For years it was treated as political theatre, a fevered fantasy repeated so often that it lost its power to shock. The Yankees are coming. Hugo Chávez warned of it endlessly during his 14 years in power, conjuring visions of CIA plots, Pentagon hit squads and imperial invasions designed to crush Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution. His rhetoric grew more extravagant with time, mutating into a kind of revolutionary folklore that even some supporters learned to dismiss with weary smiles.
But on Saturday night, the joke ended.
U.S. forces struck Caracas, cutting power to key districts, bombing strategic targets and seizing President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. There was no United Nations mandate, no congressional authorization, and no coalition of allies. It was a unilateral act of force—swift, overwhelming, and openly justified by Washington as necessary and historic.
The fever dream Chávez spent a decade spinning had materialized.
From the beginning of his presidency in 1999 until his death in 2013, Chávez cast himself as the frontline defender of Latin America against U.S. imperialism. He spoke obsessively of spies and saboteurs, assassins and mercenaries, submarines lurking off Caribbean beaches and airborne troops descending on Caracas. He warned that Washington would stop at nothing to destroy Venezuela’s socialist experiment.
In 2011, while undergoing treatment for cancer, Chávez suggested that the United States might have developed technology to induce cancer in political enemies. “Would it be so strange,” he asked, “that they’ve invented the technology to spread cancer and we won’t know about it for 50 years?” He accused the CIA of plotting blackouts, poisoning water supplies and destabilizing the nation’s energy grid.
Much of it was clearly performative—designed to justify growing authoritarianism, silence dissent and cloak economic mismanagement in the language of anti-imperial resistance. Over time, as Venezuela’s economy collapsed under corruption, misrule and oil dependence, the Yankee bogeyman became a convenient distraction.
Yet history has a way of folding back on itself.
Thirteen years after Chávez handed power to his chosen successor, Nicolás Maduro, the threat he exaggerated into near absurdity has arrived with startling clarity. U.S. bombs fell on Caracas. American soldiers detained the Venezuelan president. And the rhetoric of empire was no longer metaphorical.
Amid the shock, a strange irony has taken hold. For years, Chavismo cried wolf. When the wolf finally appeared, it wore a familiar face—one that mirrored Chávez more than any U.S. president before him.
Donald Trump’s populist authoritarianism has long invited comparisons to strongmen abroad. Like Chávez, Trump is a master of spectacle, grievance and polarization. Both men rose by channeling popular anger against elites, dismantling institutional guardrails and turning politics into permanent performance. Both bullied opponents, dominated media cycles and treated the state as an extension of personal power.
The differences are obvious: one was a leftist army officer who preached socialism; the other a real estate mogul who promised nationalist capitalism. Yet their methods—the theatrics, the norm-breaking, the contempt for constraints—share an unmistakable lineage.
It is therefore more than ironic that Trump’s most dramatic act on the world stage has been the abduction of Chávez’s political heir.
As international law frays and Venezuelans oscillate between hope and terror, history has completed a bizarre circular loop.
The memory of 2002 still looms large. That year, the administration of George W. Bush tacitly backed a coup that briefly ousted Chávez from power. The move evoked the darkest chapters of Cold War Latin America, when the CIA helped overthrow leftist governments in Chile, Guatemala and beyond.
But the 2002 coup collapsed within days. Chávez returned, buoyed by loyalist soldiers and massive mobilizations from the barrios. He emerged emboldened, winning subsequent elections and spending the remainder of his presidency mocking Bush as a donkey, a cowboy, and famously, “the devil.”
After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003—justified by false claims about weapons of mass destruction—Chávez’s denunciations resonated far beyond Venezuela. To many around the world, Bush did indeed appear more dangerous than “a monkey with a razor blade,” as Chávez once put it.
Despite persistent claims of U.S. plots, no military strike ever came. Washington continued purchasing Venezuelan oil. Chávez hollowed out state institutions, politicized the military and presided over economic decay largely undisturbed.
When Maduro assumed power in 2013, he inherited both the rhetoric and the rot. As oil prices collapsed and corruption metastasized, Maduro increasingly relied on repression and electoral fraud to survive. The myth of imminent U.S. invasion became more useful than ever.
Limited sanctions imposed by the Obama and Biden administrations were framed as a “blockade.” Domestic failure was blamed on foreign sabotage. Blackouts caused by a collapsing power grid were attributed to CIA hackers.
In recent months, however, Trump escalated the narrative from his side.
He accused Maduro of leading a “narco-terrorist” cartel flooding the United States with drugs—an exaggeration of Venezuela’s role as a transit route for Colombian cocaine, most of which is destined for Europe. Trump also tied Maduro to his repeatedly debunked claim that Joe Biden stole the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
On Saturday, Trump declared triumph.
“This was one of the most stunning, effective, and powerful displays of American military might and competence in American history,” he said. “No nation in the world could achieve what America achieved.”
U.S. forces, Trump boasted, disabled Caracas’s power supply “thanks to a certain expertise that we have,” clearing the way for what he described as a flawless operation to remove a tyrant.
In Chávez’s mausoleum, supporters joked darkly, the revolutionary leader must have spun.
Power cuts were once his favorite evidence of CIA sabotage. He warned endlessly that Washington sought to resurrect the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, asserting U.S. dominance over the hemisphere. Now Trump was openly proclaiming a “Donroe Doctrine”—a doctrine not of influence, but of control.
Trump went further, announcing that the United States would run Venezuela for an indefinite period. “We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” he said.
He outlined plans for major U.S. oil companies to enter Venezuela, invest billions, rebuild infrastructure and “start making money for the country.” To critics, it sounded less like liberation than occupation.
Confusion deepened when Trump suggested cooperation with Delcy Rodríguez, a senior Chavista figure and former vice-president under Maduro, who has reportedly been sworn in as interim president. The prospect of continuity under new management raised fears that regime change might prove more cosmetic than transformational.
For Venezuelans—those who remain and the millions scattered across Latin America and beyond—the moment is profoundly disorienting. Some dare to hope that decades of repression and economic ruin might finally end. Others fear that sovereignty has been replaced by subjugation, and that chaos lies ahead.
They are about to learn whether they have awakened from a long fever dream—or plunged deeper into a nightmare scripted by history’s cruel sense of irony.
