According to Western Journal, Black Lives Matter leaders, New York City Democratic Socialist Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s Democratic Socialists of America chapter, and a constellation of far-left organizations have met with Maduro, appeared alongside him at public events, or served as “election observers” for Venezuela’s widely condemned votes for more than a decade, based on the groups’ own statements and online documentation.
Some of these same organizations quickly mobilized protests in the United States after the Trump administration announced the Jan. 3 arrest of Maduro and his wife on federal drug and weapons charges, demonstrating how deeply Caracas had embedded itself in the American activist ecosystem.
January 11, 2026
The long courtship between Venezuelan officials and U.S. leftist groups did not happen by accident, but followed a deliberate strategy laid out by Chavez as he sought to export his “Bolivarian revolution” beyond Latin America. The regime’s influence campaign, according to Heritage Foundation senior fellow Mike Gonzalez, was significantly advanced by a 2006 Chavez speech that explicitly urged Americans to organize against their own government and national interests.
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“They played a key role in setting up the U.S. Social Forum from the World Social Forum which was the network of networks for the Left,” Gonzalez, a former foreign affairs journalist and State Department official, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. He credits Chavez’s fiery address with helping spark the inaugural 2007 meeting of the World Social Forum’s U.S. branch in Atlanta, Georgia, which became a hub for radical organizing.
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In that speech, Chavez framed the United States as the central obstacle to global justice and called on American activists to join his cause. “We must save the world, the people can save this world, but 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… All of us must unite; join together in a victorious offensive against the empire,” Chavez said.
Black Lives Matter co-founders Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi later surfaced at World Social Forum events, aligning themselves with the very network Chavez had championed. At the same time, a left-wing think tank that employed BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors participated in the planning committee for the first U.S. Social Forum, further intertwining American racial-justice branding with international socialist organizing.
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Gonzalez has gone further in his criticism, alleging in an October report that Chavez directly financed efforts to radicalize U.S. politics. He wrote that Chavez once paid Tometi to help foment political revolution in the United States, citing an anonymous former Venezuelan government official who defected to America and described the regime’s covert outreach.
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Years before federal agents finally brought Maduro into a New York courtroom, the Venezuelan leader was already being welcomed by American activists in symbolic venues. In 2015, Maduro traveled to Harlem for an event focused on Venezuelan “rights” alongside BLM’s Opal Tometi, as documented on an official Venezuelan government website, and the BLM movement would later defend his government against criticism from U.S. officials, including after his arrest.
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The BLM Global Network Foundation declined to engage with these concerns, ignoring a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation. Their silence stands in stark contrast to their past willingness to publicly champion the Maduro regime, even as Venezuelans endured economic collapse, political repression, and mass exodus under socialist rule.
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The Venezuelan dictatorship’s outreach extended beyond BLM to other far-left organizations that have since become prominent in American protest politics. Manolo De Los Santos, head of the New York-based People’s Forum, spoke at the People’s World Congress for Peace in Caracas in 2021, where video shows Maduro personally introducing him to the audience, and the dictator later gave De Los Santos another public shout-out by name in a 2024 speech in the Venezuelan capital.
Caracas also became a stage for American socialist activists at the 2022 International Summit Against Fascism, hosted by Maduro’s government with delegates from 53 countries. Among the featured participants was Eugene Puryear, a founding member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), whose organization surged in visibility in the United States beginning in 2023 by helping to organize aggressive pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
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The PSL has not limited its activism to foreign policy causes, but has also played a role in protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement across the country, targeting U.S. border enforcement and immigration law. Maduro’s regime, meanwhile, used the Caracas summit to burnish its own image, with the dictator delivering a speech to international delegates while left-wing outlet People’s Dispatch provided favorable coverage.
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Puryear used his platform in Venezuela to denounce the United States in sweeping ideological terms. “There is a particular variant of fascism that is imprinted in the political culture of the United States,” he said on video. “It goes to the roots of the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous people, the imprisonment in slave labor camps of African people.”
