Mainstream media’s nonsense reporting about Venezuela omits the most important truths, including the 1976 C.I.A.-linked torture/murder of the father of Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who Trump declared to be now in charge.
U.S. Air Force crew chiefs watch an F-35A Lightning II’s taxi after U.S. military actions in Venezuela, Jan. 3, 2026. (Katelynn Jackson /Wikimedia Commons/ Public Domain)
By Craig Murray
CraigMurray.org.uk
The mainstream media covered Venezuela non-stop over the weekend. They many times mentioned Delcy Rodríguez, Vice President, because Trump stated she is now in charge.
They never mentioned that 2026 marks the 50th anniversary of the torture to death of her father, socialist activist Jorge Rodríguez, by the C.I.A.-backed security services of the U.S.-aligned Pérez regime in Venezuela.
That would of course spoil the evil communists versus nice democrats narrative that is being forced down everybody’s throats.
Nor did they mention that the elected governments of Hugo Chávez reduced extreme poverty by over 70 percent, reduced poverty by 50 percent, halved unemployment, quadrupled the number receiving a state pension and achieved 100 percent literacy. Chávez took Venezuela from the most unequal society for wealth distribution in Latin America to the most equal.
Nor have they mentioned that María Corina Machado is from one of Venezuela’s wealthiest families, which dominated the electricity and steel industries before nationalisation, and that her backers are the very families that were behind those C.I.A.-controlled murderous regimes.
Jorge Antonio Rodriguez, socialist activist and father of Venezuelan VP Delcy Rodriguez, 1968. (Jesús E. Guédez’ Documentary, 1968, Public Domain via Wikipedia)
Economic sanctions imposed by the West – and another thing they have not mentioned is that the U.K. has confiscated over £2 billion of the Venezuelan government’s assets – have made it difficult for the Maduro government to do much more than shore up the gains of the Chávez years.
But that Venezuela is a major production or trafficking point for narcotics entering the U.S.A. is simply a nonsense. Nicolás Maduro has his faults, but he is not a drug trafficking kingpin. The claim is utter garbage.
President Maduro’s final election rally here in Caracas, Venezuela attracted more than one million people.
Corporate media will never show you images like this. It destroys their narrative about Venezuela being a dictatorship. pic.twitter.com/rVhayMhG8X
— Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) July 26, 2024
Over the weekend almost every Western government came up with a statement that managed to endorse Trump’s bombing and kidnap – plainly grossly illegal in international law – and simultaneously claim to support international law. The hypocrisy is truly off the scale. It is also precisely the Western powers that support the genocide in Gaza that support the attack on Venezuela.
Death of International Law
The genocide in Gaza demonstrated the end of hopes – which were extremely important to my own worldview – for the rule of international law to outweigh the brutal use of force in international relations. The kidnap of Maduro, the rush of Western powers to accept it, and the inability of the rest of the world to do anything about it, have underlined that international law is simply dead.
In the long list of appalling awards of the Nobel peace prize, none can be worse than the latest to the Venezuelan traitor María Corina Machado, intended actively to promote and bring forward the imperialist attack on Venezuela by the United States.
It takes a great deal of effort to come up with a worse decision than to award [Henry] Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize immediately after the massive bombing of Laos and Cambodia. It was a dreadful award, but it was intended to recognise the putative Paris peace deal and prod the United States towards honouring the peace process. Initially it was a joint award with Vietnamese negotiator Lê Duc Tho (who sensibly declined).
“The kidnap of Maduro, the rush of Western powers to accept it, and the inability of the rest of the world to do anything about it, have underlined that international law is simply dead.”
The Kissinger award was a terrible mistake, but the Committee were seeking to end a war, starting from a willingness to cooperate with unprincipled realpolitik. In the award to Machado, they are deliberately seeking to endorse and promote the start of a war. That is a very different thing.
Similarly the award to Obama was a crazed moment of hope after the despair of the invasion of Iraq. It was a combined mistaken belief that Obama would be better, with a mistaken idea it would encourage him to be so.
I accept that the line I am drawing is a thin one; rewarding the perpetrators of Western aggression is only a short step away from actually encouraging Western aggression. But nevertheless a line has been crossed.
Maria Corina Machado at Protest Rally, August 2024. (VOA, US Government)
The gross hypocrisy of the morally bankrupt Committee chairman, Jørgen Watne Frydnes, in claiming that the prize is for non-violent action on Venezuela, at the very moment that Trump gathered the largest invasion force since Iraq off Venezuela makes me feel thoughts towards Frydnes that ought not qualify me for any peace prize at all. I feel similarly towards [U.N. Secretary-General Antonio] Guterres and all those others abandoning their supposed international role to lick Trump’s boot today.
