The Footnote and the Fire, Trump’s Venezuela Gambit, Five Centuries of Pillage, and the Unbroken Chain of Imperial Plunder
On the surface, it is a discrete event, contained in time and space: the President of the United States, Donald Trump, orders military intervention in Venezuela. Commentators in Western capitals wring their hands over the destruction of the “rules-based international order.” Analysts debate the legality of the action under international law. Pundits speculate about oil prices, regional stability, and the fate of the Venezuelan people. The event is treated as a rupture—an aberration from the norms of civilised state conduct, a shocking departure from the post-1945 consensus that sovereign nations, however weak, are entitled to non-interference in their internal affairs.
This framing, as Suhit K. Sen argues in the accompanying essay, is not merely inadequate; it is deliberately amnesiac. It severs the present from the past, the individual act of aggression from the five-century structure of violence that made it possible and, from the perspective of imperial logic, necessary. Trump’s invasion of Venezuela is not a rupture; it is a continuation. It is not a departure from the norms of Western conduct toward Latin America; it is the latest iteration of those norms, updated for the 21st century but unchanged in their essential character. It is, in Sen’s memorable formulation, a footnote in the bloody and barbarous history of the colonial subjugation and raping of the world by the ‘West’ .
This is not a rhetorical flourish; it is a methodological claim. To understand the present, one must excavate the past. The genocide of the indigenous populations of the Caribbean and the Americas that followed Columbus’s landing in 1492, the enslavement of African peoples to extract the continent’s mineral wealth, the replacement of magnificent civilisations with European administrative structures, the imposition of comprador regimes to manage newly independent states in the 19th century, the financing and orchestration of coups against democratically elected socialist governments in the 20th century, and the military intervention against the elected government of Nicolás Maduro in the 21st century—these are not discrete episodes in the history of a region. They are chapters in a single book, whose plot is the systematic subordination of Latin America to the economic and geopolitical imperatives of Western capitalism.
The authors whom Sen mobilises—Guillermo Morón, Eduardo Galeano, Naomi Klein, Gregory Wilpert—are not merely chroniclers of this history. They are diagnosticians of its structure. They demonstrate, through theory and through human story, that the underdevelopment of Latin America is not an original condition or a failure of its peoples to adopt the correct policies. It is the structural byproduct of the development of the West—the necessary shadow cast by the bright light of metropolitan prosperity. The silver of Potosí, the sugar of Cuba, the rubber of the Amazon, the oil of Venezuela: each has been extracted, refined, and consumed in the service of accumulation elsewhere, leaving behind depleted landscapes, distorted economies, and dependent polities.
This is the context in which Trump’s invasion must be understood. It is not an act of madness or a departure from American tradition. It is the American tradition itself, operating according to its own internal logic, pursuing its own historic imperatives, and deploying its own familiar justifications. The names change—Pizarro, Rockefeller, Pinochet, Trump—but the structure endures.
The Dependency Framework: Underdevelopment as Structural Necessity
The intellectual architecture of Sen’s argument is dependency theory, the school of thought associated with André Gunder Frank, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and Enzo Faletto, and given its most powerful literary expression in Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America. Dependency theory emerged in the 1960s as a challenge to both classical Marxism and modernisation theory, both of which assumed that the underdeveloped world would eventually replicate the developmental trajectory of the advanced capitalist economies. Dependency theorists argued, to the contrary, that underdevelopment is not a stage but a condition—one that is actively produced and reproduced by the integration of peripheral economies into the global capitalist system.
The mechanism is straightforward. The core economies of the world system—first Britain, then the United States—require raw materials and primary commodities to fuel their industrial growth. The peripheral economies of Latin America are organised to supply these commodities, but the terms of trade are structurally biased against them. They export low-value raw materials and import high-value manufactured goods. The surplus value generated by their labour is not reinvested in their own development; it is repatriated to the core as profits, dividends, and interest payments. Their economies become specialised and dependent, incapable of generating the diversified industrial base that is the foundation of autonomous development.
