[TEASER] Venezuela Pt. 4: The Empire vs. Venezuela w/ Jesus Rodriguez-Espinoza and Saheli Chowdhury

Upstream

News, Politics, Society & Culture

4.9 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 28 October 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is a free preview of the episode "Venezuela Pt. 4: The Empire vs. Venezuela w/ Jesus Rodriguez-Espinoza and Saheli Chowdhury." You can listen to the full episode by subscribing to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/upstreampodcast

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In Part 4 of our ongoing series on Venezuela, Jesus Rodriguez-Espinoza and Saheli Chowdhury of Orinoco Tribune join us to discuss the US empire's attacks on Venezuela—both historically and into the present. Jesus Rodriguez-Espinoza is an expert in international relations, Venezuelan politics, and communications and is the founding editor of Orinoco Tribune. Saheli Chowdhury is from West Bengal, India. She's studying physics as a profession and has interests in history and global movements. Saheli is a co-editor of Orinoco Tribune, an independent media outlet that provides news and analysis from Venezuela, Latin America, and the Global South.

Our conversation begins with an update on the latest escalations of aggression by the United States before presenting a brief history of US aggression against Venezuela and the Bolivarian Revolution more broadly. We then discuss the grassroots and institutional response in Venezuela, including the role that the communes play in resisting US empire. We talk about María Corina Machado and the Venezuelan far right more broadly and the role they play in advancing the interests of the United States and transnational corporations. We talk about the geopolitical context of all of this, the war on drugs, and much more.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	A quick note before we jump into this Patreon episode.
0:03.2	Thank you to all of our Patreon subscribers for making upstream possible.
0:07.3	We genuinely couldn't do this without you.
0:09.8	Your support allows us to create bonus content like this
0:12.8	and to provide most of our content for free
0:15.0	so that we can continue to offer political education media to the public
0:19.1	and build our movement.
0:20.9	Thank you, comrades.
0:22.2	We hope you enjoyed this conversation. So with land reform, they lost, the oligards lost land to the people.
0:50.3	So they are resentful in this regard that our property were taken away, which was never there to begin with.
0:56.7	It should be of the people.
0:58.0	The commons should be of the people, but that's not their vision.
1:01.2	Their vision is capitalism.
1:02.8	So it should be in the hands of the film.
1:04.5	And most of Venezuelans should live in absolute poverty.
1:07.9	That was the vision, which was the situation in the 70s, 80s, if you
1:12.1	go through it, like Venezuela, was called the Saudi Venezuela, and in many ways it was like
1:17.7	that, you know, as a few people extremely rich, the 70% of the population in extreme poverty,
1:24.5	so they want to go back to that. They want to go back to that. That is their vision.
1:28.7	And if it means that, there needs to be a foreign military invasion of the country, there needs
1:34.5	to be bombs dropped on the country, they are disposed towards it. They have no issue with it.
1:39.0	They would love it, actually. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world around you. I'm Robert Raymond. And I'm Della Duncan. As the U.S. war machine barrels down on Venezuela, a war machine whose wheels have been greased
	...

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