There is constant, pervasive propaganda throughout the imperialist establishment against the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, against its leadership – Hugo Chávez, Nicolás Maduro and the PSUV – and, ultimately, against the Venezuelan people.
Media, academia, thinktanks and governments all generate and spread a trove of vitriolic stories – some based in half-truths, some based entirely in deranged self-contradictory fantasy. These stories rely on their audience lacking historical knowledge and the capacity for critical thinking.
As world events pick up pace, so does the propaganda from the ruling class. But hardship and oppression mean that more workers are beginning to understand that the ruling class does not act in their interests, and as a result they are questioning the official narrative more often.
On 11 February 2026 (broadcast on 26 February), not six weeks after the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and First Combatant Cilia Flores, Dr Vanessa Neumann participated with Mehdi Hassan on Al Jazeera’s Head to Head debating programme. Ms Neumann had previously been the ‘ambassador’ in the UK for Juan Guaidó, the regime-change figurehead chosen by the imperialists and comprador bourgeois of Venezuela. She has also expressed her approval of the USA’s presidential kidnapping, despite its being in violation of both international and Venezuelan law and, in her own admission, not having changed the Bolivarian government of Venezuela.
Disappointingly, although not surprisingly, Mehdi Hassan and the panel of ‘experts’ all spoke from the shared understanding that Venezuela currently lacks ‘democracy’, although they differed on ideas of how to ‘restore’ it. In this way, they aligned themselves with Dr Neumann’s argument that Venezuela needs regime change and differed only on the details of how this should be achieved.
The extremist opposition that Neumann has been involved with has been increasingly divided and has further alienated ordinary Venezuelans, since its leaders openly celebrate sanctions that are hurting the general population, advocate for foreign military intervention against their own country, and reveal themselves as nothing more than servants for their imperialist masters in the USA.
This article is the first in a series examining the Venezuelan opposition. Who are they, what do they want, and what would their success (an increasingly unlikely prospect) mean for Venezuela? Dr Neumann provides a useful case study in beginning to understand their background, organisation and views.
The Neumann family
Despite Dr Vanessa Neumann’s insistence that “stories of oppression by a white oligarchy have been greatly exaggerated” and that there is no racial component to poverty and oppression in Venezuela (one simply has to compare a photo of the wealthy Venezuelans and the opposition politicians to judge whether or not this is true), her family’s Venezuelan saga has its origins just two generations ago in Europe. (The essay: Not noble, not savage, Varsity magazine, 23 October 2009)
Her grandfather, Hans Neumann, was the son of wealthy German-jewish industrialist Otto Neumann, who built a successful paint business in Czechoslovakia during its independence after WW1. Along with his brother Lothar, Hans was sent to study chemical engineering at the University of Prague. The rise of fascist Germany and the annexation of Czechoslovakia forced the Neumanns into hiding, and 25 out of 34 of the family were murdered by the Nazis.
Hans survived by assuming a false identity and working in a paint factory that was crucial for the Nazi war effort, the education provided by his wealthy family helping him to escape the fate of many working-class jews.
After returning to Czechoslovakia, he and his brother began rebuilding the family businesses, but they decided to flee to Venezuela in 1948 when it became clear that a people’s government, led by communists, was going be established. Dr Vanessa Neumann claims her grandfather fled fascism in Europe, but in reality he fled the prospect of being deprived of the wealth and power derived from his business ownership and of being reduced to the status of an ordinary member of society.
The Neumann brothers arrived in Venezuela in 1949, and did very well under the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, which lasted from 1950-58. Hans Neumann’s eulogy on the Mustique Island website paints a relatively positive picture of dictator Pérez Jiménez, praising the architecture of public works while only dryly noting that the corrupt junta took a cut from every project.
