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Venezuela‘s regime is coming under increasing pressure from the Trump administration for using the cartels it controls to smuggle drugs into the United States. Last week, President Donald Trump said he had authorized covert CIA actions inside the South American country, a significant escalation.
But Caracas’s transgressions extend to other areas. It has also long backed efforts to sow political division on U.S. streets. First, it supported Black Lives Matter and its founders. Now, it’s antifa.
Indeed, you can tell a lot about which domestic anti-U.S. groups are rising by the support they get from our enemies overseas, especially Venezuela, but also Iran, Cuba, and China. That Venezuela is diversifying into “anti-fascism” is yet another sign of how diminished BLM has become.
Before its precipitous downfall, BLM changed this country deeply, and for the worse. Its massive and costly riots led to a wave of deep societal changes that threatened to make race the deciding factor in everything from hiring, job promotion, contracts, and university admissions. Diversity, equity, and inclusion workshops became mandatory, and freedom of expression came under threat.
That tide is finally turning now as the people fought back against these draconian measures. But for a few years, the heads of all our main cultural institutions, from universities to media, to libraries, to even the Smithsonian, accepted the BLM canard that America was systemically racist and needed a top-to-bottom overhaul.
Venezuela played more than a supportive role in this attempt. Last week, I spoke with a former senior Venezuelan official who was very close to the dead dictator Hugo Chavez and who has now defected. He told me he was in the room in late 2012 when Chavez gave Opal Tometi — who the following year helped to found BLM — suitcases stuffed with dollars.
“Chavez ordered his people to hand the suitcases to them, suitcases filled with dollars, at least $20 million,” the defector told me, adding that Tometi was accompanied by three other African American women and the actor Danny Glover, a huge supporter of the Marxist regimes in Venezuela and Cuba. “Chavez told them that the money was to project the Bolivarian revolutionary project on U.S. streets,” he said, using Chavez’s term for Venezuelan Marxism.
The defector, who is cooperating with and providing evidence to the U.S. government on other subjects, particularly the close connection between the Cartel de los Soles narco group and the Venezuelan state, spoke with great specificity. “I see them all very clearly. The meeting took place at the Miraflores presidential palace, in a huge suite called the Japanese suite, where private meetings are held.”
This isn’t hard to believe. It was Chavez himself who, after all, called in 2006 for the creation of a leftist network inside the U.S. that would act as a fifth column to thwart U.S. policy. That network came into being as the United States Social Forum. Launched in 2007, it quickly became an incubator for the founders of BLM to network.
Chavez made this call at the immense 2006 gathering in Caracas of the World Social Forum, a global meeting of Marxists that had been taking place annually in different Third World capitals for several years.
“I think that, finally, distinct movements are rising in the U.S., movements that each day has gained more power, more conscience, and more unity,” Chavez said as he urged Americans to take up the revolutionary cudgel. “Viva the people of the U.S.!” he shouted to a crowd of some 15,000, which included Cuba’s then-foreign minister, Ricardo Alarcon de Quesada.
“We count on you, compañeros!” Chavez said, using the Cuban Revolution’s term for comrade to address Americans. “Essential to this formula to save the world are the people of the U.S., the conscience of the U.S. people, the resurrection of the U.S. people. United with the people of the Caribbean, the people of Latin America, the people of Asia, Africa, and Europe. All of us must unite; join together in a victorious offensive against the empire.”
Within months of this speech, the inaugural meeting of the United States Social Forum was held in Atlanta in 2007. Alicia Garza, another one of the main three founders of BLM, was not just there but also on the organizing committee.
Garza, who was just 26 and had recently joined a sort of Marxist preparatory school called People Organized to Win Employment Rights, cut her teeth at that inaugural USSF.
“It was one of my first trips with POWER, and I was eager to prove myself by playing a role in helping to coordinate our delegation of about thirty members, along with the staff,” Garza wrote in her 2020 book The Purpose of Power. “I was becoming politicized in this organization.”
