985 - The Murder Inc. Doctrine feat. Greg Grandin (11/10/25)

Speaker 0 All I wanna be is Il Joco.

Speaker 0 All I wanna be is Il Joco.

Speaker 0 We ain't gonna tell Pesos.

Speaker 0 All I wanna

Speaker 1 Hello, everybody. It's Monday, November 10th, and this is your Chapo.
Just off the top of the show, I will say, no more talk about New York City.

Speaker 1 I know you've been sick of it. No more talk about New York City.
But for today's episode, basically, over the last couple of weeks,

Speaker 1 when

Speaker 1 we've seen a massive military buildup in the Caribbean and the open threat of a U.S.

Speaker 1 invasion of Venezuela, and basically, when I began to hear Trump supporters begin to justify this or promote a possible war with Venezuela by invoking the Monroe Doctrine, I knew I had to get this guest back on the show.

Speaker 1 So to offer a historical perspective on the United States and Venezuela, please welcome back to the show, Greg Grandin.

Speaker 2 Thanks for having me, Will.

Speaker 1 So, Greg, like I said, I just want to begin first with, like I said, we're sending an aircraft carrier group to the Caribbean, but this is all in the context of like this

Speaker 1 kill spree that the Trump administration has gone on, blowing up these fast boats in the Caribbean, just killing people and then sharing the snuff film with the media to promote what they're doing, supposedly as a war on narco-traffickers, which are linked to Venezuela.

Speaker 1 You've gave us a little preview of an article you wrote that's coming out where you describe this as sort of government by murder incorporated.

Speaker 1 So just to begin here, to what extent are we already at war with Venezuela? And what do you make of, like, like I said, this murder spree?

Speaker 2 Well, if if you look at the U.S. war on drugs, the U.S.
has always been at war on, well, always been fighting a war on drugs, at least since 1973.

Speaker 2 And, you know, the thing about Trump is that he's insisting it's not a metaphor, that it actually gives him extraordinary powers to do whatever he wants.

Speaker 2 And the thing about Venezuela and the attacks on the go-fast boats, which started September 2nd and have accelerated in,

Speaker 2 you know, like any good serial killer, they, I think, forensic psychologists call it uh when serial killers start to decompose they start going quicker and quicker in the in their kills and that's what's happening the the the the the hits are getting are getting more frequent and they're they're they're expanding out of the caribbean into the pacific and and what's interesting about it is that is that the first one on september 2nd was really designed i would argue by by rubio and what i what i one could identify as a war party within the trump administration that sees Latin America in very ideological terms, that wanted to preempt.

Speaker 2 I don't want to say a moderate party within the Trump administration, but certainly there was a sector in the Trump administration that thought they could do business with Maduro.

Speaker 2 And Maduro would certainly sign any contract at this point that Trump put in front of him if it just calmed things down. Richard Grinnell, who's Trump's special envoy for special missions,

Speaker 2 I wish I had a

Speaker 2 special envoy for special missions, missions.

Speaker 2 Basically represents Chevron. And Chevron is a company that kind of went along with Chavez.
Remember who Chavez back in the day, his nationalization. Exxon rejected

Speaker 2 oil cloth and pulled out and moved its operations to Guyana, British Guyana.

Speaker 2 But Richard Grinnell, just two weeks before...

Speaker 2 that attack got an a variance against the sanctions in which chevron could start pumping oil and it did start pumping oiling and sending it to Fort Arthur to be refined.

Speaker 2 And those attacks, those cold-blooded premeditated murders on innocent people who had no charges brought against them,

Speaker 2 no allegations, no evidence, was Rubio's bid to preempt.

Speaker 2 the people who thought that they could make a deal with Maduro and normalize relations a bit.

Speaker 2 So I mean the bigger picture is, you know, America's first is don't think the United States should superintend a global world order based on free trade, that the world should be broken up into spheres of interest with different power centers.

Speaker 2 And those power centers would exert their authority over their hinterlands. And obviously, Latin America is the United States' hinterland.
So the Trump administration has to get Latin America.

Speaker 2 into order. But there's a lot of ways you can do that.
You could, you know, okay, we'll just deal with whoever's there. We'll sign contracts and we'll just, you know, get them down.

Speaker 2 Or we could see it the way Rubio and

Speaker 2 all of those Republican congressmen

Speaker 2 in Florida see it as an ideological project to take out Venezuela, take out Nicaragua, take out Cuba, and basically eventually isolate Brazil.

Speaker 2 Because if you don't have Brazil, you don't have Latin America.

Speaker 1 Right. And like you bring up Chevron, and and obviously the U.S.
has been more or less at war with Latin America under the under the guise of the war on drugs.

Speaker 1 But where does Venezuela fall into this war, especially considering that they don't actually produce very many illegal narcotics that find their way into the United States of America?

Speaker 1 Is it just the oil?

Speaker 1 Or is it like, as you just said,

Speaker 1 they could easily just sign contracts with Maduro to get the oil anyway? So like, how do you could you speak a little bit more on this broader ideological mission?

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's easy easy to say, you know, the United States just wants oil. And it's true, they do want the oil, but they could get it other ways, right?

Speaker 2 You know, you could get it by, you know, there are other ways in which the United States can get Venezuela's oil with that, but it is a, you know, you can't separate interests out from ideology, right?

Speaker 2 Interests are always ideologically defined. And

Speaker 2 they want, and they basically want to put an end to Venezuela. And they want to put an end to Venezuela, I think, as the first step in bringing down Cuba.

Speaker 2 Cuba is the real prize, obviously, the real obsession, going back to Benjamin Franklin.

Speaker 2 But yeah, so Venezuela, Venezuela has a significant amount of oil. And the way it's actually playing out now is,

Speaker 2 you know, there's a border dispute between Venezuela and Guyana, British Guyana, over, you know, and there's a lot of, there's a lot of heavy crude in that area. So Exxon is already starting to drill.