This dependency is not a natural outcome of comparative advantage; it is enforced through violence. When peripheral economies attempt to break out of this structure—by nationalising natural resources, protecting domestic industries, or forging independent economic relations with other peripheral states—they are met with overwhelming force. The United States has overthrown governments in Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1964), Chile (1973), Argentina (1976), and countless other Latin American nations when they threatened to pursue autonomous development paths. It has trained and financed the security forces that have tortured and disappeared generations of trade unionists, journalists, and political activists. It has imposed structural adjustment programmes that have dismantled the welfare states and industrial policies painstakingly constructed over decades.
This is the context in which the Venezuelan tragedy must be understood. Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution was, in its essence, an attempt to break the chains of dependency. It sought to redirect the rents from Venezuela’s vast oil reserves from foreign shareholders and domestic oligarchs to the country’s impoverished majority. It sought to diversify the economy away from its pathological dependence on a single commodity. It sought to construct a participatory democracy that would empower communities that had been systematically excluded from political life. It was, in short, an attempt to do what every independent nation has the right to do: chart its own course, develop its own resources, and determine its own future.
It failed. It failed for many reasons: internal contradictions, strategic errors, the persistent vulnerability of an oil-dependent economy. But it failed, above all, because it was besieged—by the United States, which never accepted the legitimacy of the Chávez government; by its corporate allies, which financed and orchestrated opposition movements; by its ideological apparatus, which delegitimised the Venezuelan experiment as authoritarian and incompetent. The siege continues today, culminating in Trump’s military intervention. The Bolivarian Revolution is, for now, defeated. But its defeat is not evidence of its impossibility; it is evidence of the extraordinary power of the forces arrayed against it.
The Historiography of Conquest: Morón and the Limits of Liberal Apologetics
Sen’s critique of Guillermo Morón’s A History of Venezuela is not an academic exercise in historiographical correction. It is an intervention in the politics of memory. Morón’s history, written from an “unabashedly Eurocentric perspective,” performs a crucial ideological function: it naturalises the conquest as an inevitable, even benevolent, process of cultural transmission. The indigenous civilisations of Venezuela are acknowledged, but only as raw material for the creation of a new, mixed society. Their destruction is noted, but in “metaphorical parentheses”—a minor qualification to an otherwise triumphant narrative of progress.
This is not mere oversight; it is structural necessity. A history that took the genocide of the indigenous population as its central organising fact could not also celebrate the “civilising mission” of the Spanish Empire. A history that recognised the forced assimilation of surviving indigenous peoples as a form of cultural extermination could not also praise the “cultural intermingling and miscegenation” that produced contemporary Venezuelan society. Morón’s perspective is not neutral; it is constitutive of the colonial project itself. It renders the violence of conquest invisible by reframing it as the inevitable cost of progress, the regrettable but necessary prelude to the creation of a new, better world.
This historiographical operation is not confined to the colonial period. Morón’s account of post-independence Venezuela attributes the prevalence of dictatorship to the “temperament of the people”—a classic colonial trope that locates the causes of underdevelopment in the character of the underdeveloped rather than in the structures that constrain them. By erasing the role of British and American imperialism in shaping Venezuela’s political institutions, by ignoring the ways in which foreign powers have systematically undermined democratic governance when it threatened their interests, Morón produces an account of Venezuelan history that exculpates the imperial powers and blames the victims for their own suffering.
This is not merely bad history; it is dangerous history. It provides the intellectual justification for continued intervention. If Venezuelans are temperamentally unsuited to democracy, then the imposition of authoritarian rule by external powers is not a violation of their sovereignty but a necessary correction of their deficiencies. If Venezuela’s underdevelopment is the product of its own failures rather than the structural legacy of colonialism and neocolonialism, then the exploitation of its resources and labour by foreign corporations is not theft but trade. Morón’s history, in Sen’s reading, is not an innocent work of scholarship; it is an ideological weapon in the continuing war against Latin American autonomy.