So what now for Venezuela? Well, on the most optimistic reading Trump’s action was performative. He had to do something to avoid the Grand Old Duke of York jibes after that immense concentration of forces off Venezuela, and he has produced a spectacular that actually changes little.
On this reading, the Americans may be making the same mistake they made in Iran, in believing that decapitation strategy and bombing will spark internal revolution. In Iran, they actually strengthened support for the Government.
As of Saturday afternoon, the Bolivarian government in Caracas genuinely did not yet know what had happened, how far there was collusion in the armed forces in Maduro’s kidnap, and whether they still had the control of the army.
Trump’s plain signal that the U.S. views Rodríguez as in charge, and Trump’s contemptuous dismissal of Machado – the only bright point in an appalling day – might give pause to any in Venezuela expecting active U.S. support for a coup.
To those who claim Maduro was a tyrant, I refer you to the comic opera Guaidó coup of April 30, 2019. Guaidó had been declared President of Venezuela by the western powers despite never even having been a candidate. He attempted a coup and wandered around Caracas with heavily armed henchmen, declaring himself president but just being laughed at by the army, police and population.
In any country in the world Guaidó would have been jailed for life for attempting an armed coup, and I expect in the majority he would have been executed. Maduro just patted him on the head and put him back on a plane.
So much for the evil dictatorship.
By pure chance, on Friday I had texted Delcy Rodríguez about arrangements for travel and accreditation so I could go and report from Venezuela and bring you more of the truth from that country that the media is hiding from you. I made plain I was not asking for financial support. Things are obviously fluid at the moment, but it is still my intention to get there.
Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010. His coverage is entirely dependent on reader support. Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.
Subscriptions to keep Craig Murray’s blog going are gratefully received. Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, Murray has set up new methods of payment including a GoFundMe appeal and a Patreon account.
This article is from CraigMurray.org.uk.
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Craig Murray was harassed and bullied by the British gestapo for the crimes of honest journalism and speaking the truth.
That did nothing except harden his resolve to practice honest journalism and speak the truth.
Speaking truth in a empire of lies is an act of treason.
I suppose that the British government cannot really condemn a kidnapping partly because there is a strong possibility that the Skripals were kidnapped.
The motive might well be to prevent them from contradicting the official narrative. I think we would have heard from them if their story had confirmed it.
“Skripal poisoning victim disputed UK narrative, official inquiry reveals”
(The Grayzone)
If what I read is correct, China is threatening to take the US to court over loss of its investments in Venezuela and any other country the US decides to take over. That could prove to be very interesting.
IT’S THE OILCONOMY, STUPID!!!
The US belligerence against Venezuela is multifactorial in origin, but by far the three key, top of the list reasons are OIL, OIL and OIL (which includes natural gas).
If you want to talk about the Dumbroe doctrine – keeping China and Russia out, or other resources such as lithium or gold or aluminium or rare earths, yes those may be part of it, however all other resources can only be physically extracted using oil, so IT ALL GOES BACK TO OIL, OIL, OIL.
OIL as the fuel for driving a materially productive economy (mining, agriculture, industry, construction, infrastructure maintenance etc).
OIL as the financial basis for the US petrodollar which props up the USD as international reserve currency, without which the entire US financial and economic system will collapse.
OIL scheme scammery as faux collateral (fake hyped up future projected oil production) for obscene Ponzi schemes such as US shale oil and Canadian tar sands. The Venezuelan extra heavy Orinoco tar is being eyed by the US fraudsters as a vehicle to create yet another uneconomic oil Ponzi scheme.
If you want nuanced understanding regarding the above, here it is:
hxxps://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/disli90y1petqsz2g7noh/ITS-THE-OILCONOMY-STUPID-parts1to7.pdf?rlkey=s8ps9s14ym8g9kznc9c4o4jl0&st=ezqpebtz&dl=1
The KEY factor leading to the decline of the USD (which includes international flight away from US Tbills) is the LOSS OF US PETRODOLLAR STATUS.
Think about it. The US petrodollar began in 1974 when Saudi Arabia signed up to that Nixon/Kissinger protection racket scam. By 1977, even the USSR had signed up and it was practically impossible for any petroleum/gas importing country to obtain such critical fuels without having access to US dollars.
In 2025/6, IF oil/gas were still sold exclusively in USD, the primacy of the US dollar (and US treasuries) would still be intact, even if the USA uses it as a financial weapon (the USA had been using the USD as a weapon for DECADES and victim countries could do nothing so long as the US petrodollar was in place).
