lot more vulnerable. When Chavez dies, actually I was there in Venezuela when he died. I was a journalist for BBC Brazil in Washington and I was sent there. The first few days there was this kind of silence across Caracas but within only a few days you start to get a little bit of an arrest. What's gonna happen now because Maduro doesn't have the same popular appeal that Chavez has. And then Maduro starts to talk about the political military direction of the revolution. So before you had Chavez very much focusing on popular power and communal power but now Maduro is starting to shift things and he starts to talk about the political military direction of the revolution as the first time I hear this sentence in 2013. It was a contest elections but he won the election according to international observers. The problem of Maduro started in 2014 because then the opposition starts to become more emboldened and then you have the first massive protests against Maduro. And the opposition manages to win the legislative elections in 2015. Then the government changes the rules to make sure that some of those opposition legislators are not allowed into Congress. So you start to see Maduro play by a very different playbook then because he couldn't win the elections the same way that Chavez did. And in doing that he also relies on the military a lot more. So then in 2017 Donald Trump is elected president of the US for the first time and he begins to openly threaten regime change in Venezuela. The way I'm not going to rule out a military option. We have many options for Venezuela. How does Venezuela react to Trump's comments back then? I think Venezuela tries to negotiate with Trump because Trump is very ambiguous about what he wants in Venezuela. I think even now we're not entirely sure what he wants in Venezuela. He seems to be playing hardball this time whereas before you could offer for some companies to operate in in Venezuela and then he might take that as a deal. In Venezuela it really felt that moment because the economic situation wasn't good, was deteriorated even more. You have the mismanagement of the economy. The military is taking care of a lot of those sectors so it's inefficient and on top of this you have sanctions. Sanctions that are very draconian. US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley defended the move. It's a strong message for the people of Venezuela and it's a strong message to Maduro. And that's when Venezuela sees hyperinflation in a lot more unrest because in 2017 because of the economic situation in general the satisfaction with the government then you have more protests and you have a series of uprisings inside the military and the police forces. So at that point between 2017 and 19 it was a very fragile moment for the regime of Venezuela but again they managed to stay cohesive and really crack down on military people and civilians and a lot of millions of Venezuelans at that point live in Venezuela. They live to other parts of the world. Coming up after this short break from neighborhood surveillance to Maduro's second stage of war we look at how Venezuelan might actually react on the ground to a US invasion. Welcome back Pablo the US has significantly increased its military presence of Venezuela's coast this year and from the research that you've been doing about Venezuela's scenario planning what does the country think would happen if the US does decide to invade? I think Venezuela realizes that the United States has a lot of choices. They could for example strike to some parts of the country. They could send special operations. The United States seems to be playing with this idea of incremental pressure. Now if the Americans decided to invade they would face some resistance from the regular army but no one would be expecting the Venezuelan army to defeat the United States easily so they could with enough force overpower the Venezuelans and then try and establish a government and so on. The problem would be the second stage of war which would be the resistance that we were just talking about. What is Maduro's plan for that second stage of resistance? What that might entail what might happen? What they're trying to simulate is a sort of Vietnam. They are trying to make sure that any force wouldn't be able to rule over much of the territory because this would be covered by this civilian soldiers. Even if that's not perfect some of that would be probably enough to create a lot of chaos and create a sort of military quagmire in the country and make it very costly for the Americans to stay or for any ally of the Americans to stay. I think I'm going to step out of the military here and into the political just to think about what Venezuelans want if you take the result of the last election. The country's electoral authority or C.N.E. said Maduro had won a third six-year term with 51% of the vote. The election authority said Gonzales won 44%. But opposition leader Maria Corina Machado said Gonzales had secured 70% of the vote and that multiple independent exit polls and quick counts decisively showed his victory. But still 30% of the people who voted are still with Chavismo. So it's just some of those are willing to commit to fight and resist. You can have a situation where the Americans or the allies of the Americans in which case could be Maria Corina Machado, could be Edmondo Gonzales. They would just find a situation a country that's ungovernable and I think that's what they would try to do. And can you walk me through some of kind of the tools of the popular resistance that's in this scenario planning? What this territorial defense system does via the civilian soldiers is that they break down all the way through to parts of communities. So if you think that maybe 500,000 people live in a poor