Venezuela Is Not a Battlefield: Why Black and Indigenous Liberation Rejects Empire
Tending Futures exists to tend to future generations by revitalizing cultural practices, birthing knowledge and nurturing community resilience. That mission is inseparable from global struggles against militarism, extraction and racial capitalism. What happens in Venezuela right now is not “over there.” It is a live example of how empires treat land, people and sovereignty when resources and power are on the line.
Over the past few days, the situation in Venezuela has escalated dramatically after the United States launched a military operation in Caracas and captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, with significant reported casualties and ongoing instability.
We can hold multiple truths at once.
• Maduro’s government has a well documented record of repression and closing civic space.
• Venezuelans deserve safety, dignity, free expression and self determination.
• A foreign military assault and forced removal of a head of state is not liberation. It is an escalation of imperial power that endangers civilians and makes real democracy harder, not easier.
We condemn President Trump’s decision to use U.S. military force in Venezuela and to treat Venezuelan sovereignty as something the U.S. can override at will. The UN Human Rights Office warned that the intervention violates international law and sets a dangerous precedent by normalizing unilateral force.
This is also a constitutional crisis at home. Members of Congress have publicly stated the action was taken without congressional authorization.
Even when leaders are abusive, militarized regime change is not a human rights strategy. It is collective punishment, it is chaos and it is a blueprint that has repeatedly produced mass displacement, retaliation and deeper repression.
Black and Indigenous solidarity means opposing empire, not picking empires.
Black and Indigenous liberation has always required naming the machinery that keeps “order” through violence: colonization, forced displacement, resource theft and criminalization of resistance. The same logic that built plantations and boarding schools also justifies sanctions that starve communities, proxy wars that fracture societies and military “operations” that treat whole countries as chessboards.
Venezuela’s crisis sits at the crossroads of:
• Militarism and the myth of rescue. The story is always that violence is necessary for freedom. The outcomes are rarely freedom for everyday people.
• Extraction and sacrifice zones. Indigenous peoples in Venezuela have faced severe threats tied to illegal mining and violence, including in the Orinoco Mining Arc region.
• Anti-Blackness and erasure. Afro-Venezuelan communities have long organized against structural racism and discrimination, often while being pushed to the margins of the national story.
When we say Black and Indigenous solidarity, we mean we refuse the framing that asks us to choose between an authoritarian state and a foreign empire. Our commitment is to people on the ground: organizers, workers, mothers, elders, Indigenous nations and Afro-descendant communities fighting for life in the middle of forces much larger than them.
From Africatown to the wider Gulf South, we know what it means to be treated as expendable for somebody else’s profit.
• We know extraction: oil and petrochemicals, land theft and poisoned water.
• We know militarized policing: surveillance, raids and the criminalization of survival.
• We know what displacement does to families, language and memory.
Venezuela’s current upheaval is already rippling through questions of oil, sanctions and regional stability. People will pay for that with higher vulnerability, harder migration routes and deeper economic instability.
Solidarity is not charity. It is shared defense.
What we are calling for
1. An immediate end to unilateral military escalation and any pathway that treats Venezuela as a U.S. managed project.
2. Protection of civilian life, journalists and human rights defenders amid the crackdown and instability being reported on the ground.
3. A Venezuela-led future determined by Venezuelans, including Indigenous nations and Afro-descendant communities whose rights are often sidelined in elite negotiations.
4. Accountability without collective punishment, meaning approaches that do not starve communities, deepen black markets or expand corruption.
What you can do with Tending Futures
• Refuse dehumanizing narratives. If you hear “they need us to fix them,” pause. That story is how empire recruits consent.
• Support Venezuelan diaspora care networks in your region. Mutual aid, legal support, housing support and community based health care matter more than hot takes.
• Call your members of Congress and demand transparency, war powers accountability and an end to unauthorized military action.
• Practice solidarity locally. The same anti-Black, anti-Indigenous and anti-immigrant forces that justify violence abroad show up here in policing, detention and environmental racism.
Tending Futures will always choose life over empire, self determination over occupation and people power over militarized “solutions.”