The Bolivarian Experiment: Promise and Contradiction
Gregory Wilpert’s Changing Venezuela by Taking Power provides Sen with a nuanced, critical account of the Chávez administration’s efforts to construct an alternative to the neoliberal, dependent model of development. Wilpert’s analysis is notable for its refusal of both hagiography and demonology. It recognises the genuine achievements of the Bolivarian Revolution—the new constitution of 1999, with its innovative provisions for participatory democracy and its constitutional guarantees for women and indigenous peoples; the expansion of urban and rural land reforms; the nationalisation of key industries, including partial reclamation of the oil sector; the dramatic improvements in access to health and education for the poorest Venezuelans. But it also recognises the revolution’s failures and contradictions: the persistent dependence on oil revenues, which left the economy vulnerable to price shocks and discouraged diversification; the incomplete implementation of worker self-management in nationalised industries; the authoritarian turn that accompanied the escalating siege; the corruption and inefficiency that plagued state institutions.
This balanced assessment is essential for understanding both the promise and the tragedy of the Venezuelan experiment. The Bolivarian Revolution was not a utopia betrayed by a tyrannical leader; it was a genuine, if imperfect, attempt to construct an alternative to capitalist dependency. Its failure is not evidence that such an alternative is impossible; it is evidence of the extraordinary difficulty of constructing it in the face of overwhelming external opposition and internal constraints.
Sen’s comparative observation—that Cuba succeeded where Venezuela failed because it had the benefit of Soviet assistance in a bipolar world—is crucial. Chávez came to power in 1999, at the height of the unipolar moment. The Soviet Union had collapsed; the United States was the sole superpower; there was no alternative source of economic and military support for countries seeking to escape the orbit of Washington’s influence. The Bolivarian Revolution was, from its inception, strategically isolated. It faced the full, undivided hostility of the world’s most powerful state, with no countervailing power to moderate that hostility or provide alternative sources of assistance.
This is not an excuse for the revolution’s failures; it is an explanation of them. It is also a warning. If the United States is willing to deploy its full arsenal of economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure, covert action, and military force against a medium-sized country with significant oil reserves, what hope is there for smaller, weaker countries that might contemplate a similar path? The invasion of Venezuela is not merely a crime against the Venezuelan people; it is a message to the entire Global South. The message is simple: do not challenge the hegemony of the United States; do not attempt to forge an independent path; do not imagine that sovereignty means anything when it conflicts with the interests of the empire.
Conclusion: The Footnote and the Fire
Trump’s invasion of Venezuela will, in due course, be absorbed into the grand narrative of Western liberal internationalism. It will be treated as an aberration, a departure from the norms of civilised conduct, a mistake to be regretted and not repeated. Commentators will note that it was undertaken by an especially reckless and unconventional president, and that his successors will restore the traditional American commitment to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. The structural continuities between this invasion and the five centuries of imperial plunder that preceded it will be obscured, minimised, or denied.
Sen’s essay is a refusal of this amnesia. It insists that the invasion of Venezuela is not an aberration but a continuation. It insists that the categories of analysis deployed by liberal commentators—”rules-based international order,” “sovereign equality of nations,” “democratic norms”—are themselves products of a history of violence and domination that they simultaneously obscure and legitimise. It insists that the only adequate response to the latest act of imperial aggression is to name it accurately: as a footnote in a five-century history of colonial subjugation, as the latest chapter in the systematic plunder of Latin America’s resources and labour, as the violent enforcement of a global economic order that produces underdevelopment in the periphery and prosperity in the core.
This is not an argument for passivity or despair. It is an argument for clarity. The struggle for Venezuelan sovereignty and Latin American autonomy is not a new struggle; it is the continuation of a struggle that began the moment Columbus’s ships appeared on the horizon. It has been fought, and often lost, by generations of indigenous resisters, anti-colonial insurgents, socialist revolutionaries, and democratic reformers. It will be fought again, and again, and again, until the structures of imperial domination that produce these recurring crises are finally dismantled.
