How Venezuela supports violent leftist groups to destabilize the country

Last week, President Trump announced that he authorized covert actions by the CIA inside Venezuela. This decision is part of a broader campaign against the Nicolás Maduro regime, aimed at combating drug trafficking and stopping tons of drugs entering the United States through the Caribbean.

However, according to The Washington Examiner (WE), Caracas also extends to other areas. According to the conservative daily, Chavismo has long backed efforts to sow political division in the country's streets. Under Hugo Chávez, it supported the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM), and currently backs Antifa.

Last week, journalist Mike Gonzalez of The Washington Examiner spoke with a former senior Venezuelan official who was very close to Hugo Chávez and who has now defected. According to Gonzalez, the man told him he was in the room in late 2012 when Chavez handed Opal Tometi - who the following year helped found BLM - suitcases full of dollars.

"Chavez ordered his people to give them the suitcases, suitcases full of dollars, at least $20 million," the defector told Gonzalez, adding that Tometi was accompanied by three other black women and actor Danny Glover, a supporter of Marxist regimes in the Caribbean. "Chavez told them the money was to project the Bolivarian revolutionary project on the streets of the United States," he said, using Chavez's term for Venezuelan Marxism.

According to Gonzalez, it was Chavez himself who, in 2006, called for the creation of a leftist network within the U.S. that would act as a fifth column to thwart U.S. policy.

"That network materialized in the United States Social Forum (USSF). Created in 2007, it quickly became an incubator for BLM founders to establish contacts," the journalist said.

Chavez pushed for the founding of BLM

Chavez made this call in 2006 during the World Social Forum, organized in Caracas, an international meeting of left-wing militants and social movements that had been held annually in different capitals of the world.

"Essential to this formula to save the world are the people of the U.S. with the peoples of the Caribbean, the peoples of Latin America, the peoples of Asia, Africa and Europe. We must all unite; unite in a victorious offensive against the empire," Chavez said during his speech.

A few months later, the inaugural meeting of the U.S. Social Forum was held in Atlanta in 2007. According to Mike Gonzalez, Alicia Garza, another of the three main founders of BLM, was there and was part of the organizing committee. The journalist claims that in 2010 Garza revealed, in a speech delivered in Oakland, that the USSF was created at the request of foreign enemies of the United States.

For Gonzalez, all this networking, at the behest of Chavez, helped create the impetus for the founding of BLM in 2013. And BLM, after its creation, did not skimp on giving its support to the Venezuelan regime.

Nicolás Maduro bets on Antifa

In 2015, Opal Tometi - who that same year was an electoral observer in Venezuela and wrote a manifesto on behalf of BLM in support of the Bolivarian revolution - invited Nicolás Maduro to speak in Harlem during an event also attended by actor Danny Glover.

According to Mike Gonzalez, BLM leaders wasted all their money and any respectability they might have had, and now they are nothing more than rival groups arguing over who owns the money that's left.

So, according to the journalist, perhaps that explains why Maduro is now busy directing his attention to Antifa groups. According to Gonzalez, these groups may lack the structure that BLM once had and the political and social influence, but Antifa makes up for it with crude violence and actions to sow pure chaos.

Amid accusations of electoral fraud, Nicolas Maduro has hosted at least five "anti-fascist" rallies, conferences and festivals since September 2024, turning Caracas into an epicenter of anti-imperialist rhetoric. These events, which bring together international delegates, focus on criticizing U.S. policies.

At the most recent International Anti-Fascist Festival, held last January, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), a Marxist-Leninist grouping with headquarters in San Francisco and Washington, participated on behalf of the United States.

This party claims that "behind a facade of 'democracy' the United States today is a dictatorship of the capitalist class. This reality will not change without a socialist revolution."