On January 3, US imperialism launched a military attack on Venezuela, kidnapping President Nicolás Maduro and Deputy Cilia Flores and opening a new and profoundly uncertain chapter in the country’s relationship with Washington. After more than a decade of sanctions and economic warfare aimed at forcing regime change, Venezuela is now navigating asymmetric negotiations with the United States. While some sanctions have been eased and space has opened for investment, the broader framework of coercion remains in place.
In this interview, William Castillo, who is director of the Antiblocade Observatory, reflects on the evolution and devastating impact of the economic war, the concessions and agreements emerging from the negotiations, and the decision to pursue dialogue after the January attack. He argues that Venezuela has suffered a defeat and a violation of its sovereignty, but that the Bolivarian project itself has not been defeated. Moreover, preserving its political existence is the necessary condition for rebuilding and advancing.
Cira Pascual Marquina: It’s now been well over a decade since Hugo Chávez’s death. That was the moment that Washington decided to move hard for regime change in Venezuela, tightening unilateral coercive measures into what became a full-scale economic war on the Bolivarian process. Take us back to how that war unfolded, and the price paid by working people and the government along the way.
William Castillo: We could go back even further: Venezuela has now spent more than a quarter century under political and economic pressure, enduring acts of aggression by US imperialism and its international partners. In turn, the country has resisted for more than a quarter century. That’s easy to say, but we need to recognize the scale of the resistance the Venezuelan people have mounted while trying to build a new political model that is based on direct democracy and protagonistic participation, a model for redistributing national income, for social justice, for equality—a socialist project.
That pressure never let up, but it intensified sharply after Comandante Chávez’s death. Washington’s interpretation of the situation was simple to the point of simplistic: the Bolivarian Revolution would collapse once its leader was gone, so that was the moment to push it over the edge.
That’s how, in 2014–15, what we’ve called the blockade began: a multiform, highly aggressive campaign of coercive measures, punishment, and persecution aimed at the Venezuelan state, at the economy (the oil industry above all, and also public finances), and at strangling Venezuela’s foreign trade more broadly. All this was meant to manufacture a profound social and economic crisis that would ultimately lead to regime change.
It was roughly the same strategy that had been tried before 2014, just accelerated. And the goal was never hidden. US officials said as much themselves: they wanted to change the constitutional model, eliminate the danger of the Venezuelan example, and end our participatory democracy and our redistribution mechanisms. They wanted the Left option to die.
That process has now gone on for more than ten years, involving new US laws, executive orders, and the confiscation of Venezuelan accounts abroad. To this day, $22 billion of Venezuelan funds remain frozen in the international banking system. Our assets have been confiscated—above all CITGO, but also other assets in Colombia and the Caribbean, taken under the pretext of sanctioning the Venezuelan government, but which amounted to an operation of economic dispossession.
There were always two sides to it: a political operation of aggression and regime change, and simultaneously an operation of plunder—seizing resources, seizing ships, seizing Venezuelan aircraft captured in other countries, and detaining vessels in the Caribbean. Behind all of this aggression there was always the threat of a possible military intervention. The United States never denied that among its options—the famous “all options on the table”—there was, as a last resort, a military operation in Venezuela to achieve regime change.
By 2020, the year of the pandemic, Venezuela’s economy was a quarter the size it had been in 2012, under Chávez. Three-quarters less production of goods and services, three-quarters less in wages, in benefits for workers, in income, in public budgets for education, healthcare, and social programs in general.
The asphyxiation was so severe that it even hit the private sector. In theory, it wasn’t covered by the sanctions, but in practice, many necessary commercial operations, like bringing in inputs, goods, and raw materials for Venezuela’s conventional economy, were blocked or partially blocked. That generated the crisis from 2016-2017 through to 2021, the end of the pandemic. They imposed more than a thousand measures—1,089, to be exact—on the state, the government, the president, the ministries, and public enterprises, but also on foreign companies, with Chinese and Russian companies being sanctioned for maintaining economic relations with Venezuela.
That established a kind of “sanitary cordon” around the Venezuelan economy, and Venezuela was thus isolated from the international financial system and from international trade. We had to improvise, to carry out operations that were undeclared. And we did that, it should be said, with the support of countries that took the risk of backing Venezuela to get around the blockade and maintain at least some foreign trade that could guarantee Venezuela goods, services, food, medicine, and vaccines.
