United States–Venezuela relations

Based on Wikipedia: United States–Venezuela relations

In September 2025, American warplanes began bombing boats in the Caribbean Sea. The targets, according to the Pentagon, were drug vessels. The location was just off the coast of Venezuela. And the context was a relationship between two nations that had curdled from close partnership into something approaching cold war hostility—all within a single generation.

How did the United States and Venezuela, once reliable allies bound together by oil and anti-communism, end up here?

The answer involves coups (both successful and failed), accusations of assassination plots, expelled ambassadors, billions of dollars in petroleum, and a cast of characters including dictators, revolutionaries, and reality television stars. It's a story that illuminates how quickly international relationships can transform, and how economic interdependence doesn't always prevent political antagonism.

The Long Friendship

The relationship started well. Very well, in fact.

When Latin American colonies began breaking away from Spain in the early 1800s, the young United States watched with obvious sympathy. Officially, Washington remained neutral. Unofficially, American merchants sold weapons and supplies to the revolutionaries. In 1821, the United States became only the second government in the world—after Brazil—to recognize an independent Latin American nation when it welcomed Gran Colombia, the federation that included present-day Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and parts of Peru and Brazil.

The Anderson-Gual Treaty of 1824 made history as the first bilateral agreement between the United States and another country in the Western Hemisphere. It established "most favored nation" status between the two countries—diplomatic language meaning each would give the other the best possible trade terms. When Gran Colombia split apart in 1830, with Venezuela going its own way, the Americans simply continued their friendly relations with the new government in Caracas.

This warm start would define the next century and a half.

Gunboat Diplomacy and the Roosevelt Corollary

The relationship faced its first serious test in 1902, but the crisis ultimately pulled the countries closer together rather than driving them apart.

Venezuela's president, Cipriano Castro, had a problem. European citizens had suffered losses during Venezuela's recent civil war, and their governments wanted compensation. Castro refused to pay. Britain, Germany, and Italy responded with a naval blockade—warships surrounding Venezuelan ports, choking off trade.

Castro assumed the Americans would rescue him. After all, the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 had declared that European powers should stay out of Western Hemisphere affairs. But President Theodore Roosevelt saw things differently. The Monroe Doctrine, as he understood it, prohibited Europeans from seizing American territory. It didn't necessarily forbid them from collecting debts.

Still, Roosevelt worried. Germany, in particular, seemed eager to expand its influence in Latin America. The longer the blockade continued, the more nervous Washington became about European powers establishing permanent footholds in the region.

The crisis eventually resolved through compromise, but it left a lasting mark on American foreign policy. Roosevelt concluded that if the United States wanted to keep Europeans out of Latin America, it needed to police the region itself. This thinking produced the "Roosevelt Corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine—the idea that America had the right (and responsibility) to intervene in Latin American countries that couldn't manage their own affairs.

It was, depending on your perspective, either a protective embrace or a suffocating grip. Latin Americans would spend the next century arguing about which interpretation was correct.

Oil, Dictators, and the Legion of Merit

By the mid-twentieth century, Venezuela had discovered something more valuable than any treaty: oil. Vast reserves of petroleum lay beneath the country's soil and offshore waters. American companies rushed in to extract it.

In 1948, a military officer named Marcos Pérez Jiménez overthrew Venezuela's elected president and installed himself as dictator. The United States didn't object. Pérez Jiménez was staunchly anti-communist, which mattered enormously in the early Cold War. He also welcomed American oil companies, letting them exploit Venezuelan resources in exchange for profits that flowed partly to company shareholders and partly to his personal bank accounts.

The relationship was cozy enough that in 1954, the United States awarded Pérez Jiménez the Legion of Merit, one of America's highest military honors.

There was a darker side to this partnership that Washington preferred not to discuss. Pérez Jiménez ran a police state. His secret police, the Seguridad Nacional, tortured thousands of Venezuelans in the basement of its Caracas headquarters. Others disappeared into a jungle prison camp on Guasina Island. When a 1958 coup finally forced Pérez Jiménez to flee the country, liberators discovered more than 400 prisoners still confined in the Seguridad Nacional's basement cells.

The United States had spent years honoring and supporting a man who ran torture chambers.

Enter Chávez

For decades after Pérez Jiménez's fall, Venezuela remained a reliable American partner. Oil kept flowing north. Venezuela stayed non-communist. The relationship was stable, if not particularly exciting.

