In a press conference following the U.S.’s Jan. 3 kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, President Donald Trump said the word “oil” no less than 19 times.
“And the word ‘democracy,’ anyone know how many times it was said in that press conference?” Gabriel Hetland asked.
“Zero!” shouted the audience in the Stevenson Event Center, where about 80 people gathered on Feb. 26 for a talk by Hetland titled “Venezuela: Contradictions of Regime Change Without a Change of Regime.”
Hetland is an associate professor of Africana, Latin American Caribbean and Latinx Studies at the State University of New York at Albany and the author of the book “Democracy on the Ground: Local Politics in Latin America’s Left Turn.”
Organized by the Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas, his talk covered the history behind and ramifications of the illegal U.S. attack that deposed Maduro and killed over 80 people, from the economic motives of capturing Venezuela’s oil supply to the broader consequences for international relations.
Jessica Taft, a professor of Latin American and Latino Studies and director of the Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas, introduces Hetland.
“In the seven weeks that have passed since the attack,” Hetland began, “the U.S. has sought to make good on Trump’s promise to run Venezuela, transforming it into a literal protectorate of the United States, with Trump officials now controlling Venezuela’s oil industry and even its budget.”
The U.S. replaced Maduro not with the pro-democracy politician María Corina Machado, but rather Maduro’s vice president Delcy Rodríguez. Trump has exercised an immense amount of control over her government, even saying in a phone call with The Atlantic that “if she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”
Among the audience were students from the Latin American politics class POLI 140C. The director of the Huerta Center, professor Jessica Taft, expressed gratitude for the turnout and engagement from the crowd, many of whom were students.
“It is part of our mission to always be paying attention to what’s happening in the world in relation to Latin American and Latinx communities,” Taft said in an interview with City on a Hill Press.
Salvatore Fierro, a second-year politics major, remembers starting POLI 140C just a few days after the Venezuela attack, and how the class processed the event together. He compared the experience to watching the January 6th capitol riots in high school.
“It was like, ‘Oh my gosh, the U.S. is doing it again, we’re throwing another coup,’” Fierro said. “I didn’t realize until later on when we went into more of a case study of it that the U.S. is not just throwing a coup, but really sinking their claws into Venezuela’s economy.”
An attendee asks Hetland questions during the Q&A held at the end of the talk.
Over the past decade, Venezuela has been devastated by U.S. tariffs and Maduro’s authoritarian policies, causing nearly eight million Venezuelans to immigrate out of the country to escape economic hardship. After the attack, Trump encouraged American oil companies to exploit Venezuela as a new market.
“Trump has said that this will benefit the Venezuelan people, but he means that in terms of economic benefit,” Hetland said in an interview with City on a Hill Press. “That’s complicated, because the U.S. is literally stealing Venezuelan oil. It’s stolen at least 80 million barrels, if not more, and is holding an unknown amount of profits from the sale of that oil on the world market.”
While the U.S. has a long history of interfering with politics in Latin America, the success of this attack has emboldened Trump. It carries implications for the ways in which the U.S. will navigate relationships with countries like Cuba and Greenland, which Trump has threatened to invade, as well as Iran.
Only three days after Hetland spoke at UCSC, the U.S. attacked Iran, launching the country into another conflict in the Middle East. At least 175 people at a school, many of them children, died amid a U.S. strike, and retaliatory strikes from Iran have killed six American soldiers.
“Iran has been in U.S. sights for a long time,” Hetland added. “Trump has been saying openly that Venezuela is a model, and they thought that they could do something similar in Iran.”
Trump has stated that the assault on Iran will take four to five weeks, although experts say longer. Meanwhile, Maduro sits in a New York jail, awaiting trial for alleged drug trafficking and weapons possession.
Some students feel that Democratic party leadership has not denounced Maduro’s kidnapping strongly enough, by choosing to focus on the attack’s lack of congressional approval rather than demanding Venezuelan sovereignty.
“My main concern is that we’re going to keep throwing coups throughout history,” Salvatore Fierro said. “It’s just kind of sad, and makes me wonder if there’s anything that we can do about it. Eventually, if we as students get into politics, are we going to end up being the ones throwing the coups or not?” he asked hypothetically.
In his interview with City on a Hill Press, Hetland expressed the need for true, anti-imperialist alternatives to this pattern.
“To defeat Trumpism and everything Trump represents, you can’t just call Trump authoritarian. You have to offer something positive. You have to offer an alternative program,” he said.
“Part of what a university can offer,” professor Jessica Taft told City on a Hill Press, “is a much more critical and careful analysis of current events than what we get in popular media. It’s not soundbites, not short one-line interventions, but expert knowledge, research and careful assessments of what’s happening that can then give us a sense of how we should move in the world.”