Speaker 2 And Chevron kind of wants in there. And so

Speaker 2 in some ways, foreign policy is being played out as a proxy between these two competing oil companies who maybe on some abstract level have the same interests, but historically have been rivals

Speaker 2 within that region, the

Speaker 2 northern South America.

Speaker 1 Is there a certain level of

Speaker 1 institutional memory and score settling going on here that goes back to the Hugo Chavez era, like an Hugo Chavez and Maduro's government? How are they seen by policy planners in D.C.?

Speaker 2 Well, less D.C. than Florida, right? Rubio's from southern Florida.
And, you know, it's funny. Cuba has been a thing for over a century.

Speaker 2 They have inst, they have, you know, the anti-Cuban revolution institutions have been built up and reinvigorated recently, but they're there. They exist.

Speaker 2 They're like lobby groups.

Speaker 2 The anti-Chavez,

Speaker 2 you know, and of course, Chavez is is dead to stipulate, but the anti-Chavez groups are more vocal, right? They're more hysterical in some ways. Not that Cuba really isn't ultimately, I think,

Speaker 2 the main prize,

Speaker 2 but they really think that Venezuela is on the cusp of collapse. I mean, I don't know if it is or isn't.
As to your question about drugs, Venezuela produces very little drugs.

Speaker 2 It's always been a transshipment point from Colombia and from Bolivia.

Speaker 2 And most of those drugs, anyway, come in from the Pacific now,

Speaker 2 you know, through Ecuador and up the Pacific coast, not through the Caribbean. There's certainly no fentanyl coming from Venezuela.
And this has been going on for a long, long time.

Speaker 2 Venezuela is very, you know, it produces very little drugs. And the idea

Speaker 2 You know, they've come up with this total fiction that

Speaker 2 the justification is that Venezuela doesn't have a state. It's being run by a drug cartel, the cartel de los soles, because the military has a son, not

Speaker 2 sole on the insignia on the thing. You know, at best, it's corruption.
You know, they look the other way. They probably take bribes.
But the idea of describing the whole state as

Speaker 2 basically not a state, but an arco-state is, is just pure fiction, pure manufacturing.

Speaker 2 You could say the same thing about el salvador you could say that you could certainly say the same thing about ecuador um and you could have always said the same thing about colombia when we were feeding billions of dollars into colombia which only served to make the problem worse i i've noticed that the um the cartel of the sun thing that's been around in sort of like uh

Speaker 3 whatever you would call like the successors to the original neocons the people who were media figures who were like very involved in, you know, the Syrian opposition

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 Ukraine after that.

Speaker 3 In about 2014, that's when you started seeing the cartel of the Sun stuff. And of course, like the reasoning that

Speaker 3 the more like Trump aligned people use that like the military and the cartel, they both use Sun insignia. It is like, it's like fucking Nancy Drew reason it.

Speaker 3 It's like how Nancy Drew solves the the case.

Speaker 2 There's no doubt there's corruption. And there's no doubt there's probably, you know, just like in the United States.
I mean, take a look at Fort Bragg if you wanted to shut a country down.

Speaker 2 Right, right, right. Right, right.

Speaker 3 Well, though, that's the thing. It's the like Trump-specific aspect of it.

Speaker 3 And they've done this with like a few countries that they targeted in Trump one, that it would usually end when Mnuchin or someone

Speaker 3 said,

Speaker 3 hey, I have money there.

Speaker 3 It's this idea that like if a country,

Speaker 3 if they export drugs at all, if one guy has ever sold drugs to an American there, it's a narco-state that a cartel runs their fucking government, which, like, okay, if that's true, I have bad news about Israel for you guys.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, you know, and of course, it's the, it's the history of it. I mean, what we know is the modern cartels in Mexico were created after Nixon

Speaker 2 established the DEA and their first major operation was in northern Mexico with the Mexican military,

Speaker 2 with this militarized assault on poppy. And Mexico started growing poppy to feed the market for the returning veterans from Southeast Asia,

Speaker 2 but it was dispersed and it was peasant, it was small production, it was peasant production, and

Speaker 2 it wasn't a highly capitalized industry.

Speaker 2 The relentless militarized assault that the DEA and the Mexican military launched in Mexico, which turned northern Mexico into something that looked very much like Vietnam, just as Vietnam ended,

Speaker 2 you know, going after small peasants, disappearing peasants, disappearing peasant activists. It had the effect of creating the first cartels.
Like the very first cartels were created

Speaker 2 as a result of the United States' drug war.

Speaker 2 And now we're fighting those cartels. And then, of course, a different episode, like playing Colombia, all that

Speaker 2 had the effect of that didn't do anything to stop cocaine coming from Colombia.

Speaker 2 Twice as much cocaine is grown in Colombia than at the beginning of Planned Colombia, and twice as much land is dedicated to cultivating

Speaker 2 coca in Colombia than at the beginning of Planned Colombia. All it did was break up the transportation cartels that were relatively stable.

Speaker 2 I'm not saying they were pacifists, but there wasn't insane violence.

Speaker 2 But when you break up the transportation cartels, you put a high premium on gangs in Central America and Mexico and would-be cartels to establish territory and routes through these spectacular acts of violence.

Speaker 2 So new cartels emerge, more violent, that emerge out of that phase of the war on drugs, the Planned Colombia war on drugs, which fed $9, $13 billion

Speaker 2 into what was undoubtedly a Colombian state that was

Speaker 2 interpenetrated by drugs much more than than Venezuela is or has been or

Speaker 2 if it is even.

Speaker 1 I mean, this raises an interesting point. And in the article you sent to us, you give a brief history of the war on drugs, which at this point might as well be the American Hundred Years War.

Speaker 1 And it may seem counterintuitive, but like, to what extent has the goal of the American-led war on drugs been to facilitate the steady flow of narcotics into the United States by empowering most of the people who produce and traffic drugs in Latin America.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, the war on drugs is, I mean, there's lots of different motivations for it, right?

Speaker 2 There's always been a very close association between both drug production and drug interdiction with right-wing politics, with anti-communist politics.