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When Maduro was finally arrested, the same network of groups that had praised or partnered with his regime quickly mobilized in his defense. The PSL and People’s Forum rapidly organized pro-Venezuela demonstrations across the United States in the days following his detention, complete with coordinated signage and organized marches, The New York Post reported, yet both organizations refused to respond to inquiries from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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For Gonzalez, the ideological alignment between Venezuelan officials and American leftists is neither surprising nor benign. Allyship between the two camps, he argued, stems from the fact that “they are all collectivists,” and their rhetorical opposition to Western “authoritarianism” is, in his view, nothing more than a “ruse.”
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“The Left loves authoritarianism, or even better, totalitarianism,” Gonzalez said, underscoring his belief that these movements are far more comfortable with centralized power than with genuine pluralism or constitutional limits. From his perspective, the embrace of regimes like Maduro’s reveals the true priorities of many self-described “progressive” organizations that claim to champion human rights and democracy at home.
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The personal involvement of BLM co-founder Opal Tometi with Venezuela’s electoral process illustrates how far some activists were willing to go in legitimizing the regime. Weeks after Maduro’s Harlem appearance, Tometi announced on X that she was “doing my duty as a global citizen and serving as an election observer” in 2015, posting a photograph of herself in an official observer uniform, and she later added, “Such a relief to be in a place where there is intelligent political discourse,” in another post about the trip.
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That pattern continued into the next decade, as multiple U.S.-based organizations lent their names to Maduro’s contested elections. The Democratic Socialists of America, the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), and the Alliance for Global Justice all sent “election observers” to Venezuela in 2024, but none of the three groups responded to questions about their role when contacted.
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Their endorsements stood in stark contrast to the position of both Republican and Democratic administrations in Washington, as well as many Latin American governments. Officials under Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, along with regional leaders, denounced Maduro’s 2024 “victory” as fraudulent, and major U.S. legacy media outlets also raised serious doubts about the results, citing suspicious vote tallies, reports of irregularities, and tactics such as barring opposition candidates from running.
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Despite this broad international skepticism, the National Lawyers Guild issued a glowing assessment of the process. “The delegation witnessed no instances of fraud or serious irregularities, and found overall voter satisfaction with the electoral process,” the NLG said, adding that “We observed a deeply participatory and pluralistic process where the Venezuelan people are directly engaged in the social and political life of their nation.”
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The organization claimed that its members spoke with voters on the ground who reinforced this rosy view of the Maduro-controlled system. “Because there is broad faith in election procedures and the overall electoral system, as our interviews suggest, mainstream media within the US has ramped up negative media representations of the Maduro government in the weeks leading up to the elections,” the NLG wrote.
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From the NLG’s perspective, American media criticism of Maduro is not a response to authoritarian abuses, but a propaganda effort. “This is a flagrant attempt to delegitimize the Bolivarian Republic, downplay widespread popular support for the Maduro government, and present the divided opposition as more unified and influential than it actually is,” the group argued, insisting that the real threat to democracy comes from Venezuela’s critics rather than its rulers.
The NLG went so far as to praise the Maduro regime’s supposed democratic credentials in the face of U.S. pressure. “We commend the Bolivarian Republic for its commitment to electoral democracy in the face of such brutal repression by its powerful neighbor to the north and stand with the voters who cast their ballots in support of democracy, justice and liberation,” the group wrote, effectively siding with a socialist dictatorship against its own country’s foreign policy and bipartisan concerns about human rights.
Taken together, these episodes reveal a troubling pattern: American left-wing organizations that claim to fight oppression at home repeatedly aligning themselves with a repressive socialist regime abroad, echoing its propaganda, and attacking U.S. institutions and media rather than confronting the reality of Venezuelan socialism’s failures.
While millions of Venezuelans have fled hunger, political persecution, and economic ruin, influential activists in the United States have provided Maduro with moral cover, street-level support, and international legitimacy, raising serious questions about where their loyalties truly lie and what kind of political future they envision for America itself.
