By Michelle Ellner
Elliott Abrams has resurfaced with familiar instructions on how to “fix” Venezuela, a country he neither understands nor respects, yet feels entitled to rearrange like a piece of furniture in Washington’s living room. His new proposal is drenched in the same Cold War fever and colonial mindset that shaped his work in the 1980s, when U.S. foreign policy turned Central America into a graveyard.
My childhood in Venezuela was shaped by stories from our region that the world rarely sees: stories of displacement, of death squads, of villages erased from maps, of governments toppled for daring to act outside Washington’s orbit. And I know exactly who Elliott Abrams is, not from think-tank biographies, but from the grief woven into Central America’s landscape.
Abrams writes with the confidence of someone who has never lived inside the countries his policies have destabilized. His newest argument rests on the most dangerous assumption of all: that the United States has the authority, by virtue of power alone, to decide who governs Venezuela. This is the original sin of U.S. policy in the hemisphere, the one that justifies everything else: the sanctions, the blockades, the covert operations, the warships in the Caribbean. The assumption that the hemisphere is still an extension of U.S. strategic space rather than a region with its own political will.
In this telling, Venezuela becomes a “narco-state,” a convenient villain. But anyone who bothers to study the architecture of the global drug trade knows that the world’s largest illegal market is the United States, not Venezuela. The money laundering happens in New York and London, not in Caracas. The guns that sustain the drug corridors of the continent used to threaten, to extort, to kill, come overwhelmingly from American producers. And the history of the drug war itself, from its intelligence partnerships to its paramilitary enforcement wings, was written in Washington, not in the barrios of Venezuela.
Even U.S. government data contradicts Abrams’ narrative. DEA and UNODC reports have long shown that the vast majority of cocaine destined for U.S. consumers travels from Colombia through the Pacific, not through Venezuela. Washington knows this. But the fiction of a “Venezuelan narco-route” is politically useful: it turns a geopolitical disagreement into a criminal case file and prepares the public for escalation.
What’s striking is that Abrams never turns to the real front line of the drug trade: U.S. cities, U.S. banks, U.S. gun shows, U.S. demand. The crisis he describes is born in his own country, yet he looks for the solution in foreign intervention. The United States has long armed, financed, and politically protected its own “narco-allies” when it suited larger strategic goals. The Contras in Nicaragua, paramilitary blocs in Colombia, and death squads in Honduras. These were policy tools, and many of them operated with Abrams’ direct diplomatic support.
I grew up with the stories of what that machinery did to our neighbors. You don’t need to visit Central America to understand its scars; you only need to listen. In Guatemala, Maya communities still grieve a genocide that U.S. officials refused to acknowledge, even as villages were erased and survivors fled into the mountains. In El Salvador, families continue lighting candles for the hundreds of children and mothers killed in massacres that Abrams dismissed as “leftist propaganda.” In Nicaragua, the wounds left by the Contras, a paramilitary force armed, financed, and politically blessed by Washington, remain visible in the stories of burned cooperatives and murdered teachers. In Honduras, the word disappeared is not historically remote; it is widely remembered, a reminder of the death squads empowered under the banner of U.S. anti-communism.
So when Abrams warns about “criminal regimes,” I don’t think of Venezuela. I think of the mass graves, the scorched villages, the secret prisons, and the tens of thousands of Latin American lives shattered under the policies he championed. And those graves are not metaphors. They are the cartography of an entire era of U.S. intervention, the era Abrams insists on resurrecting.
Abrams now adds new threats to the old script: warnings about “narco-terrorism,” anxieties about “Iranian operatives,” alarms over “Chinese influence.” These issues are stripped of context, inflated, or selectively highlighted to manufacture a security crisis where none exists. Venezuela is not being targeted because of drugs, Iran, or China. It is being targeted because it has built relationships and development paths that do not answer to Washington. Independent diplomacy, South-South cooperation, and diversified alliances are treated as threats—not because they endanger the hemisphere, but because they weaken U.S. dominance within it.
