WOW! EXCELLENT! Thank you, Jermaine Fowler! Tears. This is so well articulated and breathtaking in its scope. And horrifying. And heartbreaking. And the tragic truth. — Molly
The U.S. bombed Caracas and called it liberation
Doral, Florida. 4 AM. A strip mall parking lot. The arepa shop won’t open for hours but they came anyway—some still in pajamas, holding phones from when the notification woke them. Champagne corks. Wooden spoons on pots. A man named Edgar drapes a Venezuelan flag over his shoulders, the same flag he wore at his University of Florida graduation. He wore it then out of love for a country that kept breaking. He wears it now because the man who broke it is finally in handcuffs.
Someone is crying. Someone is singing the anthem into a phone. Si se pudo. Si se pudo. Yes, we did it.
The grief in this parking lot is twenty-five years deep—the specific grief of people who watched their country collapse from 1,300 miles away, who sent money home and watched it become worthless before it arrived, who got word that friends were arrested and cousins fled to Colombia with nothing, who learned the pharmacy was empty again and grandmother had died and they couldn’t go back for the funeral because going back meant maybe not coming back. Maduro hollowed out a nation until eight million people left it. He stole an election and jailed anyone who objected. A country sitting on the largest oil reserves on earth, and people couldn’t find cooking oil. The suffering was real. The exile was real. The people dancing in this parking lot are not performing.
And the man who delivered this moment called them animals.
October 2024. Aurora, Colorado. Trump at a podium, mugshots of alleged Venezuelan gang members on posters behind him. “We have to live with these animals,” he said. “But we’re not going to live with them for long.” He called their communities “infected.” He promised to “clean out” the country. The mugshots were gang members. The message was for everyone. You don’t call a community “infected” and then claim you were only talking about a few.
Last month, his administration revoked Temporary Protected Status for half a million Venezuelans. This morning, he bombed their country and called it liberation. They’re still being told to leave.
Liberation for Venezuela. Deportation for Venezuelans. Same president. Same week.
This morning, the man who called them animals became their liberator.
The press secretary called it a law enforcement action. The lawyers nodded. If it’s law enforcement, Congress doesn’t need to authorize it, the War Powers Resolution doesn’t apply, and the UN Charter’s prohibition on force becomes irrelevant. You can’t violate the sovereignty of a government that doesn’t exist.
Trump, at the same podium ten minutes later, called it something else: “We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth from the ground. And it goes to the United States in the form of reimbursement.” The oil executives leaned forward.
Hegseth didn’t bother with the script at all. “This is about regime change,” he said. “This is about making sure the resources of this hemisphere serve American interests.” The generals had their orders.
A Republican congressman, one of the only ones who seemed to notice, said it plainly: “My main concern is that Russia will use this to justify Ukraine. China will use this for Taiwan.” Nobody changed course.
Four statements. Four different masks. One operation.
Follow the logic and the elegance dissolves. Any leader the United States doesn’t recognize can be bombed and abducted without coalition, without mandate, without limit. Sovereignty becomes a courtesy we extend to governments we approve of and revoke the moment we don’t.
That’s not a limiting principle. That’s the absence of one.
“We built Venezuela’s oil industry,” Trump said, “and the socialist regime stole it from us.”
Venezuela nationalized its own oil fifty years ago. What Trump calls theft is a country deciding what happens to what’s under its own soil. The crime is sovereignty itself.
The justification is drugs. The objective is oil. Both stated out loud. Same podium. Same breath.
Reimbursement.
None of this is new. The pattern has always been the same: a doctrine of control, a pretext of disorder, an intervention, and American interests walking in behind the troops.
1823: Monroe Doctrine. The hemisphere belongs to us.
1904: Roosevelt Corollary. The U.S. will exercise “police power” whenever Washington decides a nation is guilty of “wrongdoing.”
For three decades after: Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Cuba. They called it the Banana Wars. The vocabulary changed but the grammar stayed the same.
1973: War Powers Resolution. Congress required authorization for military action. It became a loophole.
November 2025: White House Chief of Staff says strikes in Venezuela would require Congress. “If Trump authorizes activity on land, it’s war.”
January 2026: Bombed without authorization. Congress notified after. Explanation: “Congress leaks.”
The rules applied until they didn’t. That’s how the system works.
Watch how fast it moves.
Saturday morning: shock.
Saturday afternoon: debate.
Saturday evening: acceptance. He was a dictator. He deserved it.
