'Venezuelanization': How a Latin American Country Became Empire's Favorite Verb

On Saturday, Iranian parliamentary speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf reached for a word that has, over the past decade, become a kind of imperial shorthand — a single term capable of conjuring an entire doctrine of sponsored destabilization, economic asphyxiation, and media-assisted regime collapse. "The enemy sought regime change and Venezuelanization of Iran," Ghalibaf said in a televised interview, describing Washington's failed strategy during the conflict with Israel. "They wanted to auction our oil — but they failed."

The linguistic move is telling. Ghalibaf did not say "regime change" alone — a term that has existed in the geopolitical vocabulary for generations. He said Venezuelanization — and in doing so, invoked a specific, recognizable template: the targeting of a resource-rich, non-aligned or anti-imperialist state through a combination of financial sanctions, parallel government recognition, media delegitimization, and the patient cultivation of an internal opposition willing to accept external sponsorship. Venezuela, for the governments of Iran, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and others in Washington's crosshairs, has become not just a country but a method — the method Washington perfected in Caracas and has since attempted to export.

The irony, visible from the Global South but largely invisible in the metropolitan press, is that Venezuela's status as the template of regime-change failure has itself become a source of political power.

The Doctrine Takes Shape: From Chávez to Maduro

The construction of "Venezuelanization" as a recognizable political form did not happen overnight. It was assembled, block by block, across two decades: the 2002 coup attempt against Hugo Chávez — briefly recognized by Washington and then reversed when the Venezuelan military and popular mobilization refused to accept the outcome; the sustained campaign of financial strangulation, as oil revenues were targeted, PDVSA was isolated from international finance, and secondary sanctions turned Venezuela's trading partners into reluctant enforcers of US policy; the orchestrated hyperinflation narrative that mixed genuine policy failures with externally engineered financial disruption; and the 2019 gambit of installing Juan Guaidó as "interim president," a move that more than fifty governments were pressured to recognize before the project collapsed under the weight of its own illegitimacy.

Each of these components is now available in the imperial repertoire. Targeted sanctions on central bank reserves and energy sector transactions. Parallel government recognition. The conversion of diaspora communities into vocal political actors tied to opposition funding. The use of international financial institutions — the IMF, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank — as gatekeepers of economic access, able to accelerate a target government's liquidity crisis by denying access to refinancing. Fernando Coronil's concept of the "magical state" helps here: Venezuela's oil revenues had generated a form of sovereignty-by-resource-abundance that Chávez deployed as political magic. The sanctions regime was designed, with considerable sophistication, to break that magic — to turn the oil state's resource into a liability by making it impossible to monetize.

Why the Template Keeps Failing

Ghalibaf's invocation of Venezuelanization was offered as evidence of imperial failure — "they sought it, but they failed." This requires scrutiny. Venezuela's story is not, in fact, a simple story of resistance triumphant. The country experienced extraordinary suffering: an economic contraction that, by most estimates, exceeded the proportions of a major war, mass emigration, severe food insecurity, and a public health crisis. The suffering was real, and its causes were compound — both policy failures internal to the Maduro government and the externally imposed sanctions architecture that Saskia Sassen's "expulsion" framework helps name: the systematic exclusion of a population from the circuits of global economic participation.

What failed, specifically, was not the causing of suffering — the sanctions caused enormous suffering. What failed was the political translation of that suffering into regime change. And the reason it failed is structurally interesting: the Venezuelan state, like the Iranian state and like the Cuban state before it, proved capable of maintaining institutional coherence and military loyalty even under extreme economic duress. Western media's systematic amplification of opposition voices and delegitimization of the incumbent government was predicted to eventually corrode popular support sufficiently to trigger collapse. It has not, repeatedly, because the populations targeted are capable of reading the information environment — of understanding that the media voices demanding their government's collapse are the same voices aligned with the forces imposing their poverty.

The Multipolar Reading of "Venezuelanization"

What Ghalibaf's comment reveals is that Washington's regime-change template has become, in the political analysis of its targets, a named thing — something that can be pointed at, described, and therefore partially countered. The naming is political power. When Venezuelan, Iranian, Cuban, and Nicaraguan officials can say "Venezuelanization" and have their populations understand exactly what they mean — economic strangulation, parallel government, media delegitimization, sanctions — they have already won an important battle in the cognitive dimension of the conflict.

CELAG (the Latin American Centre for Strategic Analysis), whose research has tracked the mechanics of US electoral and political interference in the region, has documented the template's application across multiple countries: the pattern of NED-funded civil society organizations, the role of US-aligned media in amplifying particular narratives, the use of judicial processes to target political opponents. The template is real, documented, and increasingly legible to the populations it targets — what Ghalibaf's reference to "Venezuelanization" encapsulates is the completion of that naming process.

Stakes: A Doctrine in Circulation

The geopolitical significance of Venezuela's role as the regime-change template goes beyond the Bolivarian republic itself. The Maduro arrest in January 2026 — whatever its precise origins — may represent a variation on, rather than a victory over, the Venezuelanization framework: a managed transition rather than a popular uprising, a reconfiguration that maintains state continuity while removing the most internationally toxic figure. If Rodriguez's government stabilizes, partially re-engages with international finance, and avoids being characterized as a "failed state," Washington may claim a version of success while Chavismo claims continuity.

The deeper stakes are hemispheric. The rest of Latin America watches the Venezuela case precisely because every government that has challenged US policy — Bolivia's Morales, Ecuador's Correa, Honduras's Zelaya before his coup — has faced versions of the same toolkit. Understanding "Venezuelanization" as a doctrine, naming its components, and studying why it has failed to achieve its ultimate objective in Venezuela is not an academic exercise. It is a survival skill for governments that intend to exercise meaningful sovereignty in the Americas.

Monexus noted that Ghalibaf's use of "Venezuelanization" as a named geopolitical concept received almost no analytical coverage in Western media — an omission that itself illustrates the sourcing bias of Western journalism.