Speaker 2 This goes back to Hoover and the FBI using drug interdiction to discredit, you know, what they imagine to be subversives of police morality and, you know, and whatnot.

Speaker 2 But then under COINTELPRO, it became explicitly directed at the peace movement,

Speaker 2 at the civil rights movement, at the Black Power movement. You know,

Speaker 2 and then, of course, in, you know, there was the intertwining of drug production within Latin America with drug interdiction.

Speaker 2 So it was a common dynamic is that repressive military governments would use the CIA.

Speaker 2 to come to power, then they would facilitate the cultivation of coca, and then they would start taking DEA money in order to fight the drug war at the same time.

Speaker 2 So, you know, and so you had this, you know, a very tight kind of intertwinement. And this, this really,

Speaker 2 this really took off after the Cuban Revolution, when, when Castro and the, and, and the Cuban Revolution ended Havana's nodal function in the Caribbean as as, you know, which would brought together this, you know, an international drug trade routes, which went from Istanbul to, you know, through the Middle East and Italy.

Speaker 2 You know, it was all set up by Lucky Luciano

Speaker 2 after World War II, when it was working with the CIA and anti-communists to stop the communists from coming to power in Italy in 1948.

Speaker 2 But when Castro ended, you know, all of he had the effect of broadcasting these gangsters all into Latin America and into Florida, where they were incorporated into the CIA.

Speaker 2 I mean, you could really fall down a deep state rabbit hole here,

Speaker 2 but it's all true. I mean, it's been documented by people like the 60 Minutes and Bill Moyers, as well as, you know, more marginal reporters, at least vis-a-vis the establishment.

Speaker 1 You know, like the specific character of the war on drugs in terms of like the drugs that are being imported changes. And like for, you know, cocaine to heroin to crystal meth.

Speaker 1 And now the big thing is fentanyl.

Speaker 1 And opiate addiction obviously has led to a great amount of death in this country and a great amount of like, you know, despair and demoralization as like we see more and more communities succumb to the effects of it.

Speaker 1 Like to what extent are like

Speaker 1 these speedboat murders that are happening in the Caribbean kind of an attempt by the Trump administration to direct people's anger at what they regard as like as the killing of America by drug dealers to sort of like identify a target for it and say, look, we're doing something about it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, the drug war war was always part of the culture war. And it was always, I mean, right from the beginning with Nixon, I think it was John Ehrlich.

Speaker 2 Was it John Ehrlichman who gave that interview? He said, where, you know,

Speaker 2 they came up with drugs as a way you couldn't outlaw people's political beliefs or their skin color, but you could outlaw drugs. And that's the way they came up.

Speaker 2 They did it intentionally to go after black communities and destroy black communities.

Speaker 2 And so it's always been part of the culture war. But what you see with the rise of

Speaker 2 the opioid addiction in areas that are the Republican, white, rank-and-file base, you see people like J.D.

Speaker 2 Vance, you know, irresponsibly but persistently ginning up a sense that their pain and their suffering is the result of glo the betrayal by elite elites.

Speaker 2 And certainly the, you know, the idea that we're gonna murder at will, even though obviously the people piloting those fast boats aren't, the, aren't globalists.

Speaker 2 They're not George Soros' son, but, but, you know, still, it's the idea of like, well, we're, we're avenging, you know, the suffering of, you know, of Appalachia to the opioid addiction.

Speaker 2 I mean, they're not bombing the Sakwa family house, that's for sure.

Speaker 2 And they're not, and, and, um, and also, you know, it's, it's a, it's a degree of empathy that nobody, nobody's ever shown for African-American communities, you know, during, during the worst of the crack epidemic.

Speaker 1 Another thing I've I've noticed about like this latest iteration is that he said that Trump more or less views the war on drugs not as a metaphor, but as a literal thing that empowers him to, you know, go to war even without the express approval of Congress.

Speaker 4 I mean, he has made comments recently that he's saying, well, I don't think we're going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war.

Speaker 4 I think we're just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. Okay? We're going to kill them.
You know, they're going to be like dead.

Speaker 1 And in addition to that, this is just something from the Atlantic here. It says here, in addition, U.S.

Speaker 1 officials reportedly told the New York Times last month that the Trump administration had secretly authorized the CIA to conduct covert action in Venezuela.

Speaker 1 Doesn't this sort of undermine the whole point of secret covert action when you go in?

Speaker 1 Usually the New York Times has to like work pretty hard to break that story, but it seems now that they're just being told by the Trump administration that they are undertaking covert action in Venezuela.

Speaker 2 I know, I know, I know, it's as if they

Speaker 2 put out a flash, you know, in 1972, we've authorized covert action

Speaker 2 in Chile.

Speaker 2 We've authorized covert action in Guatemala in 1953.

Speaker 2 No, I know it's all part of the spectacle of it, I think, you know, and the attempt to build a legal case. I mean, the irony of it is that, you know, Trump's predecessors have built the legal case.

Speaker 2 It was George W.

Speaker 2 Bush that united the war on drugs with the war on terror and claimed that the authorization for the use of military force gave him the right to use the military to go after drug, you know, for drug interdictions.

Speaker 2 There's been no shortage of using the U.S. military for drug.
I mean, you know, Trump is doing nothing new. The speedboats are new.

Speaker 2 The murder and then the passing around the snuff films in the form of the video things. That's new.
And that's all part of the spectacle.

Speaker 2 But every president before him declared that, you know, use the military. I mean, like I said, the DEA in Mexico was waging, you know, Vietnam's second act in late 1973.

Speaker 2 You know, a couple of months after the last combat troop was pulled out of Vietnam. You know, the DEA was, you know, running a scorched earth campaign in northern Mexico with the Mexican military.

Speaker 2 So, you know, a lot of this stuff isn't new. It's, but, but Trump does what Trump does.
He turns it into a spectacle. And other presidents have claimed all of these powers to fight the war on drugs.

Speaker 2 So, you know, but they present it as if, you know, that's the title of the essay.