The threats came at that same Saturday press conference—the one where they announced the capture. “Something is going to have to be done about Mexico,” Trump said. Cuba “is something we’ll end up talking about.” Colombia’s president “needs to watch his ass.”
Mexico. Cuba. Colombia.
Three countries threatened before Maduro’s plane touched down in New York. And other names—not yet spoken, not yet bombed.
This is how consent is manufactured: not by convincing you the action was legal, but by moving so fast that the question of legality becomes yesterday’s news before it can be answered. By the time you’ve processed Venezuela, Mexico is on the table. By the time you’ve processed Mexico, Cuba is next. Each exception becomes the rule. Each violation becomes the precedent for the next. The window of shock shortens every time until shock itself becomes impossible and all that’s left is acceptance.
That acceptance is not neutral. It is not the absence of a position. It is the position. The people nodding along, saying well, he was a dictator—they are building the permission structure for the next one. They are looking away because looking costs something, and they have decided not to pay.
The looking away is the participation. The shrug is the permission slip.
The innocence is believing this stops at Venezuela. That the logic has a limit somewhere, invisible but real.
It doesn’t. They said so. They named three countries before lunch.
Thirteen hundred miles south, a man drives through Caracas. He won’t give his name.
“I see a somewhat warlike atmosphere,” he says. “Silence can say many things.”
According to CNN, the streets were mostly deserted. Businesses closed. The smell of gunpowder lingered in the air. But from some balconies, music was playing—opponents of Maduro celebrating from their apartments, afraid of reprisals if they took to the streets. That’s what resistance looks like under occupation: a song from a window, a door that stays closed.
In Washington, outside the White House, protesters with signs: NO WAR FOR OIL.
In Doral, nobody is protesting. The sun is up. Valeria Morillo tells reporters: “Since the moment I was born, we lived under an abusive dictatorship. I feel so lucky and privileged to be out in the street, whereas people back home in Caracas are scared for their lives.”
She’s asked when she’ll go back.
“The damage is almost irreparable. We’ll have to wait a long time.”
A Cuban American woman stands at the edge of the crowd. Her father called her this morning, told her she should come out. She said the celebration reminded her of the one in Miami after Fidel Castro died. Same dancing. Same certainty that everything was finally going to change.
“The regime held on in Cuba,” she said. “Things there are worse than ever.”
Asked about María Corina Machado—the woman who actually won Venezuela’s election, who received the Nobel Prize for her resistance, Trump waved her off. “She doesn’t have the support,” he said. “Very nice woman.” The U.S. invades to restore democracy, then dismisses the woman democracy chose. America will “run it” instead.
“We’re going to run it properly,” Trump said. This from a country that struggles to run healthcare, housing, even its own elections without half its citizens screaming fraud. But Venezuela, that we can run.
Run it for whom?
“We’re going to have our large oil companies go in, spend billions, fix the infrastructure.”
Reimbursement.
Three hundred billion barrels of oil. More than Saudi Arabia. More than anywhere on earth. That’s the answer. That was always the answer.
Venezuelans wanted Maduro gone. Americans wanted the oil. Nobody asked to be governed at gunpoint afterward—except the people who won’t have to live there.
Liberation that arrives by bomb belongs to the one who dropped it. The people in this parking lot are celebrating American power—the power to reach across borders and take what it wants. A leader. A resource. A country. They’re celebrating because that power was aimed at someone who destroyed their lives, and after twenty-five years of watching from 1,300 miles away, it is hard not to feel something when the man who made you flee is finally dragged away in handcuffs.
But power doesn’t ask permission to change direction.
The same administration handing out liberation just revoked protection for half a million exiles. The same president calling this freedom called them animals three months ago. The same logic that captured Maduro can be aimed anywhere, at anyone, for any reason—or for no reason at all.
In the crowd, a man in a red shirt holds his daughter on his shoulders. She’s maybe two, three years old. Red bow in her hair. He’s holding up a little flag—VENEZUELA LIBRE—and everyone around them is celebrating. Vuvuzelas. Arms raised. Flags everywhere.
The girl isn’t celebrating. She’s looking off to the side. Quiet. Too young to understand any of this—the liberation, the deportation orders, the oil, the logic. She’s just a kid on her father’s shoulders, being held up for a moment that will shape her life in ways no one can predict.
In Caracas the streets were empty.
In Doral, the champagne keeps flowing.
The little girl looks away.
Please go here for the original article: https://thehumanityarchive.substack.com/p/reimbursement?triedRedirect=true
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