His fantasy for Venezuela rests on another imperial delusion. The notion that the United States can bomb air bases, sabotage infrastructure, deploy Special Forces into a sovereign country, tighten sanctions until society buckles, and then “install” a compliant government as if Venezuela were an uninhabited outpost is a breathtaking escape from reality. Venezuela is a nation of 28 million people, with a national identity shaped by resisting foreign control, above all, control over oil. Abrams presents a military-assisted overthrow as if it were a routine administrative task, erasing the human cost, the regional fallout, and the absolute certainty of popular resistance. It is the same imperial fantasy that has haunted Latin America for generations: the belief that our countries can be redesigned by force and that our people will obediently accept it.
He also assumes that once Washington’s preferred government is installed, the oil will conveniently flow. Nothing could reveal a deeper ignorance about Venezuela. Oil in Venezuela is not merely an export or a source of revenue; it is the ground on which its sovereignty was fought for, betrayed, reclaimed, and fought for again. It was the terrain of foreign concessions, the site of the 2002 sabotage, the backbone of the Bolivarian project. Venezuelan refineries, pipelines, and fields are the archive of a century of struggle to control its own destiny. Believing that foreign troops would be welcomed as managers of their most intimate sovereignty is to be utterly blinded by arrogance.
Then there is the matter of sanctions. In Washington, they are treated as technical measures, policy levers, bargaining chips. In Venezuela, there are shortages in hospitals, lines at pharmacies, collapsed revenue, currency freefall, and families forced into migration. And here Abrams’ fingerprints are impossible to ignore: during Trump’s first administration, he served as “Special Representative for Venezuela,” helping design and defend the very sanctions that strangled the economy he now blames the government for failing to manage. Abrams says sanctions “failed,” as though they were meant to improve Venezuelan life. But sanctions did not fail. They succeeded at destabilizing society, suffocating public services, and manufacturing the humanitarian crisis now used to justify further intervention. It is circular logic: create the conditions of collapse and then point to the collapse as evidence that the government must be removed.
Abrams now frames regime change as a solution to migration, but history tells another story entirely. U.S. interventions do not stop migration; they generate it. The largest waves of displacement in our region came in the wake of U.S.-backed coups, civil wars, counterinsurgency campaigns, and, more recently, the weaponization of economic sanctions. People fled not because their governments were left alone, but because Washington treated their countries as battlefields or, in the case of sanctions, as laboratories for economic collapse. Central Americans ran from bullets and death squads; Venezuelans have been pushed out by a siege designed to break the economy and fracture society. The result is the same: migration engineered by U.S. policy, then used as justification for further intervention.
Washington’s case against Venezuela now leans on a familiar set of fabricated alarms: claims that the country has become a hub of “narco-terrorism,” that it harbors Iranian operatives, that Chinese investment is a Trojan horse for hostile influence. Venezuela is not being targeted because of drugs, Iran, or China. It is being targeted because it has built relationships and development projects that do not answer to Washington’s dictates. Independent diplomacy, South-South cooperation, and diversified alliances are treated as threats, not because they endanger the hemisphere, but because they weaken U.S. dominance within it.
Until Washington abandons the idea that it owns the hemisphere, Latin America will never be safe. Not from Abrams, not from coups, not from CIA programs, not from blockades, and not from the Monroe Doctrine.
And perhaps the clearest sign of this imperial hypocrisy is watching Trump accuse his domestic opponents of “sedition” for a simple video where lawmakers remind U.S. service members that they are legally bound to refuse unlawful orders. Yet the very same political forces praise the idea of Venezuelan officers breaking their own constitutional order to topple a government Washington dislikes. Latin America has lived long enough under that double standard, and we are done paying the price for it.
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Michelle Ellner is a Latin America campaign coordinator of CODEPINK. She was born in Venezuela and holds a bachelor’s degree in languages and international affairs from the University La Sorbonne Paris IV, in Paris. After graduating, she worked for an international scholarship program out of offices in Caracas and Paris and was sent to Haiti, Cuba, The Gambia, and other countries for the purpose of evaluating and selecting applicants.