Speaker 2 Tom Dispatch, you know, the great Tom Dispatch is sending it out on Thursday, I think. But is, you know, escalating the escalation.
You know, every president escalates the war on drugs.

Speaker 2 Trump is just escalating, you know, a perpetual escalation.

Speaker 1 Going back to like Venezuela and the Monroe Doctrine, as a historian, I mean, what do you think when you hear the Monroe Doctrine being invoked in the 21st century?

Speaker 1 Is this just like, once again, stating out loud what's already been taking place from the last century or so?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Or just like when goes back when politicians or people in the media they always refer to like central and south america as america's backyard very euphemistically like you know like it's a big backyard i mean a quick history lesson the monroe doctrine was was proclaimed in night in in 1923 by john monroe in a state of the union address and really had to do with latin america getting independence and and it's a very wordy many clauses, complicated, contradictory statement that that could be broken down into two parts.

Speaker 2 So, the one part, it's an anti-colonial document. Europe keep out.
No part of the Americas that have achieved independence are eligible for reconquest. Latin Americans liked that part.

Speaker 2 They thought that Monroe was affirming their own anti-colonialism.

Speaker 2 But then other parts of the doctrine claim that

Speaker 2 any event that happens within the Americas that has a bearing on U.S. interests, the U.S.
has a right to take action.

Speaker 2 It didn't say it that clearly, but more or less it's something along those lines.

Speaker 2 And that's obviously the part of the Monroe Doctrine that deepened and became basically a standing universal police warrant for the United States to act at will.

Speaker 2 Monroe Doctrine basically became a symbol of mandatory power within an informal empire. And it was adopted by other countries.
Other countries claimed they wanted their own Monroe Doctrine.

Speaker 2 Japan wanted a Monroe Doctrine for China after World War I. Britain wanted the Monroe Doctrine for Africa.
Hitler claimed a Monroe Doctrine for Eastern Europe.

Speaker 2 It came to symbolize American power.

Speaker 2 It's especially important for American firsters.

Speaker 2 As we talked about earlier, harkening back to this idea. that the world is now organized around a fractured sovereignty of

Speaker 2 superpowers or regional powers that are administering their spheres of influence.

Speaker 2 And the United States' administration is getting Latin America in order and hence the invocations of the Monroe Doctrine.

Speaker 2 You know, and it's also a it's also a rhetorical thing that gets that gets played out over and over again.

Speaker 2 Whenever like the United States, whenever there's a president that like is pulling back a little bit from direct intervention, people proclaim the Monroe Doctrine is over.

Speaker 2 You know, during Chavez and Lula's first go-round, you know, there were multiple argument articles about how, you know, the Monroe Doctrine is over, Latin America is now independent.

Speaker 2 You know, now we've snapped back to the, you know, the Trump

Speaker 2 American Firsts and nationalists, and now everybody's talking about the Monroe Doctrine as, you know, in its... in its interventionist form.

Speaker 1 When I see it being invoked, it's being invoked as a way by a kind of like the America First and more like nationalist part of Trump space to sell to the American people or to their supporters the idea that like, oh, like the U.S.

Speaker 1 invading Venezuela, that's not like Iraq because it's in our hemisphere and this is the Monroe doctrine. It's based.
It's cool. It's nationalist, but it's nothing

Speaker 2 like the war in Iraq. That's exactly right.
It is

Speaker 2 because,

Speaker 2 you know, despite the often use of the word isolationist, isolationists were never isolationists in the United States. They were always in favor of intervention in Latin America.

Speaker 2 And Latin America in some ways is a kind of crucible.

Speaker 2 It is the United States' entrance into the world.

Speaker 2 It turns isolationists into internationalists. So

Speaker 2 in the run-up to World War II, even isolationists who wanted to stay out of the

Speaker 2 war realized the United States

Speaker 2 had to set up defenses in Latin America. And it was a short step from that to beating a full-on

Speaker 2 internationalist. But it is.
it's a doctrine that's very much associated with

Speaker 2 the anti-internationalist wing of foreign policy, with the nationalist chauvinist American first wing, because they assume that Latin America belongs to the United States.

Speaker 2 And, you know, this goes back to taking Texas, taking Mexico. It all gets deepened, you know, the need to build a canal.

Speaker 2 You know, it does, it actually Monroe doesn't even be, it doesn't even take the name doctrine until the 1850s when the united states was starting to look for a site to build a canal in the in in central america and it's competing with with the british over where that canal will be and and then all of a sudden what what was like a couple of random paragraphs in an 1823 state of the union address became the monroe doctrine

Speaker 1 right

Speaker 1 so uh going back like going back to like the history of venezuela in particular like the Maduro, the Maduro government and Chavez before him,

Speaker 1 they view themselves as heirs to the Bolivarian Revolution. And the Bolivian military is

Speaker 1 often referred to as the Bolivarian Armed Forces. So

Speaker 1 how does Simon Bola, Simón Bolivar and his war of independence from Spain, how does that history shape the context of the current government of Venezuela and its relations to the United States?

Speaker 2 Well, Bolivar became a symbol, right? And Bolivar was born in Venezuela. He was one of the first revolutionaries.

Speaker 2 Latin American independence took place. There were multiple fronts, multiple wars, multiple independence movements in Mexico

Speaker 2 in southern South America. But Bolivar led the one in what's now Venezuela and what's now Colombia and what's now the northern Andes.
And he's associated with

Speaker 2 finally driving the Spanish out. So he's a national hero in Venezuela and obviously a hero among Latin Americans in general.
And Chavez

Speaker 2 was very astute at invoking him as a kind of what I guess

Speaker 2 Ernesto LeCloud would call an articulating principle.

Speaker 2 Because you could bring a lot of different ideas into liberation theology, Marxism, socialism,

Speaker 2 a sense of a kind of larger nationalism.

Speaker 2 And there is this deep affection for Bolivar, just like there there is for its, you know, a certain kind of patriotism. So, so Chavez was very good at, and he wasn't the first one.