Then, in 1999, Hugo Chávez became president.

Chávez was different. A former military officer who had attempted his own coup in 1992, he won the presidency on a promise to transform Venezuela and challenge the established order. He called himself a socialist. He called the United States an empire. He called American foreign policy imperialist aggression dressed up in democratic rhetoric.

And he became extremely close to Fidel Castro's Cuba.

This last point drove Washington particularly crazy. The United States had spent forty years trying to isolate Cuba, maintaining a trade embargo designed to strangle Castro's communist government economically. Now Venezuela was shipping cheap oil to Havana and treating Castro as a mentor and ally. American policy toward Cuba was being undermined by a country whose oil Americans depended on.

Chávez also worked to raise global oil prices. As a member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the cartel of oil-producing nations, Venezuela pushed for lower production quotas. Less oil on the market meant higher prices. American consumers paid more at the pump. Venezuelan government coffers swelled with revenue.

The Coup That Failed

In April 2002, everything nearly changed.

Street protests against Chávez turned violent. At the Llaguno Overpass in Caracas, gunfire erupted; nineteen people died. Military officers announced they were removing Chávez from power. A businessman named Pedro Carmona declared himself the new president.

The Bush administration's response was conspicuously muted. Washington didn't immediately recognize the Carmona government, but it also didn't condemn the coup. Officials seemed to be waiting to see if it would stick.

It didn't. Within forty-eight hours, pro-Chávez forces had reversed the coup. Chávez returned to the presidential palace. And he had a new narrative: the United States had tried to overthrow him.

The evidence was circumstantial but troubling. CIA documents later revealed that the Bush administration had known about coup planning "weeks before" it happened. A briefing document dated April 6, 2002, warned that "dissident military factions...are stepping up efforts to organize a coup against President Chávez, possibly as early as this month."

Knowing about a coup is not the same as supporting one. The American ambassador to Venezuela later stated that the U.S. embassy had actually warned Chávez about the plot. A State Department investigation found no evidence that American assistance programs had contributed to the coup attempt.

But for Chávez, the distinction didn't matter much. The Americans had known. They hadn't stopped it. They had seemed ready to accept the result. From his perspective, that was damning enough.

The Strange Dance of Enemies Who Need Each Other

Here's the peculiar thing about the U.S.-Venezuela relationship after 2002: the political hostility barely touched the economic partnership.

Chávez railed against American imperialism. Bush officials called Venezuela a troublemaker undermining regional stability. Ambassadors were expelled. Accusations flew back and forth about assassination plots and invasion plans. (Chávez claimed the United States had a detailed scheme called "Plan Balboa" to invade Venezuela; American officials said it was actually a Spanish military simulation exercise.)

And throughout all of this, oil kept flowing.

In 2006, the United States remained Venezuela's most important trading partner. Bilateral trade grew by 36 percent that year. By 2007, America was importing more than $40 billion worth of Venezuelan oil annually. Total trade between the two countries exceeded $50 billion.

Both sides needed each other too much to let politics completely override economics. American refineries on the Gulf Coast were specifically designed to process Venezuela's heavy crude oil. Venezuelan government budgets depended on American oil purchases. The relationship was like a married couple who despised each other but couldn't afford separate apartments.

Even when the Bush administration designated Venezuela as having "failed demonstrably" to cooperate on counternarcotics efforts in 2005, the president simultaneously waived the economic sanctions that would normally follow such a designation. The sanctions would have disrupted the oil trade, and that was apparently a step too far.

Chávez and the Art of the Insult

Whatever else might be said about Hugo Chávez, the man knew how to get attention.

At the United Nations General Assembly, he declared that Bush promoted "a false democracy of the elite" and "a democracy of bombs." On another occasion, standing at the same podium where Bush had spoken the day before, Chávez announced that he could still smell sulfur—the traditional scent of the devil.

He claimed to have intelligence showing American assassination plans against him. He warned that any attempt on his life would result in an immediate cutoff of Venezuelan oil shipments to the United States. He promoted a Venezuelan diplomat to Deputy Foreign Minister after the United States expelled her in retaliation for Venezuela expelling an American naval attaché accused of spying.

In January 2006, Venezuela kicked out John Correa, a U.S. Navy commander working at the American embassy. The charge was espionage—allegedly collecting information from low-ranking Venezuelan military officers. Chávez claimed he had infiltrated the American embassy and found proof. Washington called the accusations "baseless" and expelled a Venezuelan diplomat in return.