The invasion of Venezuela is a battle in this long war. It is a battle that, for now, the empire has won. But the war is not over. The forces that produced the Bolivarian Revolution—the hunger for dignity, the aspiration for autonomy, the refusal to accept that some peoples are born to rule and others to serve—have not been extinguished. They will find new expressions, new leaders, new strategies. They will continue to struggle, as they have struggled for five centuries, against the empire that has plundered their continent and crushed their hopes.
The footnote will be written. But the fire, as Galeano knew, will not be extinguished.
Q&A Section
Q1: What is dependency theory, and how does it explain the relationship between Latin American underdevelopment and Western development?
A1: Dependency theory is a school of thought that emerged in the 1960s challenging both classical Marxism and modernisation theory. It argues that underdevelopment is not a stage but a condition—actively produced and reproduced by the integration of peripheral economies into the global capitalist system. The mechanism operates through several channels. First, structural inequality in trade: peripheral economies export low-value raw materials and import high-value manufactured goods, with terms of trade structurally biased against them. Second, surplus extraction: the value generated by peripheral labour is not reinvested locally but repatriated to core economies as profits, dividends, and interest payments. Third, enforced specialisation: peripheral economies are organised to supply primary commodities demanded by the core, preventing the diversified industrialisation necessary for autonomous development. Fourth, political enforcement: when peripheral economies attempt to break out of this structure—through nationalisation, protectionism, or independent foreign policy—they are met with overwhelming force from the core, including military intervention, covert action, and economic sanctions. Dependency theorists thus argue that Western development and Latin American underdevelopment are not independent phenomena but two sides of the same coin: the prosperity of the core is structurally dependent on the immiseration of the periphery. This framework directly challenges narratives that attribute underdevelopment to cultural deficiencies or policy failures of Latin American nations.
Q2: What is the significance of Sen’s critique of Guillermo Morón’s A History of Venezuela, and what ideological function does Morón’s historiography perform?
A2: Sen’s critique is significant because it exposes how ostensibly neutral historical scholarship can function as an ideological weapon in the continuing subordination of Latin America. Morón’s history performs several interrelated ideological functions. First, naturalisation of conquest: by framing the Spanish colonisation as a “civilising mission” and the destruction of indigenous civilisations as the regrettable but necessary cost of progress, Morón renders the violence of conquest invisible and inevitable. The genocide is consigned to “metaphorical parentheses”—acknowledged but marginalised. Second, erasure of agency: indigenous peoples appear not as historical actors but as raw material for the creation of a new, mixed society through “cultural intermingling and miscegenation.” Forced assimilation is reframed as benign cultural exchange. Third, exculpation of imperialism: by attributing Venezuela’s post-independence history of dictatorship to the “temperament of the people,” Morón erases the role of British and American imperialism in shaping the country’s political institutions. The violence of imperial intervention becomes invisible; the responsibility for underdevelopment is displaced onto its victims. Fourth, legitimisation of intervention: if Venezuelans are temperamentally unsuited to democracy, then external imposition of authoritarian rule is not a violation of sovereignty but a necessary correction. Morón’s historiography is thus not an innocent work of scholarship but an ideological apparatus that justifies continued imperial domination.
Q3: What were the principal achievements and contradictions of Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution, according to Gregory Wilpert’s analysis?
A3: Wilpert’s analysis identifies significant achievements across three domains. Political: the 1999 constitution introduced innovative provisions for participatory democracy, including two additional branches of government for auditing and accountability, referenda for legislation and recall, and decentralisation of power to communities. Economic: nationalisation of key industries, including partial reclamation of the oil sector; promotion of worker cooperatives; gestures toward worker self-management; expansion of urban and rural land reforms to provide entitlements to the poor. Social: constitutional guarantees for women and indigenous peoples; dramatic expansion of state health and educational systems serving the poorest Venezuelans.
