When the U.S. Army Osprey planes crossed the sky over Caracas last May 23 in a —perhaps unnecessary— military drill, something that had been quietly brewing for months finally came to light. The chavista bases that sustained the Bolivarian revolution for 27 years —the collectives, party cadres, popular movements— are revolting against the new order imposed by Washington in Venezuela. The complaints and warnings from chavista allies are increasingly open and harsh, although it remains unclear whether they are enough to put Delcy Rodríguez in trouble.
The reactions to U.S. tutelage over the country since the military intervention on January 3, in which Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores were captured, have shifted from bewilderment to outrage. The former enemy of chavismo, U.S. imperialism, is now an ally setting the country’s pace, conducting military maneuvers, and even announcing the international trips of the acting president. And the bases that for decades shouted “Yankee go home” don’t quite know what to make of that.
The discontent has been quietly brewing since January 3, but a few weeks ago, a guerrilla of chavista influencers began raising the flag of betrayal. Two staunch chavista propagandists, Mario Silva, host of the program La Hojilla, and the Argentine Diego Suárez, known as Michelo, turned up the volume on the complaint: those in power today, they said, cooperated with the imprisonment of Maduro and Flores in New York. They sowed doubts about the bitter pill chavismo is struggling to swallow after the fall of its leader: the U.S. baton.
When the noise on social media seemed to have died down, the Venezuelan government itself handed over Alex Saab —Maduro’s closest collaborator, turned hero and martyr of anti-imperialism after years of campaigning in his favor— to U.S. justice. The Colombian businessman is now a piece in Washington’s hands that could be key in the ongoing process against Maduro. Faced with the huge controversy sparked by the handover, the acting president settled the matter with a single defense: that every decision made since January 3 has been “in the interest of the nation.”
Last weekend, the discontent found its image. Two U.S. military planes landed in Caracas —the same city they had bombed five months earlier— in what Foreign Minister Yvan Gil presented as an “emergency evacuation drill.” On board was the head of Southern Command, General Francis Donovan, followed by about twenty marines dressed in camouflage. In the streets, some banners with the old cry “Yankee go home” could be seen, and there were three small but significant protests: for many chavistas, seeing those planes in the Caracas sky with the government’s own permission was an obscenity.
One of Saturday’s protests, called by Comunes, a current of grassroots leftist organizations, turned into a petition against the drill that gathered more than 5,000 signatures in a few days. “Most have been grassroots chavistas, from chavismo’s structures,” says Antonio González, a sociologist and part of this front. For him, what is at stake is the core nerve of the revolution: “There is a nationalist feeling that was chavismo’s great coordinate and that its leadership is no longer responding.”
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González adds to that grievance the reform to the hydrocarbons law, negotiated to suit Donald Trump’s interests. For the sociologist, a government not elected by the people has no strength to stand up to Washington. “The loss of popular sovereignty has led us to the loss of national sovereignty.” The solution, he says, is free elections. “Maduro’s removal lasted 40 minutes and the drill planes were in the country for about four hours, but it will take us decades to get the United States out.”
No one in the National Assembly wanted to give explanations. Journalist and former chavista official Mary Pili Hernández demanded that the Parliament —led by Jorge Rodríguez, brother of the acting president— clarify why the deputies had not authorized the maneuver, as the Constitution requires for any foreign military mission in the country. “When did the NA authorize the U.S. military exercise in Caracas, which even included the head of Southern Command?” she wrote on her social media. No one responded. Neither the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) bench nor the opposition. All remained silent.
Criticism also came from the most ideological sectors of chavismo. Elías Jaua, who was vice president under Hugo Chávez and minister under Maduro, thanked in a statement the gestures of rejection on the day of the drill and predicted the start of a “civic resistance.” Perhaps May 23, he wrote, will go down in history “not as the day the foreign occupier dared to carry out military exercises on national soil, but as the day the civic resistance began that will lead us to recover our national independence.” It was the second time in a few days that Jaua was linked to criticism of the chavista leadership.
Even within chavismo in power, the hints of protest after the drill slipped in, albeit quietly. Deputy Jorge Arreaza —former minister under Chávez and Maduro— made no statements nor signed communiqués. He limited himself to posting an image of the Venezuelan flag on his social media, the same gesture he had used when Trump threatened to make Venezuela the 51st state of the Union. It was enough for others to read it as a stance.
Fury is growing among the collectives and grassroots organizations, the same ones Maduro called on last year to take up arms if the United States dared to enter Venezuela. Now with them inside, a leader of these organizations who prefers to remain anonymous vents daily via WhatsApp and threatens mobilizations. “You can imagine the outrage,” he says. “This was not a drill, it was an invasion, a show of force and intimidation toward a rival with hands tied and a gun to the head,” he claims. The groups he belongs to are full of posts in which Delcy Rodríguez appears as a traitor. “The leaders who should be the first to prevent this are the first to lend themselves to the act,” he denounces. “The people of Bolívar and Chávez are being vilely trampled right in their face.”
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