Speaker 2 There was always a, there was long a kind of opposition between Bolivarism and Monroeism.

Speaker 2 One was seen as more, the first was seen as more humanistic, more universal, more emancipatory. The other was seen as interventionist and imperialist and enslaving.

Speaker 2 And so, you know,

Speaker 2 Chavez was tapping into that.

Speaker 2 And, you know, what Chavez basically was doing

Speaker 2 was resurrecting a lot of ideas from the 1970s associated with dependency theory and the new international economic order and the idea that you can use oil as a tax on the first, as a tax on the first world to subsidize.

Speaker 2 solidarity in the third world and and and social programs. You know, all of his, all of his programs, a lot of them had antecedents going back into the 70s.

Speaker 2 You know, Chavez was unbelievably strategic. He had rhetorical hegemony.
He had electoral hegemony for a long time.

Speaker 2 He, without doubt, won at least 13, well, I can't remember the numbers now, but 11 elections. Absolutely fairly.
without any, you know, the one election he lost to amend the Constitution, he accepted.

Speaker 2 He accepted. But,

Speaker 2 you know, one could say he made a series of mistakes. You know, maybe he should have set up a sovereign wealth fund rather than just like spending the money.

Speaker 2 Like he let everybody do whatever they wanted. He didn't, you know, and the state was very, I mean, the state both collapsed and was also a kind of nucleus of reaction and special interests.

Speaker 2 So instead of

Speaker 2 instead of like presiding over revolution and creating a new state with

Speaker 2 monopoly power over the borders and over violence and force and coercion, Chavez basically created all these parallel institutions.

Speaker 2 Well, we can't deal with the medical establishment, we'll just create medical missions. We can't deal with the universities, we'll just create a whole series of other educational power.

Speaker 2 It was parallelism. It was straight out building alternative things, except he didn't have to.

Speaker 2 Because there was so much money, and the money came largely because Chavez himself, along with his oil the people who presided over his oil program worked to revitalize opec rebuild opec and and get control of the national oil company and um you know oil was trading like at seven dollars a barrel when chavez came into power you know and at its height in 2008 it was like five or six times that and that was a largely because of what Venezuela was doing in trying to reorganize the world.

Speaker 2 It's little known that the United States' response pushed for fracking.

Speaker 2 And Obama's, when, you know, Obama taken credit, I did that about all the oil and oil he was pumping here and there and like turning the United States into a self-sufficient oil export.

Speaker 2 To a large degree, that was about, that was in response to Chavez. That was in response to Venezuela.
And, you know, Chavez dies in 2013 and he anoints Nicolas Maduro,

Speaker 2 his successor, which might not have been

Speaker 2 the best idea.

Speaker 2 He didn't have his charisma. Oil collapsed when he died.

Speaker 2 It went down to $13 a barrel. And the United States began a full court press.
And basically, Chavez socialized the bourgeoisie through those elections.

Speaker 2 and through his rhetorical dominance of the public sphere. And

Speaker 2 he forced opposition parties to fight on his terrain. Or in all of those elections, they were basically promising to be better socialists than Chavez was by the end of his life.

Speaker 2 But then Chavez dies. Maduro wins the next election, but by a hair.
And he doesn't have the tools or the skills

Speaker 2 to maintain the socialization, to maintain the bourgeoisie's kind of, to keep, you know, the way that Chavez did.

Speaker 2 He would have had to re-socialize

Speaker 2 his winning so close re-emboldened the opposition and re-embolded them to go on the offensive in a way that was like, we're not, it was no longer we're going to be better

Speaker 2 redistributors than you are. We're like, you know, we're going to, you know, we're going to get the country back that we had.
And,

Speaker 2 you know, it's been

Speaker 2 horrific. It's been catastrophic.

Speaker 1 Well, also, like, it's sort of a double-edged sword because, like, if oil is such a great source of wealth and power and you make your whole state about oil, well, then things get really dicey when global oil prices take a dip.

Speaker 1 And isn't that what happened with Venezuela?

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 Chavez was

Speaker 2 the last leftist, the last decent leftist, decent human being

Speaker 2 that could credibly think that they were going to use oil to fund

Speaker 2 an internationalist progressive program.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 that is straight out of the 1970s.

Speaker 2 When oil prices started going up, the whole new international order

Speaker 2 thought they were going to make a public energy bank in which the profits from oil would go into that and allow poor countries to take out low-interest loans in order to develop and also

Speaker 2 so they could know how they can project what their energy costs would be over a decade, which is a central element of any kind of developmentalist project. But an energy bank isn't what happened.

Speaker 2 What happened was that Kissinger and Saudi Arabia and Iran before the revolution

Speaker 2 basically made a deal to

Speaker 2 basically cycle petrodollars into New York and Bonn and London banks

Speaker 2 and recirculate them, both to pay for arms deals and to keep the U.S. military industry afloat after Vietnam, but then also lent as loans.
to third world countries.

Speaker 2 So Chavez's using of oil was a kind of harkening back to this earlier moment of the new international economic order, but it was quixotic, you know, and obviously,

Speaker 2 you know, even setting aside climate change, you know, it can't just happen in one country.

Speaker 2 But yeah,

Speaker 2 it was interesting, you know.

Speaker 2 And Maduro is just the kind of...

Speaker 1 tail end of that that is you know that we're living with the consequences well i mean like obviously like uh venezuela has been under under sanctions for a long time.

Speaker 1 I mean, their economy has cratered. We often hear about the terrible deprivations caused by his government.

Speaker 1 But it does seem like Maduro, for better or worse, has used the wealth and power that he has to shore up Venezuela's considerable military.

Speaker 1 Now, you could say, like, maybe he should be spending that money on his own people, but given, you know, their tenuous position and the repeated coup attempts, I can't say I totally blame him because it just seems like in spite of all of this, Venezuela still has a fairly strong and importantly loyal military.

Speaker 1 So what do you think explains this?

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, I think that they got rich. I think they got powerful.
I think that they relied more and more on the military rather than social movements.