The contradictions were equally significant. Economic: persistent, even increased, dependence on oil revenues, leaving the economy vulnerable to price shocks and discouraging diversification; incomplete implementation of worker self-management; corruption and inefficiency in state institutions. Political: authoritarian turn as the escalating external siege and internal opposition prompted centralisation of power and suppression of dissent. Strategic: failure to build sustainable alternative economic relations to reduce dependence on the United States and its allies. Sen adds a crucial comparative observation: Cuba succeeded where Venezuela failed because it had the benefit of Soviet assistance in a bipolar world; Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution was strategically isolated in the unipolar moment, facing the full, undivided hostility of the world’s sole superpower with no countervailing source of support.
Q4: How does Sen’s analysis situate Trump’s invasion of Venezuela within the broader history of Western imperialism in Latin America?
A4: Sen’s analysis insists that Trump’s invasion is not an aberration or rupture but a continuation of a five-century structure of imperial domination. This structure has operated through distinct phases with consistent underlying logic. Colonial phase (1492-1820s) : genocide of indigenous populations; enslavement of African peoples; extraction of mineral wealth (silver, gold) for European enrichment; transplantation of European administrative, religious, and cultural institutions; forced assimilation of surviving indigenous peoples. Neocolonial phase (1820s-1945) : formal political independence accompanied by continued economic subordination; British and then American dominance of trade, finance, and investment; imposition of comprador regimes willing to manage dependent economies; military intervention when regimes threatened to pursue autonomous development. Imperial phase (1945-present) : U.S. hegemony enforced through overt military intervention (Guatemala 1954, Dominican Republic 1965, Grenada 1983, Venezuela 2026); covert action (CIA-orchestrated coups in Brazil 1964, Chile 1973, Argentina 1976); training and financing of security forces that terrorised domestic populations; structural adjustment programmes that dismantled welfare states and industrial policies; economic sanctions regimes that strangle economies of non-compliant states.
Trump’s invasion is the latest chapter in this unbroken history. It is not a departure from American tradition but the American tradition itself, operating according to its own internal logic, pursuing its own historic imperatives, and deploying its own familiar justifications. The names change—Pizarro, Rockefeller, Pinochet, Trump—but the structure endures.
Q5: What does Sen mean by describing the invasion of Venezuela as a “message to the entire Global South,” and what is the content of that message?
A5: Sen argues that the invasion functions as a disciplinary signal addressed not only to Venezuela but to every country in the Global South that might contemplate challenging U.S. hegemony. The message has several components. First, sovereignty is conditional: the nominal sovereignty of peripheral nations will be respected only as long as it does not conflict with the strategic and economic interests of the empire. When those interests are threatened, sovereignty is revoked. Second, independent development paths are prohibited: attempts to nationalise natural resources, protect domestic industries, or forge independent economic relations with other peripheral states will be met with overwhelming force. The Bolivarian Revolution’s crime was not its failures but its aspiration—the attempt to chart an autonomous course. Third, there is no alternative: the unipolar moment forecloses the possibility of seeking support from countervailing powers. Cuba could turn to the Soviet Union; Venezuela had nowhere to turn. The message is that the post-Cold War order is not merely unipolar but total. Fourth, resistance is futile: the full arsenal of imperial power—economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure, covert action, military force—will be deployed against any challenger, and that arsenal is overwhelming. The invasion is intended to demonstrate that the costs of resistance exceed any conceivable benefits.
This is not merely a message about Venezuela; it is a message about the structure of the global order. It announces that the era of decolonisation and Third Worldism is over; that the aspirations for autonomous development that animated the Bandung generation are, from the perspective of the empire, illegitimate; that the choice for peripheral nations is not between dependency and autonomy but between different forms of dependency. The message is designed to produce anticipatory compliance: to ensure that other nations, observing Venezuela’s fate, will not even attempt to follow its path.
