Maduro’s capture and the return of empire: Why Venezuela is not a ‘rescue mission’ but a colonial reprise

The US “capture” of Nicolás Maduro is being celebrated in Western capitals as the fall of a tyrant and the restoration of democracy. The language is familiar, almost ritualistic: a strongman removed, a nation “liberated,” history supposedly nudged back onto the right track. Yet this narrative is not merely misleading—it is colonial. It erases centuries of Latin America’s resistance to empire, sanitises racialised class rule, and reduces a deeply political struggle into a morality play written in Washington and applauded in Europe. To understand Venezuela, one must first discard the fiction that this was ever just about Nicolás Maduro. The Bolivarian Revolution was not a personality cult or a transient regime; it was a historical rupture. It emerged from centuries […]