Caracas — Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro accused the United States on Monday of waging “aggression” on multiple fronts, warning that Washington’s actions have severed channels of communication and raised the risk of direct conflict.
Speaking in a televised address, Maduro alleged that the United States has abandoned diplomacy and instead resorted to “bombs, death, blackmail, and threats” against his government. He described the situation as a “battlefront of aggression,” claiming that Washington’s behavior amounts to a coordinated campaign to destabilize Venezuela.
Maduro’s sharp language comes days after a US military strike killed eleven people and sank a Venezuelan boat that Washington alleged was carrying narcotics. Venezuelan officials countered that the victims were civilians, not members of the Tren de Aragua gang as claimed by American authorities, according to The Guardian.
“They openly confessed to killing 11 people,” Venezuela’s interior minister and ruling party head, Diosdado Cabello, said. The incident has fueled outrage in Caracas, where officials say it demonstrates a broader pattern of disregard for Venezuela’s sovereignty. According to Reuters, Maduro also accused a US destroyer of intercepting and occupying a Venezuelan fishing vessel inside the country’s exclusive economic zone.
“This isn’t tension. It is an aggression all down the line, it’s a judicial aggression when they criminalize us, a political aggression with their daily threatening statements, a diplomatic aggression and an ongoing aggression of military character,” Maduro said.
The Venezuelan leader argued that Washington is actively seeking an “incident” to escalate tensions. “They have thrown away communication,” he said, while acknowledging that minimal contacts remain to manage logistical matters such as the repatriation of Venezuelans stranded in the United States.
The rupture deepens a long-running confrontation between the two countries. Washington has refused to recognize Maduro’s last electoral victory, instead backing Venezuelan opposition figures who insist that the vote was fraudulent. For Maduro, such support represents an attempt to remove him from power, echoing a pattern of foreign interference that he and his allies often describe as a form of modern imperialism.
The clash underscores the widening gulf between the United States and much of Latin America, where governments have increasingly questioned Washington’s posture on regional security. Venezuela, long a critic of Western hegemony, has sought to position itself alongside countries like Russia and Iran in resisting American influence. Maduro’s denunciation may signal deeper alignment with BRICS members who are pushing to build a multipolar world order outside of US control.
Analysts warn that the collapse of diplomatic communication leaves little room to de-escalate. With American forces active in the southern Caribbean and Venezuelan officials vowing to defend their sovereignty, the risk of accidental confrontation is rising. The episode could complicate Washington’s broader regional strategy, including its efforts to pressure governments that refuse to align with Western policy in Gaza and beyond.
Maduro framed the standoff as more than a quarrel between two capitals; he cast it as a contest over the very dignity of Latin America, a region he says has long been battered by Washington’s habit of turning political disagreements into kinetic interventions. He pointed to a trail of US warmongering in Iraq and the endless war in Afghanistan, campaigns that shattered institutions, produced staggering civilian tolls, and left whole societies scarred and destabilized.
He and his ministers also invoked Washington’s harsher tools short of open invasion: crippling US sanctions on Iran that international observers say have damaged public health and infrastructure, and high-profile targeted strikes such as the assassination of Qasem Soleimani in 2020 — actions Maduro says demonstrate a readiness to upend regional order when convenient for US strategic aims.
To underline Caracas’s point, Maduro contrasted American coercion with the blunt statecraft of Moscow, noting Russia’s decisive military intervention in Syria as an example of power used openly to defend allied regimes — a model Caracas now holds up as a counterweight to what it calls US “regime change by other means.”
Taken together, Maduro argues, the record from Iraq to Afghanistan to Iran and the wider Middle East amounts to more than policy mistakes; it is a pattern of militarized intervention and economic coercion that, in Caracas’s telling, disqualifies Washington from lecturing other nations about sovereignty or morality. He warns that if the US continues to “test the patience” of Venezuela and the region, rhetorical confrontation could harden into deeper geopolitical entanglement — a realization that the BRICS and other Global South actors are already exploiting as evidence that multipolar alliances are now the only reliable shield against US overreach.