The damage was very serious. The Venezuelan people felt it in hyperinflation, the destruction of their wages along with the social security and pension systems, impoverishment, worsening malnutrition, and an unprecedented wave of migration: families separated, businesses closed, capital flight. It was a situation like nothing seen before.
That shaped the image many still have of Venezuela today, as a country that never quite emerges from crisis. The US’s strategy behind all of it was to blame twenty-first-century socialism—“look at what socialism did to Venezuela, one of the richest countries.” However, behind that whole narrative was a policy of coercion and aggression that escalated to a new level in 2025, culminating in what Trump had already hinted at back in 2017, when he first said he was considering a military option against Venezuela.
CPM: You’ve described a process of outright economic war that has lasted close to twelve years. Could you explain a bit about the concessions they have exacted from Venezuela, and the agreements that have been reached since January 3?
WC: Yes. The first thing I would say is this: the military aggression was asymmetric; the blockade was asymmetric. Remember: the sanctions playbook is a gangster policy, where powerful economies like the United States and the European Union restrict the economies of small countries precisely to extract political advantage, force regime change, or seize those countries’ resources.
Just as the blockade was asymmetric and the military aggression was asymmetric, the negotiation is equally asymmetric. Negotiations are happening in conditions where the underlying coercion, both the sanctions and the military threat, remain in place. All that has changed is that the United States has begun issuing a set of licenses and administrative measures that don’t lift the sanctions, but do open up space for negotiation over the return of investment to Venezuela. However, all of this is done in line with the United States’ own global strategic interests: control over resources and energy supply chains here in Venezuela, as the country with the world’s largest reserves, has become an obvious target.
One of the first things put in place after January 3—after years of economic war, a naval siege and the bombing of our country—is a mechanism that makes Washington into the “receiver” of Venezuela’s resources. I want to say something that the world should be listening to: under the UN Charter, no country has the right to control another country’s resources, to have them pass through an account, be audited, and only then be authorized for use.
To be clear, it’s not that the money isn’t coming into Venezuela. It is, but through a draconian, illegal mechanism imposed over the terms governing Venezuela’s export revenues. Paradoxically, this mechanism establishes for the first time that Venezuelan oil proceeds are Venezuelan government funds. That is important since, as a result of the blockade, Venezuela has debts that exceed $200 billion.
So on the one hand, they put in place an illegal mechanism. On the other, it ends up protecting Venezuela’s funds and assets from creditors. It’s difficult to explain this without it sounding like I’m calling the mechanism good. The dark side is that we arrived at this strange arrangement through illegal policy steps, including sanctions and a military attack. What we have is a kind of jointly administered drip-feed system.
Alongside that, they have been issuing broad licenses from the sanctions to some companies. This began with the oil sector, but private-sector participation in energy was permitted, then mining, now coal. A window has also been opened for Venezuela’s possible return to the SWIFT banking system. Sanctions on the Central Bank are now reduced, and so on. Then there are commercial licenses for any US company and also for companies connected to the United States (since European and Asian companies tied to the US system are also part of this negotiation).
Some windows of opportunity are opening, but this is happening within a framework where the aggression continues, where the sanctions remain in place, and where the language being used is meant to suggest that Venezuela has surrendered completely: “Now I control the world’s largest reserves, and now I direct the Venezuelan government.” I call this rhetoric the “diplomacy of humiliation.”
Trump is manufacturing a discourse that does not coincide with the facts; we see the same thing with Iran and his supposed victories in the Strait of Hormuz. His rhetoric is radically revisionist. Now, the fact that Venezuela is managing to bring in some resources to sustain its economy is projected as if it were a protectorate of sorts, as if Venezuela were handing over its sovereignty to the United States. This is not the case!
Our situation is an unprecedented one. There’s no real antecedent for it. I think one of the difficulties in grasping this new situation, in understanding how novel it is, is that we need new tools to understand these new processes.
If we try to read it through the old binary logic, good and bad, imperialism versus colony—the categories we’re used to working with—the situation exceeds those categories. And thus, some say: “Here is the new colony, Venezuela as the new model.” Of course, there is a real danger in all of this, as an experiment to be applied to other countries; no doubt about it. We’ve seen this before in history, with imperialism testing models and then rolling them out elsewhere.
