an Indigenous Perspective On The US Intervention in Venezuela

I’m Native American. I mean, technically I’m Native Mexican but I was born in the US and with the history of the Yaqui people, and how American treated Native Americans, Mexico and basically, everyone, not Christian and white, I just say I’m Indigenous. When I first heard about the US intervention in Venezuela, it really hit a chord with me. I realized I hadn’t written anything down in a while about what’s going on in the world.

Colonization isn’t an idea to me. It’s the lived experience of my ancestors. It’s memory carried in families, bodies and land and, to be real, it’s sort of a different level of generational trauma. So when I hear the United States talking about “intervening” in Venezuela, about sending in oil companies under the language of stability and security, something in me tightens, angers and then screams internally and maybe sometimes externally but that’s what writing is for.

It may not be my personal lived experience but I know this story. My people know this story.

Colonization never announces itself because why tell the world your plans when your plan is to destroy an entire country, its people or culture? Colonization doesn’t say, “We want your land, your labor and all your resources.” It says, “We’re worried about you.” It says, “You’re unstable.” It says, “You’re mismanaging yourselves.” It says, “We don’t have a choice.”

That language is not neutral. And quite honestly, doesn’t this sound like a man talking to a woman? Let’s rationalize that.

Venezuela Is Not a Failed Country Waiting to Be Saved

Venezuela did not ask for this. Venezuela did not need the United States to step in for anything, especially because the United States has proven that it hates brown people over the course of the last 300 years. Even now, with the ICE raids, it’s a very obvious thing to anyone paying attention, even if they’re somehow enjoying this in some weird, sick ‘Eric Cartman Loves NPR because liberals are complaining” way. Framing this as a humanitarian or anti-drug effort is honestly just beyond insulting.

Let’s get really real for a moment. The overdose crisis in the US is not being driven by Venezuelan cocaine and the real part of this is that it’s not being driven by cocaine at all. The drug crisis in America is being driven by fentanyl. The crisis is even part of a systemic and protected system of synthetic opioids, pharmaceutical greed and decades of policy failure that no amount of a US intervention in Venezuela can fix.

American leadership cries into the void about “America First” but what about this is really putting Americans in any sort of better position than we’re in now? What about this puts Americans at the forefront?

Blaming Venezuela for American addiction is a deflection. It redirects attention away from domestic accountability and toward a brown country that’s already been positioned as expendable.

That move isn’t just the US intervention of Venezuela or anything else. This is obvious imperial muscle memory and in case you didn’t know, we’ve been here before and I’m gonna help you see it.

How Economic Warfare Becomes “Help”

Here’s what this looks like in human terms for someone who might not get it and honestly, I feel like I’m preaching the choir but also, I can’t expect people to be smart enough to know history and the US intervention in Venezuela is part of a longstanding Imperialistic playbook.

Imagine someone decides they don’t like how you’re running your family and your home. So what do they do? They cut off your access to money and block your ability to work and support your home. They watch your family struggle and say shit like, “See? You’re failing.” After that, they invite corporations into your home to fix what they took from you and call it assistance.

In the real world we call that coercion.

Sanctions that starve civilians are not peaceful. We did this during World War II to the Japanese. Corporate entry without consent is not partnership and we did this during the Iran conflicts in the 1980’s. Economic warfare means stepping in and taking something we think we need while raping a place of its natural resources. Hello, it’s 1893 and Queen Liliʻuokalani wants her sugar back, motherfuckers. She is quoted as saying one of the most true and honest things about the United States

“As the American residents became wealthy, their greed and their love of power proportionately increased.” – Queen Liliʻuokalani

When oil companies arrive before sovereignty is respected, the outcome is already decided. This is the same way that Sanford B. Dole, yes that Dole, was made president of Hawaii and handed Hawaiian resources to the United States forever.

WIth US Intervention in Venezuela, Brown Countries Are Treated as Disposable Again And Again

This is the part of the US intervention in Venezuela that hits me hardest as an Indigenous woman.