Speaker 2 As, you know, even when Chavez was alive during some of his early elections, I remember being in...

Speaker 2 in some of the popular barrios and they were like, okay, now that this election is won, you know, now the real revolution begins. We're going to like create this.

Speaker 2 And of course, it never actually truly happens because of, I guess, the geopolitics of having to rely on a strong military when you surround it. I mean, at the time, Colombia was a hostile state,

Speaker 2 and pressing in on Venezuela. And

Speaker 2 you had the Bush administration, then you had

Speaker 2 the quieter imperialism of the Obama administration, which placed sanctions on Venezuela.

Speaker 2 And then

Speaker 2 it was ratcheted up by

Speaker 2 Trump and then by by Biden.

Speaker 2 It does enormous damage. So there is this sense that, yeah, of course, anybody who knows anything about Latin America knows that you may be called on to defend yourself or to just give up, right?

Speaker 1 And if you have to defend

Speaker 1 yourself, make sure that your officers are, I don't know, well taken care of.

Speaker 2 Well taken care of, but also was part of the, you know, the fact that, you know, everybody was, everybody was getting to do what they want.

Speaker 2 The, the, you know, the peasants were building the cooperatives, the workers were organizing,

Speaker 2 people were doing this and good people were doing that. And then the military was making money and

Speaker 2 the Bolivarian bourgeoisie was making money. A whole new middle class emerged.

Speaker 2 I made that joke that Brett Stevens keeps on quoting as an indication of the immoralism of the left where I said, Chavez, in his obituary in the nation, I said he wasn't, the problem was he wasn't, it wasn't that he was too

Speaker 2 authoritarian. He wasn't authoritarian enough.
What I meant by that is that he should have built a state.

Speaker 2 He should have built a state rather than a series of parallel institutions to a decayed state, you know, and

Speaker 2 he didn't, you know, and maybe in retrospect, he should have used, he should have been like Norway and built a sovereign wealth. fund and been a little bit more

Speaker 2 you know but whatever it was you know he was, people, people loved him and he was spending money on, he was spending money on health care and he was spending money. But obviously it couldn't last.

Speaker 2 And it didn't.

Speaker 1 Thinking back to the first Trump administration, now the last time Trump was in office, there was that incredibly embarrassing coup attempt where like the guys all got arrested and Maduro was like showing their U.S.

Speaker 1 passports on Venezuelan national TV. I mean, first of all, how are you going to send the guys to do do your coup into the country with their U.S.
passports? I mean, that's insane.

Speaker 1 But like, do you think the memory of that embarrassment is like sort of, I don't know, kindling a lot of this bloodlust now that they want retribution for how badly they were humiliated on the last go-around?

Speaker 2 I don't know. I don't think Trump even remembers.
Do you think Trump remembers that?

Speaker 1 I mean, I think maybe Marco Rubio does.

Speaker 2 I mean, Rubio might. Rubio might.
It doesn't seem, nobody talks about it. It's like down the memory hole, right? Nobody even talks about it.
I think it's, I think they're just trying for part two of

Speaker 2 a continuation. You know, I mean, it was a circus.
Remember the whole, we're going to recognize Juan Guayo and he's the president.

Speaker 2 You know, he's running around on his little motorcycle around Venezuela, telling everybody he's the president. Nobody's listening to, you know, he's, you know,

Speaker 2 so and then they give that up. I don't, I don't know exactly what the official policy of the United States not recognized.
I don't know if it still recognizes Juan Guayo.

Speaker 1 Well, they have a new figure.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of

Speaker 2 craziness during that first term. Like, I don't know what they recognize, but I don't think they feel humiliated.

Speaker 1 Guayira, I'm sure, has been forgotten about, but

Speaker 1 there's sort of a new figure, the lady who just won the Nobel Peace Prize

Speaker 1 more or less for saying, please, Donald Trump invade my country. I mean, first of all, could you give us some background? Like, who is this person and what do you make of her?

Speaker 2 She's been involved in anti-Chavez politics since the beginning. She's a symbol symbol of oligarchic intransigence.

Speaker 2 She was involved in the 2002 coup,

Speaker 2 which, you know, of course, failed and had and had George W. Bush's backing.

Speaker 2 She represented a face of the oligarch. Remember, I said that there was a...

Speaker 2 you know, that Chavez socialized the oligarchy and its political expressions, tried to kind of mimic some kind of democratic socialism. Yet she wasn't part of that.

Speaker 2 She represented the most intransigent and divisive. And she wasn't polarizing just to get vis-a-vis Chavismo.
She was polarizing within the opposition.

Speaker 2 She comes from a wealthy family involved in, I think, electrical engineering and metal work and

Speaker 2 became a symbol of this kind of oligarchic opposition to Chavismo.

Speaker 2 And then she still, you know, and as the as the opposition moved after Chavez died and the opposition moved away from its earlier more moderation and moved back toward Machallo's vision of a kind of, you know,

Speaker 2 of a restoration of the of the rightful class,

Speaker 2 she

Speaker 2 she became

Speaker 2 rose in power. And like a lot of these people, they rely on foreigners to to prop up their their power, the mostly the United States.

Speaker 2 And that was what was sort of so shameful about why the I mean, I don't really understand what the Nobel Committee was thinking because

Speaker 2 you could find,

Speaker 2 I mean, setting aside like the doctors who work in Gaza or the women who are fighting not to be put in prison for having miscarriages in El Salvador, you could probably find more moderate faces of the opposition

Speaker 2 within Venezuela that could have that they could have given the the Nobel Peace Prize to.

Speaker 2 I mean, if you know if they did if if for whatever reason the Nobel Committee felt like Venezuela was the thing that they had to focus on.

Speaker 2 But instead, they just gave it to somebody who is like, you know, has now endorsed those murders in the Caribbean and

Speaker 2 murders in the Pacific and basically has endorsed the argument that Venezuela isn't a state

Speaker 2 run by a corrupt military government, but it is a state run by a you know a cartel.