The USSF was, she wrote, “a major gathering of social justice activists” that taught her “a lot about how to build relationships with people with different backgrounds and agendas,” skills which, she added, helped her during the riots in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 following the death of Michael Brown.
The organization that Patrisse Cullors, the third BLM founder, belonged to — the Labor and Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles, another Marxist prep — was also on the planning committee of the first USSF. It is therefore highly likely she was also in attendance in Atlanta. She attended a subsequent meeting in Detroit in 2010 and spoke there.
There is at least one mention in a 2022 academic paper that Tometi was also at the Atlanta gathering in 2007. But we know she attended World Social Forum gatherings.
All this networking, at Chavez’s behest, happened years before BLM was founded in 2013 and helped create momentum for it. Garza pretty much revealed that the USSF was created at the request of America’s enemies overseas at a speech she gave in Oakland in 2010.
She said foreign Marxists had said at the WSF, “‘What are you doing? Take your foot off my neck, right? I need you to go home and talk to your comrades, and your compañeros, right? And talk about and figure out what you’re gonna do to take your foot off our neck’,” Garza can be seen saying in this video. “That’s where the U.S. Social Forum came from.”
So the mayhem we had on our streets, and all the stress it brought, was carried out by people who networked and carried out street organizing to help Marxist dictators in Caracas, at the very least, and may have received outright financial backing from them. Revolutionary Venezuela continued its relationship after BLM’s founding by, for example, inviting representatives to gatherings of the Foro de Sao Paulo, the Hemispheric Marxist network Venezuela promoted.
And BLM, after its creation, was in return unstinting in its support for Venezuela’s illegal regime.
In 2015, Tometi brought Nicolas Maduro, who took over as president when Chavez died in 2012, to speak in Harlem at an event that Glover also attended. Tometi was an election observer in Venezuela that same year, writing a manifesto on behalf of BLM supporting the Bolivarian revolution.
The BLM leaders frittered away all their money and any respectability they might have had, and are left now with rival groups bickering over who owns whatever money is left.
So maybe that explains why Maduro is now busy turning his attention to international anti-fascist events and antifa groups. They may lack the tight structure BLM once had and the political and societal clout, but antifa makes up for it with raw violence and actions to sow pure chaos.
At least five times in the past year, Maduro has hosted “anti-fascist” rallies, conferences, or festivals. It started in September 2024 with a World Congress against Fascism and Neo-Fascism, which, in reality, became a gabfest to denounce U.S. policies.
That conference was followed two months later by Venezuela’s launch of the “World Antifascist Network.”
Then, on January 9 to 11 this year, to coincide with Maduro’s inauguration after actually losing elections last year, Caracas hosted an International Anti-Fascist Festival, which organizers said had over 2,000 attendees from 125 countries.
At the most recent one, last January, the Party for Socialism and Liberation was an attendee from the U.S. The U.K. Revolutionary Communist Group, another antifa group, also sent Sam McGill to four of the Venezuelan anti-fascist events.
And Code Pink, another antifa adjacent group, which has to boot connections to the Chinese Communist Party, has also sent members to visit Caracas and Havana.
The PSL is a Marxist-Leninist party that will turn out for any rally, demonstration, or riot, as long as it is anti-U.S. in nature.
NO KINGS IS THE SEINFELD OF PROTESTS
The PSL has supported BLM in the past. But with BLM falling into inactivity, PSL is more what the New York Post describes as an “Antifa satellite org.” The “Trantifa” leader of Armed Queers Salt Lake City, reportedly being investigated in the Charlie Kirk assassination, Ermiya Fanaeian, opened a PSL chapter in Utah. Fanaeian visited Cuba earlier this year to receive ideological training. The AQSLC has trained with the John Brown Gun Club, a straight-up antifa group.
Our enemies want to use us in a weakened state, whether because we’re hooked on narcotics or because of political mayhem in our streets. In October 2019, the head of Venezuela’s National Assembly, Diosdado Cabello, presented a battle plan for hemispheric destabilization, calling it a “Bolivarian hurricane.” If we are serious about stopping political violence, it would be useful to look at the foreign connections.
