From Venezuela to Gaza to U.S.: Trump’s Wars Against the People

Solidarity National Committee

Posted November 4, 2025

THE SERIAL MURDERS committed by the Trump regime in blowing up small boats in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean, on the untested and almost certainly false claim that these are “drug smuggling vessels,” are world-class crimes in their own right. At this writing the victims of these assaults number over 60, with no accountability and no end in sight.

It is an astonishing sign of our times that these atrocities receive so little outrage, blending into the background noise of the daily crimes against humanity perpetrated by this administration both globally and at home. We need to look more closely at the extreme menace they represent.

First, Trump’s intention to wage war on Venezuela, in order to install a pro-U.S. puppet regime in that country, is out in the open. This scheme is supposed to be accomplished through some combination of CIA operations that Trump boasts he’s authorized inside Venezuela, economic strangulation, and possibly direct military action if it’s not feasible to organize an internal coup. (Alternatively, though less likely, U.S. imperialist goals might be achieved through massive economic and political concessions by the Maduro regime, particularly regarding access to Venezuela’s oil resources.)

Second, the goal is not only crushing whatever hopes remain from the early 2000s “Bolivarian Revolution.” More strategically important, it aims to isolate Colombia’s moderately leftwing government, strengthen Trump’s alliance with the far-right regime of Argentina, and embolden the military forces hoping to bring back the days of neo-fascist rule in Brazil under Trump’s friend Jair Bolsonaro — whose pardon he’s demanding as a price for lifting punitive tariffs on Brazil’s exports to the United States.

No doubt the U.S. temptation to intervene is strengthened by the fact that the Maduro government is repressive and unpopular. This kind of gunboat-diplomacy scenario is not so attractive to Trump’s MAGA base, to which he deceptively promised no more “endless wars” and Iraq-scale chaos that would likely ensue. It does represent, however, the perspective of the militarist-neocon wing of the Republican cult, notably Trump’s Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio.

For Rubio, Venezuela is only the initial target. He has long fantasized of bringing about regime change in Cuba to complete the project of restoring the order of U.S. capitalist hegemony in Latin America.

Trump’s terror bombing of the boats not only satisfies his well-known personal insecure masculinity. It serves more importantly as a test of how far he might be able to go – bombing Venezuelan targets, assassinating officials, kidnappings? – before finally meeting Congressional or court resistance which so far is largely absent.

Third, we have to understand Trump’s crimes in the Caribbean in a much broader global scenario.

After boastfully campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize, Trump like his wretched predecessor Biden is enabling Israel’s genocide in Gaza to carry on under the thin veil of the ceasefire agreement, which the Netanyahu government, of course, never had any intention to respect.

Trump dispatched his acolytes Kushner, Witkoff and vice-president Vance as “Bibi-sitters” to keep Netanyahu within the boundaries of behavior that prohibit his outright cancellation of the ceasefire – something the Gulf kingdoms can’t tolerate in the face of popular anger in the Arab world. But so long as the ceasefire remains formally in place, the Israeli state can use any pretext for daily bombings that often kill as many Gazans as during the full-scale war.

Israel blatantly holds back essential food, medicine and essential supplies from the population of the utterly destroyed Gaza Strip, with cold weather soon setting in. The brutal military-settler destruction of Palestinian life in the West Bank continues without interruption, unconstrained by Trump’s pronouncements that Israel will not officially annex the territory, at least not yet.

So Trump’s imperialist crimes in the Caribbean are not to be considered separate from Washington’s total indifference to the genocide of the Palestinian people. And this is not the total picture either. The dismantling of USAID, for example, means that desperately needed assistance is not available for the survivors of the climate-change Hurricane Melissa catastrophe in Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Bermuda, or mass starvation in Sudan.

On the surface, the United States may seem not to be responsible for the carnage in Sudan. In reality, however, it’s a major U.S. strategic Middle East ally – the United Arab Emirates – that funds the Rapid Support Forces perpetrating the full-scale genocide in Darfur.

Fourth, Trump’s war on the world’s people is very much part of the same brutal assault his regime is waging against the U.S. population. Can blowing up boats in international waters be a test not only for the possibility of bombing Venezuela, but perhaps also lethal force against U.S. dissident populations?

Masked and unaccountable ICE and Border Patrol gangs roam the streets of U.S. cities, kidnapping and disappearing non-citizen and sometimes citizen residents as well, manhandling protesters, pepper-spraying bystanders and indeed police officers. If that doesn’t produce mass deportations on a sufficient scale, as it probably is not, Trump says he will deploy the National Guard and the military itself to carry out deportations and crush protests.

There must be immediate demands, obviously, for “ICE Off Our Streets” and, in particular, to stop the horrendous deportation of refugees from Venezuela’s collapsing economy and the desperate situation in Haiti (while Trump says he’ll gladly welcome seven thousand white Afrikaners from South Africa and eliminate all other refugee admissions).

At the same time, the right wing with astonishing speed is wiping out many central victories of the U.S. civil rights revolution, including voting rights and protections from job and housing discrimination as well as police brutality.

Under cover of the government shutdown, millions of people are about to lose access to essential food support and health care. And the federal government itself is being stripped of precisely those functions that provide actual services that people really need, while enhancing the military and the apparatus of repression.

How far will any of this go? In essence, as far as Trump and the far right are allowed before popular resistance stops them. How that can be accomplished is an entire set of strategic challenges – for the immigrant defense and Palestine solidarity movements, for mobilizations against the war on Latin America, for defense of democratic rights and, crucially, for the labor movement that must ultimately play a central role.

What must be clear from the outset is that these are not separate struggles. Blowing up boats in Caribbean and Pacific waters is not a sideshow. It is a display of imperial-presidential arrogance and impunity with appalling implications for us all.