Speaker 2 And Maduro is a kingpin, and they could treat him that the way they treated Manuel Loriega in 1989, except only Venezuela is bigger than Panama. Yeah,

Speaker 1 it's quite a different kettle of fish than

Speaker 1 Panama or Grenada, right? Like Venezuela is a much bigger country and it has

Speaker 1 a considerable military. And I guess I bring this up.

Speaker 1 Dick Cheney died last week. And I guess I bring that up in light of the prospects.

Speaker 2 The warning of Momhami's election.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Every document of barbarism is a document of civilization.

Speaker 1 So Dick Cheney may be gone, but his shadow looms large. And I guess I bring this up in light of the prospects of a U.S.
invasion of Venezuela.

Speaker 1 And like with Iraq and Afghanistan, I have no doubt that the U.S.

Speaker 1 military still retains considerable ability to kill large large numbers of people, destroy infrastructure, and possibly topple Maduro's government.

Speaker 1 I don't think that's a given, but like, given where the United States is right now, like, how, how would you, are we any better equipped now to achieve an actual victory in terms of like a tactical, strategic, or political sense or deal with what is sure to be a grinding guerrilla war and counterinsurgency that is likely to arise should we actually put boots on the ground in Venezuela?

Speaker 2 I don't know. I mean, look, look, what do I know? You know,

Speaker 2 it's much different. Panama

Speaker 2 was something akin to a surgical strike. It was the application of the Powell doctrine that we had to get in, know what we were doing, and get out.

Speaker 2 They sent 30,000 Marines who were already practically stationed in Panama in terms of the Panama Canal zone.

Speaker 2 They had allies within the Panama Defense Forces, and Noriega didn't have a chance.

Speaker 2 And it was a small country,

Speaker 2 uh and they were in and out quickly and then bush to you know that was the first of course that was the first step to the road to iraq because what it was the first real major intervention that was justified not in the name of of of national security but of and not just in terms of drugs but in terms of bringing democracy to the people of panama venezuela is a big country things are bad though people are hungry you know i don't know how much people are going to be loyal to to chave i mean i'm sorry to maduro maduro you know it's it's a big question the united states though also seems a little bit inept i mean did you read about that gerald ford carrier that yeah yeah yeah that was that was the last thing i was going to bring up and traveling a trail of like radiation you know

Speaker 1 well yeah you uh there is an article i wanted to bring up about i i mentioned that we're moving this uh like a huge amount of military resources into the caribbean including it including our army slowing it down too i think i think they're slow they're not they're not they're not getting there fast fast.

Speaker 2 And Trump does seem like he's backed away a little bit from some of the rhetoric. I mean, it seems like they don't know who they want to bomb, Mexico, Venezuela.

Speaker 2 Now they're picking on Colombia, right? I mean,

Speaker 2 you know, now they're trying to say that Petro is the head of a content.

Speaker 2 Go on.

Speaker 1 I did want to bring up the aircraft carrier thing because

Speaker 1 one of the ships that they moved was the USS Gerald R. Ford, which is is like the newest and latest iteration of the U.S.
aircraft carrier fleet to replace the old Nimitz class. And first of all,

Speaker 1 don't you think it's funny that it's named after Gerald Ford and the thing is like a lemon, like the toilets don't flush and like basically nothing works.

Speaker 2 Saturday night live scenes tripping down the stairs. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 it was delivered a disaster, apparently. I mean, I don't know.

Speaker 2 I'm not, I'm not a mechanical engineer, but the but the systems failures were were big on every level, from the weapon system to the radar to

Speaker 2 I guess the nuclear fusion that powers it.

Speaker 2 It's been one disaster after another. And it's delayed the delivery of the second carrier in this class, the Kennedy, which was, you know, and it was way over budget.

Speaker 2 And it just seems like a symbol of...

Speaker 2 I don't know, it seems like a symbol of what like Hegset intuitively knows is wrong with the U.S.

Speaker 2 military, but because he's such a crazy Christian nationalist, he focuses on like not, you know, shaving

Speaker 2 instead of reforming the procurement, you know, the procurement procedures of major military crafts.

Speaker 2 You know, so it is a symbol.

Speaker 2 I don't know, you know, they are, they, you know, they have battleships and they have, and they don't have, they don't have enough troops to launch an on-the-ground invasion of Venezuela.

Speaker 2 I think maybe they hope that the military will turn against, you know, maybe, maybe they'll bomb. I don't know.
But, you know, I don't think there's going to be a lot of stomach for bombing

Speaker 2 any major civilian population. So the strikes and military operations.

Speaker 2 I don't think that Venezuela is a target-rich country to bomb.

Speaker 2 It's not like they have a nuclear installation they have to take out or weapons plant. So,

Speaker 2 you know, I don't know what it's, it does seem like Bush is backing away a little bit from that, even though, you know, Trump, you know, just last week. Yeah, I guess it's all the same.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Trump.

Speaker 1 Well, yeah, it does seem because like Trump does,

Speaker 1 out of all whatever, whatever skills he does have, he does seem to have some sort of instinctive capacity to read the room.

Speaker 1 And that's why I think these like these fast boat attacks and their advertisement of it is him sort of nibbling around the edges. And like his public statements are like, Maybe I'll do it.

Speaker 1 Maybe I won't. I won't tell you.
I don't know. Yeah.
But like, it does seem he has some sort of instinctive,

Speaker 1 at least awareness that he doesn't want to be seen as a loser on the chances of like an invasion of Venezuela and it going poorly, and as well as the, you know, like the U.S.

Speaker 1 populations are rather, I don't know, that we don't want to see our own soldiers dying in a conflict like this. Like, it seems he's sort of boxed in a little bit.

Speaker 1 Like, and he wants to just do just enough. But, like, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe like,

Speaker 2 it's not going to be Libya, right?

Speaker 2 It's not going to be Libya, you know, complete disaster. I don't, you know, there's any number of nightmare scenarios that could happen.