Brown countries are once again being framed as disposable, sacrifice zones. The US intervention in Venezuela is just America again planting itself where they see suffering is acceptable if it serves our own financial gain. It seems to me that Brown sovereignty is always optional in this country and where they’re celebrating the ousting of a president they disagree with, the people of Venezuela are about to become collateral and their pain becomes a strategy. They just don’t see it yet

This is the same logic that justified stolen land, broken treaties, forced assimilation and cultural erasure. First you’re labeled as dangerous and then you’re told you can’t care for yourself and at your weakest moment, your existence becomes negotiable without any understanding of your longstanding traditions, culture, needs and abilities to sustain.

And I guess, what makes this moment especially frightening to me, as someone who holds her ancestry in great reverence and sees colonization as a longstanding movement that says, “We’re fucking better than you, bitches. Step aside so we can show you,” is how casual all of this feels. Today we’re claiming to run Venezuela. Already we’re hearing rumblings of Mexico and Cuba and even, Greenland, being next on the same grounds of cartels and drugs and we just let it all fall like dominoes. I have so often wondered how things like this happen when I read about them and in real time, I’m watching entire nations being made into a checklist instead of communities full of real people.

Empires never do one-offs. It’s all or nothing, and didn’t we learn anything from losing wars in Vietnam or Korea? No. No we did not and never will.

Why Indigenous People Recognize This Immediately

People like to say this isn’t colonization and that this is diplomacy because I believe that most people see colonization as an ancient term used to describe England taking over South Africa or Japan taking over Korea. We want to believe the world is more enlightened and can be better enforced now.

But here’s the thing, if destabilization is treated as strategy and civilian suffering is dismissed as collateral damage and if corporations benefit first, nothing about that is enlightened and that’s what’s going on with the US intervention in Venezuela and any time colonization happens.

My ancestors lost land, language, safety and autonomy because powerful white Christian men decided they knew more about what we needed that we did even though we’d existed peacefully for centuries before their perceived power. This is because profit mattered more than people and sovereignty was treated like a suggestion.

Let me share a solid example of this. Fry bread is universally loved by cultures all over the United States but how did it come to be? After the Civil War, the United States Army was encouraged by the government to kill as many as bison as possible. Indigenous people survived on bison and when the bison were slaughtered, it forced us off the land and therefore, in true corporate greed style, the transcontinental railroad could be built without interference.

When the Indigenous people were put into allotted parts of land, they were also given rations that the White Men in power felt they needed. We’re talking rotting flour, sugar, lard and salt and many people died but, also, fry bread was all they could make. Americans destroyed an entire eco and food system and ultimately fry bread is a longstanding symbol of survival, strength and resilience.

In American history classes we are taught “that the Indians killed all the buffalo for their survival” and what’s why they were almost extinct because the truth is too hard for White American exceptionalism.

Millions of Indigenous people are still living with this legacy. So when I say the US intervention in Venezuela scares me, I’m not being an overly dramatic best version of myself. I’m being historically literate.

The US Intervention in Venezuela Is Not Aid.
This Is Empire.

To read more on this, I have written about the Bison Genocide on my personal Instagram.

We don’t need more interventions gussied up as concern for whatever reason they’ve made up. The US intervention in Venezuela is just another symbol moment in American history that says: LOOK AT US! WE’RE BIGGER & BADDER THAN YOU (mostly because you have brown skin and that immediately makes you incompetent)!

In this moment, we need accountability and to stop pretending that economic violence doesn’t count as violence just because it happens quietly and far away from home. C’mon, friends, it took the Japanese government bombing Pearl Harbor for Americans to pay attention to the fact that the United States was killing their country’s civilians by cutting off their trading lines. It doesn’t have to be colonization for it to be fucked up.

People who have survived colonization can see this coming a mile away but also this type of action like the US intervention in Venezuela has been done and written and done and written and done and written for thousands of years without any recognition of history or lessons learned. Those who understand and experienced colonization recognize the language and the half-baked justifications. We recognize how quickly brown lives are deemed acceptable losses for white expansion and exceptionalism.

Yeah, all of this feels super overwhelming but also confusing and if you feel like it’s strangely familiar but can’t put your finger on it, that’s because it is.

But hey, at least we’re not talking about the Epstein files, right?