community in Port Barrio in Venezuela. So that barrier would be subdivided in areas and those areas would have different groups and then units of militia. So you would have a sort of fabric where you would be very difficult to penetrate because anyone seen as hostile would be attacked and the militia is given weapons to do that. Also the government has all other kinds of paramilitary groups that could help at that task as well. So this would be one sort of armed resistance. The other would be before you need to resort to arms that you have most of these people would be. They have been called by Maduro. The eyes and ears of the revolution. So there's now a mobile app where you can report your your neighbor or someone suspicious to the government. They actually some of the operations military police operations in Venezuela have been already dubs the operation toon toon because it's known as a knock on the door in the middle of the night. The more volatile the scenario the more this gets reinforced. This idea that spies could be everywhere at the stage. Exactly. Lispais was just someone who's a traitor. I think what happens with Maduro is that before Chavez he didn't really have to choose between authoritarian and democratic because he was winning elections. I was saved by God to make America great again. An autocrat loves a crisis. A crisis is the way that they mobilize their base. While America is under invasion from within we're under invasion from within. He's testing the boundaries of what he can get away with. We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military, our national guard but military. We've asked six of the world's preeminent scholars how we can measure the make of an autocrat. It's a recipe of sorts tried and tested by the most infamous leaders in history. Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Vladimir Putin in Russia. Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Victor Orbán and Hungary. He's basically bulletproof in terms of criminal prosecution. Join us from December 29 as we explore Trump the making of an autocrat from the conversation. The moment when that changes in Maduro certainly doesn't count on the same privilege as Chavez then he's relying a lot more on the authoritarian sort of playbook. And you talked earlier about how Venezuela hopes that this might be another Vietnam or even perhaps another Iraq in Latin America and that might serve as a perhaps deterrent not to do this not to invade. Do you think Trump is taking that seriously? I don't see signs that either Trump or the Venezuelan opposition is taking that seriously because I read things that political scientists write and they talk about power as if you could just stretch the person in the presidential palace and most of the work would be done and the next work to be done is the work of rebuilding the country according to them and I can see why you would want to rebuild as your task but for me the task would be to sustain. It might be relatively quickly that they change the person at the head of the regime but it definitely has to be beyond Maduro, beyond the 50 top people in the regime not to mention that you have military offices who are working on the civilian forums of the revolution. Would they just abandon and say this was a great experience now we're gonna move on after 25 years. I think that fair to say that there would be some resistance. How are other countries in the region responding to what's going on to this situation and what could a potential invasion of Venezuela by the US mean for the rest of South America? South America in the Caribbean as well. Both regions find themselves in very polarized politics. So the same polarization that you see alongside right and left in one country that's the what Venezuela, Venezuela is used politically by both left and right in those countries as a way of scaremongering so on. Venezuela is a very divisive issue in Latin America. It makes it difficult to find a common policy or common response. What makes the scenario even more complicated is because there are millions of Venezuela in the continent. So Venezuela is in Latin America a force that pushes the region towards the right wing and I think a lot of those countries would find it difficult to be so assertive against an American invasion but an American invasion is also something that it's a no-braining in terms of being unacceptable for most leaders but they would have to navigate the domestic political implications to find the exact position. Pablo thank you for talking us through that scenario planning that Venezuela is doing and what it means for the region we appreciate it. It's been great having you on. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. That's it for this week's episode of The Conversation Weekly. You can read more about the mounting tensions between the US and Venezuela on the conversation and we'll put some links in our show notes to those articles. This is our last regular episode of 2025. Thank you for being with us throughout the year and we hope you've learnt as much as I have from the academics we've been speaking to. While we're off on a short break over the Christmas holidays we'll be running a new series that making of an autocrat hosted by my colleague Justin Bergman on our feed. So do keep listening for that. It drops on the 29th of December. This episode was written and produced by Mendes Marijuana and me Gemma Weir with production assistance from Katie Flood. Sound mixing is by Michelle McLean and our theme music is by Nita Sal. If you'd like to get in touch with us you can email us directly at [email protected]. You can sign up for the conversation's free daily newsletter too by clicking on the link in our show notes. 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