Even countries that may be able to 100% generate electricity without fossil fuels (renewables, nuclear), are STILL utterly dependent on oil/gas.
Example: Iceland may obtain 100% of its electricity from geothermal and hydro, however it still needs oil powered vessels to import food and run their fishing fleet and construct buildings and maintain infrastructure and export aluminium ingots.
Another example: If NZ eventually obtains 100% of its electricity from renewables, it will still need oil and gas to run its agricultural systems and for fertiliser.
NO COUNTRY CAN OPERATE WITHOUT OIL/GAS, we are ALL still addicted to those fossil fuels today and in certain sectors there is simply no viable replacement eg long distance aviation and the military.
Furthermore many petroleum fractions are vital feedstock for chemical products.
HOWEVER the nail in the coffin for the US petrodollar happened quietly in 2024 when Saudi Arabia refused to renew the US petrodollar agreement. The UAE had begun selling oil to China in RMB even before that. China, the largest oil consumer in the world, now obtains oil from Russia, Iran and Venezuela by trading in their mutual currencies, completely bypassing the USD. Even Nigeria is doing so, which may be the reason behind the US bombing of Nigeria on Xmas day. Soon all the oil imported by China from the Gulf States will take place through CIPS, bypassing not-so-SWIFT and the USD. This trend is accelerating worldwide, soon to be adopted by the majority of countries.
IT’S THE OILCONOMY, STUPID!!!
Note: depletion of oil/gas are intimately related to the depletion of minerals (a topic I will cover in part 8 of my oilconomy essays) which will lead to the total collapse of global industrial civilisation (unless…..to be discussed after part 8).
At long last I have found a couple of geopolitical analysts who show some understanding of the oilconomy. Paul in particular has a background in physics, hence will agree with everything I have written.
hxxps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9GwFgPwbzM
Key points:
The US “shale revolution” was and is a Ponzi scheme. The industrial workhorse fuels of petroleum, diesel and jet fuel which run the material economy, CANNOT be made from volatile low energy density shale LTO.
US refineries, especially around the southern states, are configured to refine heavy conventional crude oil and cannot process shale LTO, which has had to be exported for processing.
People who claim that Venezuela has the “largest proven oil reserves in the world”, say, 300 billion or whatever gazillion barrels, are merely shooting off at the mouth without actually understanding anything. Theoretically or technically extractable “reserves” spouted by the USGS or IEA or EIA or CERA mean NOTHING. The ONLY thing that matters is economically extractable oil (primarily conventional oil before, at and shortly after peak production) and that has long been depleting in Venezuela. Conventional economic oil in Venezuela (mainly from the Maracaibo region) has long gone past peak production and the last Chinese major oil investment was in Maracaibo CONVENTIONAL oil. The “huge” Venezuelan reserves that pundits refer to are the extra heavy UNCONVENTIONAL high sulphur, heavy metal contaminated oil of the Orinoco basin, MOST OF WHICH MAY BE UNECONOMIC TO EXTRACT.
A minority fraction of Orinoco unconventional oil may be economic to extract, which the Chinese have been studying, but is unlikely to be a significant factor in ultimate Chinese international oil imports (Venezuelan oil exported to China was only about 3% of total Chinese oil imports as of 2025).
The USA, unlike China, has a monstrously fraudulent stockmarket which vacuums up sucker money from dumbasses around the world. The US oil fraudsters, knowing that the Permian shale LTO is now flat and poised for decline, are looking around for the next sucker scheme and Venezuelan unconventional extra heavy crude is at the top of the list.
WAKE UP EVERYBODY!!! IT’S THE OILCONOMY STUPID!!!
“The End of the Petrodollar: The Real Reason For The Venezuelan Raid”
hxxps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMnLnRkcikw&list=TLPQMDQwMTIwMjbwPQUHdHZFmg&index=3
Good analysis, sir
Dear Craig, The flag in your header image is the seven-star opposition flag, not the flag of the revolution.
The wrong picture paints more than the one thousand-plus written words.
Yes, but we all make mistakes, and need to be reminded, even a dedicated human rights activist and journalist, for the sake of accuracy, if not the all encompassing truth.
It’s not my image!
Craig is correct. It was an image used by Consortium News. It has been replaced.
