From Iraq to Venezuela: The Struggle Against Imperialism Continues

A personal reflection from Tammi Jonas

Tammi Jonas, current AFSA’s Focal Point for Farmers and an activist in anti-imperialist and food sovereignty movements for over 30 years, shares a personal reflection on the current state of the world.  From the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 1991 to the recent attack on Venezuela and the capture of its president, Nicolás Maduro, she reflects on freedom, autonomy and the collective struggle we continue face.

Thirty-five years ago, the U.S. invasion of Iraq in January 1991 lit a fire in me that has never gone out. The official justification was weapons of mass destruction — a claim that quickly unravelled — but even then it was clear that regime change and oil were the real objectives. The assault on Iraqi sovereignty, followed by years of devastating sanctions, inspired my first act of protest: organising a hunger strike in solidarity with the peoples of Iraq and Kuwait, who were suffering under illegal U.S. sanctions and bombing. That hunger strike marked the beginning of my lifelong commitment to anti-imperialism and food sovereignty — because until everyone is free, none of us are free.

That abrupt political awakening, and the actions I cut my anti-imperialist teeth on, sparked an obsession with history, power, and how violence is justified. I learned — and am still learning — about my country of birth’s egregious interventions from Central America to the Levant, Southeast Asia to West Africa. As people now ask, with apparent surprise, “Why Greenland?”, we should long have been asking a deeper question: why invade sovereign states at all? And what kind of liberal racist sensibility leads us to worry more about Canada than Palestine, or to avert our eyes from Sudan while wringing hands over European borders?

As people now ask, with apparent surprise, “Why Greenland?”, we should long have been asking a deeper question: why invade sovereign states at all?

Now, in January 2026, I watch with unsurprised horror as a painfully familiar story unfolds in Venezuela. U.S. forces launched a military operation in Caracas, kidnapping President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in the middle of the night and flying them to New York to face Trumped-up charges of narco-terrorism and drug trafficking. The Trump regime claims Maduro’s government is “illegitimate” and “flooding the U.S. with cocaine” — allegations unsupported by evidence — while Trump’s own population are marching in the streets back home for a regime change of their own.

Few are fooled. Analysts, activists, and governments around the world point to the relentless push for regime change and control over Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, the largest on Earth. Trump has openly spoken about forcibly reopening Venezuela’s oil sector to U.S. companies, hosting oil executives at the White House in a grotesque oligarchic display of contempt for Venezuelan sovereignty.

This is about the U.S. empire’s desperate struggle to maintain colonial capitalist hegemony — a war on socialism and on peoples’ rights to land, territory, and what Robin Wall-Kimmerer calls “earthly gifts” (as opposed to ‘natural resources’).

The violence against Venezuela is a grim echo of Iraq. Then, it was a lie about Weapons of Massive Destruction; now, it is the language of “narco-terrorism.” In both cases, distant populations are told our lives are at stake while geopolitics and resource robber barons pull the strings. In both cases, sovereign nations are treated as expendable. This is about the U.S. empire’s desperate struggle to maintain colonial capitalist hegemony — a war on socialism and on peoples’ rights to land, territory, and what Robin Wall-Kimmerer calls “earthly gifts” (as opposed to ‘natural resources’).

When Nature is framed as a “resource,” exploitation, financialisation, and imperial violence are normalised. When Nature is understood as kin — as our Mother — violence against land and people becomes harder to justify, though never impossible for empires.

None of this began with Iraq. In Chile in 1973, the CIA claimed it was defending democracy while overthrowing a democratically elected socialist government. Allende’s real crime was proving that redistribution, nationalisation, and popular power could work. In Guatemala in 1954, land reform that threatened United Fruit was recast as a communist threat, ushering in decades of dictatorship, genocide against Indigenous peoples, and U.S.-backed terror — all in the name of freedom.

Today, Gaza is obliterated in full view of the world with U.S. weapons and diplomatic cover, while Sudan bleeds to the sound of Global North silence. Some lives are framed as grievable, others as collateral. The pattern is not accidental.

Venezuela’s government, and movements resisting imperialism globally, correctly call Maduro’s capture what it is: the kidnapping of a sitting head of state, carried out without international mandate and in open violation of basic norms of sovereignty.

Across the world, protests are erupting — the same instinct that once drove me to refuse food in solidarity with people suffering imperial violence. As a farmer and food sovereignty activist, I know that real freedom means autonomy: over land, her earthly gifts, and political destiny. Whether Iraq under sanctions and bombs, Gaza under siege, Sudan abandoned to geopolitical indifference, or Venezuela facing foreign troops and decades of economic warfare, the struggle is the same.

These fights are not isolated. Our liberation is collective, and our solidarity must be unwavering.

About AFSA
The Agroecology & Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) is a farmer- and First Peoples-led civil society organisation of people working together towards socially-just and ecologically-sound food and agriculture systems that foster the democratic participation of First Peoples, smallholders, and local communities in decision making processes.