Speaker 2 I mean, I don't think there's going to be like an insurgency in defense of Maduro,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 kind of thing, but, you know, there could be total chaos in setting up

Speaker 2 an alternative government because the opposition hates each other. So I don't know who they think they're going to put in charge.

Speaker 2 And, you know, they might declare victory quickly if Maduro falls and some other general takes his place that's less aligned with the Bolivarian movement.

Speaker 2 But yeah, maybe they'll just still kill, just continue to kill fishermen in the Caribbean and the Pacific, you know, poor. You know, those boats,

Speaker 2 those boats weren't coming from Venezuela to the United States.

Speaker 2 They can't make it across the Caribbean.

Speaker 1 They couldn't get to Florida from where they were just.

Speaker 2 And they were probably carrying migrants. And I mean, Bush obviously, I mean, Bush, Trump obviously,

Speaker 2 Trump obviously keeps on, likes the show of dominance and he likes to be able to.

Speaker 1 How dominant is it to use the U.S. Navy to blow up like a couple speedboats?

Speaker 1 Isn't this just like a rather than a demonstration of dominion, isn't this just kind of like, if this is what we're advertising to the world, is like the U.S.

Speaker 1 military has the capability of blowing up a boat.

Speaker 1 Like one

Speaker 2 boat.

Speaker 2 It's a firm, you know, on a smaller scale, affirming the logic of Gaza, impunity,

Speaker 2 asymmetrical power, you know, no accountability.

Speaker 2 But also, again,

Speaker 2 it was the very first, what they it is Trump, but it's also Rubio, and it was Rubio's bid to preempt

Speaker 2 the moderates who seemed like Richard Grinnell, who's also an American first. He's an ideologue.
He's a Trump supporter. But

Speaker 2 he wants to make deals with Maduro

Speaker 2 on behalf of Chevron. And Rubio

Speaker 2 really

Speaker 2 sees Latin America in more ideological terms.

Speaker 2 He wants,

Speaker 2 and now that Millet has won

Speaker 2 his congressional election and this election coming up in Chile, it seems like

Speaker 2 an old Pinochet supporter, Miguel Casta, is going to win because, you know, a communist, I can't remember her first name, her last name is Hara,

Speaker 2 is running for the left. She won the left primary, and she's the most popular single politician.
But it seemed, but there's two right-wing politicians in Chile, and once it goes to a second round.

Speaker 2 So they'll have Chile,

Speaker 2 they'll have Argentina.

Speaker 2 You know, Rubio wants Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba. And, you know, and of course they have El Salvador and they have Ecuador.

Speaker 2 But like I said, they don't have their sphere of influence organized if they still have Lula.

Speaker 1 And like you said, they don't have Brazil. Brazil, which is the mega, that's the big one.

Speaker 2 Especially Brazil under Lula,

Speaker 2 who beat back Bolsonaro and beat back

Speaker 2 Trump's attempt to stop the prosecution of Bolsonaro, right? All of those coup plotters are in jail. And

Speaker 2 they beat back Musk's attempt to somehow present keeping fascists off of Rumble is a violation of free speech. You know, for some reason, Glenn Greenwald, who is good on

Speaker 2 a lot of things, is a little out of his mind on that topic when it comes to Brazil.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 so, yeah, so they don't have Brazil, but not only Brazil, they don't have Brazil, and Brazil's led by Lula, who is organizing the BRICS, right he's he is one he's a symbol of you know an attempt to build an international back check against Trumpism and and the tariffs and the and the power of the dollar um and all of that um and and they don't have Mexico right and and Mexico and Brazil are Latin America's two major economies um my last question for you is like I guess from a domestic political perspective like uh Trump is more or less openly threatening to go to war with Venezuela.

Speaker 1 And also Nigeria, too, has been added into this.

Speaker 1 He's going to protect Christians in Nigeria. Obviously, like, there's always some, Congress will always say, oh, you have to ask us before we give you the authority to do this.

Speaker 1 But like, look, the Democrats just had a good election. good election night last week.
But like, what does it say to you about the fact that like the issue of Donald Trump's promise of invading

Speaker 1 two additional countries now is entirely absent from political debates in this country in terms of like the Democrats as an opposition party. What does that say to you?

Speaker 2 Well, what it says to me, it's to the degree that liberals are still very much lead the discourse

Speaker 2 in terms of what constitutes opposition to Trump. It's still very much domestic focus, still very much, I mean, this is nothing new, right?

Speaker 2 Like when they wanted to impeach Richard Nixon, they tried to get a couple of articles of impeachment there about the illegal war in Cambodia.

Speaker 2 And the Jacksonian Democrats, the Scoop Jackson,

Speaker 2 Jackson, Scoop Jackson, Henry Scoop Jackson, yeah. The Democrats, the Cold War Democrats basically forced those articles of impeachment out and made it a totally domestic affair.

Speaker 2 You know, it's nothing new. It goes back.
Thorean policy is,

Speaker 2 you know, it's the insanity of the United States, the schizophrenia that the United States is totally structured by

Speaker 2 its foreign power, its ability to project outward, where so many times

Speaker 2 hegemony,

Speaker 2 a conception of how the world works and how it should work, is forged in foreign policy and forged in expansion and creating markets and wars.

Speaker 2 And yet when it comes to domestic politics, nobody ever thinks about those things because, you know, there's so.

Speaker 2 You know, because it's, it's just, there's so much crap to deal with at home. I mean, you know, I mean, it's as simple as that.
It's like, who could keep track?

Speaker 2 Like, sure, let's throw, let's throw opposition to a war in Venezuela into the mix. But, you know, you'd not have a conception of the United States that's different than most people have.

Speaker 2 Most people, you know, politics, all politics is local, you know.

Speaker 1 All right. Well, we'll leave it there for today.

Speaker 1 Greg Grandon, thank you so much for your time and your perspective on Venezuela and Latin America. As always, thanks for joining us.
And please check out Greg's book, America, America.

Speaker 2 Thanks, Will. It was always great.
Always great speaking with you guys.

Speaker 1 All right, everybody. That does it for today.
Till next time, bye-bye.