By Michelle Ellner
Elliott Abrams has reappeared with his usual instructions on how to “fix” Venezuela, a country he neither understands nor respects, yet still feels entitled to redesign as if it were a piece of furniture in a Washington living room. His new proposal is steeped in the same Cold War delusions and colonial mentality that characterized his work in the 1980s, when US foreign policy turned Central America into a graveyard.
My childhood in Venezuela was shaped by stories from our region that the world almost never sees: stories of displacement, death squads, villages wiped off the map, and governments overthrown for daring to act outside Washington's sphere of influence. And I know exactly who Elliott Abrams is, not from think tank biographies, but from the pain embedded in the Central American landscape.
Abrams writes with the confidence of someone who has never lived in the countries his policies destabilized. His most recent argument rests on the most dangerous assumption of all: that the United States has the authority—as if its power were reason enough—to decide who governs Venezuela. This is the original sin of U.S. policy in the Americas, the one that justifies everything else: the sanctions, the blockades, the covert operations, the warships in the Caribbean. The assumption that the continent remains an extension of U.S. strategic space, and not a region with its own political will.
In this narrative, Venezuela becomes a “narco-state,” a convenient villain. But anyone who takes the time to study the architecture of the global drug trade knows that the world’s largest illegal market is the United States, not Venezuela. Money laundering happens in New York and London, not Caracas. The weapons that fuel drug trafficking routes, used to threaten, extort, and kill, overwhelmingly come from American manufacturers. And the very history of the “war on drugs,” from its intelligence partnerships to its paramilitary arms, was written in Washington, not in the barrios of Venezuela.
Even the US government's own data contradicts Abrams's narrative. Reports from the DEA and UNODC have shown for years that the vast majority of cocaine destined for US consumers originates in Colombia and travels through the Pacific, not through Venezuela. Washington knows this. But the fiction of a "Venezuelan drug route" is politically useful: it transforms a geopolitical disagreement into a criminal case and prepares the public for escalation.
What's striking is that Abrams never looks at the true front line of the drug trade: U.S. cities, U.S. banks, U.S. gun shows, U.S. demand. The crisis he describes originates in his own country, yet he seeks a solution in foreign intervention. For decades, the United States has armed, financed, and politically protected its own "narco-allies" when it suited its larger strategic purposes. The Contras in Nicaragua, the paramilitary blocs in Colombia, the death squads in Honduras—all were tools of foreign policy, and many operated with Abrams's direct diplomatic support.
I grew up hearing stories of what that machine did to our neighbors. You don't need to visit Central America to understand its scars; you just need to listen. In Guatemala, Mayan communities still mourn a genocide that U.S. officials refused to acknowledge, even as entire villages were wiped out and survivors fled to the mountains. In El Salvador, families still light candles for hundreds of children and mothers killed in massacres that Abrams dismissed as “leftist propaganda.” In Nicaragua, the wounds inflicted by the Contras, an armed paramilitary force funded and politically blessed by Washington, remain vivid in the accounts of burned-down cooperatives and murdered teachers. In Honduras, the word “disappeared” is not a distant echo; it is living memory, a reminder of the death squads empowered under the banner of U.S. anti-communism.
That's why, when Abrams warns about "criminal regimes," I don't think of Venezuela. I think of mass graves, burned villages, secret prisons, and the tens of thousands of Latin American lives shattered under the policies he promoted. And those graves aren't metaphors. They are the map of an entire era of US intervention, the very one Abrams insists on resurrecting.
Today, Abrams adds new threats to the old script: warnings about “narco-terrorism,” alarms about “Iranian operations,” and anxieties about “Chinese influence.” These are issues taken out of context, inflated, or conveniently selected to fabricate a security crisis where none exists. Venezuela is not being attacked by drugs, nor by Iran, nor by China. It is being attacked because it has built relationships and paths to development that are not subordinate to Washington. Independent diplomacy, South-South cooperation, and diversified alliances are treated as threats, not because they endanger the hemisphere, but because they erode U.S. dominance.
Abrams's fantasy for Venezuela rests on another imperial illusion: the idea that the United States can bomb military installations , sabotage infrastructure, deploy special forces in a sovereign country, tighten sanctions until society submits, and then "install" a compliant government as if Venezuela were an uninhabited outpost. Venezuela is a nation of 28 million people, with an identity marked by resistance to foreign control, especially control of its oil. Abrams presents a militarily assisted overthrow as if it were a mere administrative procedure, erasing its human cost, its regional impact, and the absolute certainty of popular resistance. It is the same imperial fantasy that has haunted Latin America for generations: the belief that our countries can be redesigned by force and that our people will obediently accept it.
It also assumes that, once the government Washington desires is installed, the oil will flow as if by magic. Nothing reveals more ignorance about Venezuela. Oil in Venezuela is not simply an export or a source of income; it is the terrain where sovereignty has been fought for, lost, and regained. It was the linchpin of foreign concessions, the site of the 2002 sabotage, the backbone of the Bolivarian project. The refineries, pipelines, and oil fields are the archive of a century of struggle for self-determination. To believe that foreign troops would be welcomed as administrators of that intimate sovereignty is to be blinded by arrogance.
Then there are the sanctions. In Washington, they're treated as technical measures, policy levers, bargaining chips. In Venezuela, they mean shortages in hospitals, lines at pharmacies, collapsing incomes, a currency in freefall, and families forced to migrate. And here, Abrams's fingerprints are impossible to ignore: during Trump's first term, he was "Special Representative for Venezuela," helping to design and defend the very sanctions he now uses to blame the government for the crisis he helped create. Abrams says the sanctions "failed," as if they were designed to improve the lives of Venezuelans. But the sanctions didn't fail. They achieved their objective of destabilizing society, strangling public services, and manufacturing the humanitarian crisis now used as justification for further intervention. It's circular logic: create the conditions for collapse and then point to the collapse as evidence that the government should be removed.
Abrams now presents regime change as the solution to migration, but history tells a different story. US interventions don't stop migration; they create it. The largest waves of displacement in our region have followed US-backed coups, civil wars, counterinsurgency campaigns, and, more recently, the instrumentalization of sanctions. People fled not because their governments were left alone, but because Washington treated their countries as battlefields or, in the case of Venezuela, as a laboratory for economic collapse. Central Americans fled bullets and death squads; Venezuelans have been driven out by a siege designed to cripple the economy and fragment society. The result is the same: migration produced by US policy, then used as a pretext for further intervention.
As long as Washington clings to the notion that it owns the hemisphere, Latin America will never be safe. Not from Abrams, nor from coups, nor from CIA programs, nor from blockades, nor from the Monroe Doctrine.
And perhaps the clearest sign of this imperial hypocrisy is seeing Trump accuse his domestic opponents of “sedition” over a simple video in which lawmakers remind U.S. military personnel that they are legally obligated to refuse illegal orders. Meanwhile, those same political forces applaud the idea of Venezuelan officials violating their own constitutional order to overthrow a government that Washington detests. Latin America has lived under this double standard for too long, and we are no longer willing to pay the price.