A another, hidden, motive is that, IMHO, US, not to mention international, agribiz wants Venezuela’s farmland and patenting access to the country’s indigenous foods crops, from heritage maizes and peppers to tropical fruits and nuts to medicinal herbs. Some misguided person said out loud, on our National Pentagon Radio yet, that Venezuela has achieved national food sovereignty. A statement like that is the proverbial red flag to the Wall Street ag investor bull. You, as a British citizen, might recall the Tinker (Monsanto) to Evers (Clinton) to Chance (Blair) triple play that got a reputable scientist fired for being honest while doing science.
Trump might be taking over Venezuela on behalf of his oil buddies, but bet your bottom dollar he intends to “run” it for the benefit of Bayer/Monsanto and other multinational agriculture companies.
And wasn’t AOC herself disposed to oppose Maduro
not too long ago? Could be a bad sign Mamdani
The expansion of the Bolivarian revolution is one of the greatest events in the 20th century. (Perhaps second only to what the PRC did.)
That D Rodriguez’s father was tortured and killed by a US affiliated puppet regime is hardly a guarantee that she is not secretly aligned with this action by the US military and the thugs running the empire. Amazing what a combination of terror and promises of power can do.
Where was the military resistance to this attack and abduction? Why is she offering to work with the government that just attacked her nation? How can that possibly lead to anything but re-enslavement? If the government and army cooperate with the US they may well live and get rich from that betrayal of social reform.. Where is the Chavismo outrage at her offer? Where are allies ready to take on the US fleet and army? It looks fishy to me and who was not shocked by Trump legitimizing her. This regime change operation is not just against the last outposts of Latin American independence, supported by major European powers, it is an announcement of a fascist takeover by the new western order, not bound by the bill of rights or rule of law.
As the late Fidel Castro observed many years ago, there is no international law, only the Law of the Jungle. The only difference now is that is has become moire than obvious. In the past at least an effort was made to disguise mass murder and war crimes with claims of “democracy” and “freedom” blah blah.
When bribery does not work, we have brute violence and theft. As Caitlin Johnstone, Chris Hedges and others observed with the coming of the DT2 regime: the mask is off. And I say DT is a more honest representation of late empire: ignorant, ugly, violent, incompetent, irrational…
The article by Joe Lauria here today makes the case that threats and bribes were very likely used in Maduro’s betrayal. Since Delcy Rodriguez father was tortured and murdered by CIA operatives, I’m sure she does not want the same fate. Scott Ritter speculated that Maduro was betrayed almost immediately after the news broke.
In short, as the comment from C. Moulton suggests, the desperate, reckless actions of a tyrant will only expedite the inevitable Decline and Fall of the US Empire. We can see that already with imperial overstretch and looming financial crisis. (See Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers). Many informed analysts have been saying this for some time, and recent events support the claims.
Some say going after Iran is all about Israel, however cutting China off from Iranian oil and gas is a huge factor, same with Venezuela. Reportedly a Chinese diplomatic delegation met with pres. Maduro hours before he was kidnapped.
The Grand Chessboard is getting messy and the empire might blow up the board if it cannot win. I am sure Russia, China and other powers are aware of this and have acted with extreme restraint so far. How long can they continue without retaliating with violence?
I fervently hope Craig Murray manages to get to Venezuela so he can report and bring us the truth from that country that the media is hiding from us.
International law is null and void.
The only law that matters is that might is right.
However Trump may have underestimated unintended consequences such as US GIs dying in large numbers in a Venezuelan version of the Vietnam quagmire. He also may be tempted to overextend his decaying empire by do similar to other Latin American countries such as Colombia and Brazil.
If we look on the hopeful side, D J Trump may be hastening the collapse of the Euro North American Empire, aka The US Empire.
And hopefully also hasten the end of NATO, whose European members are mere paper tigers by now.
Alas, there was a time in 1994 when I played a triggering role for secstate Christopher to launch the partnership for Peace, a precursor for NATO expansion to include former Warsaw Pact countries and beyond. I deeply regret that role and, if I could, I would take it back.
And hopefully hasten the end of the EU and the Euro as well. With the US and EU ‘in tatters’, the dollar and euro worthless – the world might stand a chance of recovering from the neocolonialist catastrophe that has caused so much damage for such a long time.
The ‘collective’ west is no longer ‘collective’, that has broken up. It’s a start. Europe is fading into irrelevance, leaving the US even more isolated.
The US dollar is losing value and the petrodollar is going out of fashion, as are US treasuries. The Venezuelan debacle is unlikely to reverse any of this, so Chump will undoubtedly try other desperate measures to stop the rapid decline of the US’ economy and hegemony.
The risk is that desperate people take ever greater risks. The US regime seems oblivious to this danger.