The tit-for-tat expulsions became almost routine.

Hope, Briefly

When Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, there was a moment of potential thaw.

Chávez, who had said he saw no real difference between Obama and John McCain during the campaign, changed his tone after Obama's victory. He expressed hope for a meeting with the new president. At the Summit of the Americas in 2009, Obama and Chávez shook hands and exchanged books. It seemed possible that two leaders with very different worldviews might nonetheless find a way to work together.

The hope lasted about a month.

In March 2009, Obama said that Chávez had "been a force that has interrupted progress in the region." Chávez responded by calling Obama "ignorant" and claiming he had "the same stench as Bush." Venezuela put its new ambassador to Washington on hold indefinitely.

The relationship continued to deteriorate. In February 2014, the Venezuelan government expelled three American diplomats, accusing them of promoting violence—charges that were never substantiated. By then, Chávez himself was dead, having succumbed to cancer in 2013. His successor, Nicolás Maduro, proved even more hostile to Washington than his predecessor.

Breaking Point

The final rupture came in 2019.

Venezuela was in crisis. The economy had collapsed. Hyperinflation made the currency nearly worthless. Millions of Venezuelans were fleeing the country. Maduro's government was widely accused of rigging elections and violating human rights.

Juan Guaidó, the head of Venezuela's National Assembly (its legislature), declared himself interim president, citing constitutional provisions about presidential succession. The Trump administration immediately recognized Guaidó as Venezuela's legitimate leader.

Maduro responded by announcing that Venezuela was severing diplomatic relations with the United States.

For the next several years, the United States found itself in the strange position of recognizing a president who didn't actually control anything. Guaidó had democratic legitimacy, in Washington's view, but Maduro had the military, the police, and the machinery of government. The recognition was a symbolic gesture that changed nothing on the ground.

In 2023, even that gesture ended. The Venezuelan opposition voted to dissolve Guaidó's interim government, and the United States stopped recognizing his presidential claim. Washington continued to recognize the National Assembly elected in 2015 as legitimate, but the fiction of a parallel Venezuelan government was essentially abandoned.

The Present Moment

Which brings us back to those boats in the Caribbean.

In 2025, the second Trump administration escalated the conflict in ways that would have seemed unthinkable a generation earlier. The United States began deporting Venezuelans accused of belonging to Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang, to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador called the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT). The American government designated Tren de Aragua and the Cartel of the Suns—a criminal network allegedly involving Venezuelan military officers—as terrorist organizations.

Then came the airstrikes.

In September 2025, American military aircraft began attacking vessels in the Caribbean that the Pentagon identified as drug boats. The strikes were part of a broader military buildup in the waters between the United States and Venezuela. Whatever the stated justification—counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism—the United States was now conducting military operations in Venezuela's maritime neighborhood.

It was a long way from the Anderson-Gual Treaty.

What It All Means

The transformation of U.S.-Venezuelan relations offers some uncomfortable lessons.

First, ideology matters. For most of the twentieth century, Venezuela was ruled by governments that shared American assumptions about capitalism, communism, and the proper organization of society. When Chávez came to power with a different ideology—one that explicitly defined itself in opposition to American influence—the relationship collapsed within years.

Second, economic interdependence isn't a guarantee of peace. Even at the height of political hostility, billions of dollars in trade continued flowing between the two countries. Money couldn't overcome fundamental disagreements about power and legitimacy.

Third, history echoes. Theodore Roosevelt worried about European powers establishing footholds in Latin America; a century later, the United States worries about Chinese and Russian influence in Venezuela. The Roosevelt Corollary asserted America's right to police its hemisphere; contemporary military operations in the Caribbean suggest that claim hasn't been abandoned.

Fourth, once trust breaks down, it's extraordinarily difficult to rebuild. The 2002 coup attempt—whether or not the United States actively supported it—created a wound that never healed. Every subsequent American action was interpreted through the lens of that original betrayal.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, relationships between nations are relationships between people. They depend on individuals making choices, interpreting events, and deciding how to respond. Hugo Chávez chose confrontation. George W. Bush chose skepticism. Barack Obama briefly chose engagement. Donald Trump chose escalation. Different choices might have produced different outcomes.

But here we are. Two countries that once exchanged ambassadors and trade agreements now exchange accusations and airstrikes. The warplanes over the Caribbean are flying through history—two centuries of partnership, transformed into something that looks increasingly like war.