Venezuela has been a laboratory over the past 25 years for testing instruments of commercial war, destabilization, and political warfare in Latin America. There’s no question about that. But we also have to understand the nature of this moment, and that can only be explained from Venezuela’s own vantage point.
I think the problem is that many look at this too much from outside, from the Global North, without really trying to understand our reasoning, what’s actually at stake for Venezuela, and why Venezuela is doing what it’s doing.
CPM: Some have interpreted Venezuela’s turn toward negotiation after January 3 as pure pragmatism. How do you understand that decision, and where does it leave the Bolivarian project going forward?
WC: January 3 is a historical turning point. Things aren’t going to be the way they were before. Historical turning points are defined by the way they change the course of history: they are events significant enough to reshape relations of power, to redirect the course of events, and to bring about things that didn’t exist before, or new things that hadn’t been done before. That’s exactly why they produce uncertainty and perplexity, which has happened to many revolutions at different moments in history.
From the standpoint of Venezuela—and this is the framework I’d urge people to adopt—that historical turning point brought several priorities to the fore. The first was defending the country’s peace and defending the lives of the Venezuelan people, considering the real existing conditions. The Venezuelan people were not only attacked, but also threatened with an aggression far more violent than what we actually saw on January 3.
One option was to resist without the military instruments other countries have and without real support from abroad, and to pay the cost of that confrontation. No state wants to see its people die in a war, but sometimes it has to. Confrontation is always followed by negotiation, and hypothetically it can give leverage at that table. Our alternative was another: resist in a different way, knowing that meant self-immolation, the deaths of thousands more Venezuelans, and the definitive defeat of the Bolivarian revolution. That’s what was at stake, and that’s what we preserved: the lives of the Venezuelan people, and the internal political peace Venezuela had won back in 2017, when it defeated a violent wave of guarimbas [fascist protests] that killed more than 80 people. We chose the path of peace, the path of negotiation. And what’s the asset you have to negotiate with? Political power.
The operation on January 3 was a regime-change operation. What they were after was liquidating the Bolivarian Revolution. They defeated it militarily; they wounded its sovereignty, even our dignity as revolutionaries—as a country that has to reckon with what happened on January 3—whether it wants to or not, but they did not defeat the political project.
We were forced to shift from being the aggressed party to negotiating with the aggressor. We chose the path of moving from that aggression toward negotiation. Again, it was a difficult decision—we’re negotiating from a position of weakness, having to make more concessions than we’d like—but one that lets us keep developing our political project, keep building, and recover resources for a pueblo in need after more than a decade of scarcity and hardship. Some have called this pragmatism.
There’s a pragmatic component to it but also a strategic one: the understanding that only a revolution that exists, only a political process that survives, can rebuild itself, rebuild relations, and recover ground on sovereignty that has undeniably been damaged. Sacrificing everything while the constitutional president is in enemy hands—whose liberation is, no doubt, part of a confidential agenda within the negotiation—meant confronting the following question: what future could the Bolivarian Revolution actually offer the Venezuelan people, if the alternative is the massacre of thousands of Venezuelans, the destruction of Venezuela’s armed forces, the bombing of several cities, and an imminent crisis with no precedents? I think the path chosen was the rational one, the political one, the strategic one, and also the pragmatic one—carrying this forward into other scenarios that are uncertain, but that can potentially preserve the Bolivarian Process.
No one has all the answers. No one can guarantee that a negotiation won’t be betrayed by the very party that attacked you. With imperialism, you never really know. What we are saying is: here we are, we exist—as Bolívar is said to have put it in 1822, let us exist first, so that we can move forward. If we don’t exist, we can’t advance. I don’t think Venezuela’s future is a rosy one, an idyllic one. Revolutionary processes, in their moments of advance, can generate an expectation of great hope; in our case, there’s a lot of pain but also hope because the country is still standing.
I want to conclude by pointing to something important. The numbers don’t tell the whole story, but Venezuela was recovering economically before January 3. I think the aggression was also a kind of flight forward by the United States, because Venezuela had, bit by bit, with a great deal of difficulty, been defeating many of the coercive measures imposed against it.
If we can keep moving forward on that path—again, within a negotiation embedded in a global geopolitics of energy, of confrontation, of the threat of world wars—but one where we can preserve our people’s peace, our people’s lives, and secure better conditions to keep building our political project, then, in our particular conditions, I think that’s a responsible decision. It’s a historic decision, one that faces challenges and uncertain outcomes.