Statement of the Worker-communist Party of Iran – Hekmatist
In Condemnation of Trump’s Gangsterism, State Kidnapping, and Regime-Change Policy in Venezuela
January 3, 2026
In the early hours of Saturday, January 3, according to official statements by U.S. military commanders, a multi-stage operation was carried out around Caracas. In this complex operation—accompanied by probable collusion from within the ruling system—Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were arrested around 3 a.m. in their bedroom, removed from Venezuela, and transferred to the United States, to the New York city. A U.S. military official acknowledged that limited resistance occurred but stated that it was “quickly contained.”
This gangsterism and kidnapping was not sudden or accidental. It was the culmination of a process of military presence and harassing operations around Venezuela and the Caribbean Sea. In the months leading up to this event, pressure was gradually mounting: increased naval and aerial presence in the Caribbean, reconnaissance flights, and then a campaign of criminal attacks on boats under the pretext of a “war on drugs.” Even within the U.S. Congress, questions were raised about the basis of these attacks and their casualties. This de facto siege prepared the ground for a rapid operation.
Following this kidnapping operation, the fascist Donald Trump spoke in blunt and bullying terms. He announced that Maduro and his wife had been transferred to the United States and New York and would face charges such as drug trafficking. He threatened that if a second round were required, it would be carried out with greater force. With extraordinary brazenness, he declared that the United States would play a decisive role in administering the country and openly announced the goal of “regime change,” namely bringing to power Washington’s preferred force in Venezuela. He explicitly referred to the plunder of Venezuela’s oil and energy resources as an asset that should be “properly utilized” by the United States. He then laid bare the ideological pillar and strategic framework of this militaristic action: an explicit reference to the Monroe Doctrine and the claim that the Western Hemisphere is America’s backyard.
The propaganda framework of this official military assault is clear: baseless claims of “narco-terrorism,” “security,” “precision operation,” and “low casualties.” These claims don’t have the slightest connection to reality. They are a desperate attempt to normalize U.S. state gangsterism. Venezuela is fundamentally not the main channel for drug entry into the United States. The major routes through which drugs have entered the U.S. market for years pass through entirely different paths—not from Caracas and not from Venezuela’s coasts. U.S. official statistics themselves show that linking Venezuela to the “main drug threat” is a political labeling exercise, not a description of any reality. The reality is that the so-called “war on drugs” is an ideological cover for military aggression. These statements are not merely justifications and propaganda for a state kidnapping; at the same time, they constituted the announcement of a strategic program. “Administering the country,” the promise to appoint “individuals” to manage it, clearly lifts the curtain on a regime-change agenda that may not be explicitly declared but is undeniably on the table. This is part of the strategic policy of the United States in today’s world.
The Monroe Doctrine is no longer a relic of history or of the nineteenth century. It is today’s agenda. Yet at the height of hypocrisy, new terms such as combating migration, drugs, and organized crime are deployed in the service of legitimizing militaristic intervention and guaranteeing the sphere of influence of U.S. imperialism.
This kidnapping brings neither justice nor security. It merely strips bare the militarism of the ruling capitalist world. It is a policy that manufactures crisis in order to rule over it. The issue is neither human liberation nor freedom, nor even the alleged “human rights” that they no longer bother to invoke, but the advancement of U.S. strategic policy aimed at bullying and unilaterally dominating the Western Hemisphere in the current era.
In a world where capitalist blocs are moving toward intense competition and hard bipolarization, such policies are not exceptions; they are becoming the rule. When great-power rivalry shifts into military actions, security shocks, and direct military intervention, the world becomes more insecure. In this order, war becomes a tool for regulating politics, military operations replace social decision-making, and human beings are crushed between blocs, sanctions, interventions, and proxy wars. Bullying, instead of being exposed and condemned, is transformed into a “security norm”, into routine practice. This logic produces neither order nor stability. It only expands the system of state violence and capitalist militarism and reduces the world to a battlefield of endless competition between capital and power.
We have no alignment whatsoever with these reactionary global bloc formations and their regional and local allied states, just as we oppose the reactionary, pro-Trump, and war-mongering opposition in Venezuela and in Iran. Our policy is not to choose between rival powers, but to defend society against all of them. Neither repressive domestic states represent the people, nor does imperialist militarism carry freedom. Freedom, equality, and social liberation are not achieved through state kidnapping, bombing, appointed administrators, or neo-colonial policies imposed after criminal operations. Our policy is to stand against capitalist reaction, whether it marches under a national flag, under the slogan of “security,” or in the name of fighting “terrorism”. We are part of a justice-seeking society that rises in resistance against this anti-human order—just as, over the past two years, tens of millions of justice- and freedom-seeking people worldwide have risen against the genocide carried out by the fascism that rules Israel with the backing of the U.S. imperialist ruling establishment. We are part of the progressive movement that today, in the cities of Iran, are opposing the black rule of the Islamic Republic.
The Worker-Communist Party of Iran – Hekmatist views and condemns the gangsterism of the U.S. government in Venezuela and the arrest of Maduro and his wife as an open act of kidnapping and repulsive militaristic bullying. This phenomenon once again shows that a world under the domination of capitalism and imperialism is not worthy of humanity. If a humane future is to be built, freedom-loving humanity—and at its forefront the conscious working class—armed with a socialist compass and organized power, can and must enter the arena and overthrow the inverted, exploitative, and anti-human order of capital.
Worker-communist Party of Iran – Hekmatist