In fact, the eulogy even identifies the Neumann brothers with the dictatorship via its modernist design and architecture, saying they “exemplified this, they were a new breed of industrialist on the Venezuelan scene”. There is no mention of the secret police, suppression of political opponents, closure of universities, silencing of the press, and rampant inflation. (Marcos Pérez Jiménez biography, Britannica.com)
(In fact, modernism itself was the desperate response of imperialism to socialism, attempting to prove that the moribund system was still dynamic and developing. Modernist art, particularly abstract expressionism, was promoted by the CIA as part of its culture war against the Soviet Union.)
Hans Neumann would grow his paint business into the Corimon conglomerate (the first Venezuelan company to be listed on the New York stock exchange), go on to own newspapers such as The Daily Journal, and to buy the Caribbean island of Mustique – an exclusive resort for the rich and powerful. It is into this dynasty that Vanessa Neumann was born.
A regime-change career
Vanessa Neumann may have been born in Venezuela, but she was bred in the United States, her family having moved her there when she was ten. She would spend 11 years at New York City’s Columbia university, which culminated in a dissertation justifying regime change in which she claimed that “majority rule can become counterproductive by delegitimising [that] democracy”. [The Autonomy and Legitimacy of States: A Critical Approach to Foreign Intervention, 2004]
She would go on to work for her grandfather’s newspapers, including Tal Cual, a paper he founded specifically to spread propaganda against President Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution. Aside from some stints as a lobbyist for the arms and oil industries, she spent many years working for various thinktanks. (Meet the Venezuelan coup regime’s ‘UK ambassador,’ a pampered US heiress who threatens journalists by Ben Norton, The Grayzone, 9 July 2020)
Among these was six months spent working at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), funded by arms firms, oil companies, multinational corporations and the British government, among others. It was here Neumann began to create stories accusing the Venezuelan government of drug trafficking.
She was also a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) from 2011 until recently, where she published articles accusing the PSUV and the Bolivarian armed forces (FANB) of corruption and drug trafficking. The FPRI is an American thinktank founded by a US diplomat, Robert Strausz-Hupé, in the 1950s – a man who believed that the USA and the CIA’s notorious John Foster Dulles were not anticommunist enough!
These lies regarding Venezuelan state involvement in drug trafficking were not enough on their own, so Dr Neumann set about creating a narrative that could help sell the idea that US military intervention in Venezuela was a matter of national security, linking it to the ‘war on terror’, which was US imperialism’s replacement for the cold war as a justification for launching regime-change operations and aggressive wars across the middle east, north Africa and Asia throughout the 2000s and 2010s.
It was at these institutes, funded by imperialist governments, arms and oil companies, and staunch anticommunists, that she began concocting stories about “narcoterrorism” – the very stories that have recently been used by US media and government officials to claim that Venezuela is a threat, and to try to justify the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and National Deputy Cilia Flores.
Tales of narcoterrorism
In one sensational article from 2011, published by the FPRI, Dr Neumann claimed that Venezuela was a “nexus of narcoterrorism”, accusing the country of working with Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda (apparently without irony, since those two organisations operate on opposite sides of the middle-eastern struggle against imperialism!), of hosting “terrorist training camps” and of running the drug trade with government and army support. (The new nexus of narcoterrorism: Hezbollah and Venezuela, 3 December 2011)
As so often with imperialist narratives, every accusation is in fact a confession. We know that the imperialists routinely make use of terrorist proxy armies and are the world’s principal drug-runners. There is no evidence that any anti-imperialist country is involved in such activities, however, so what were Ms Neumann’s sources for this information?
Articles published in the New York Times, an unspecified documentary, and the United Nations office on drugs and crime (UNODC) World Drug Report 2011.
The UNODC report noted that Venezuela accounted for the majority of cocaine seized in Europe between 2005-09, however this statistic relied both on the ability of reporting nations to seize the cocaine and on their successfully determining its country of origin. The report also showed that the amount seized had significantly decreased from 9.4 metric tons (mt) in 2006 to 6.6 mt in 2009. Compared to the 65 mt seized in Ecuador that year, or the 253 mt seized in Columbia, it pales into insignificance.
Bolivarian Venezuela has consistently acted to stop the production (of which there was very little in the first place), distribution and trafficking of cocaine in and through the country, and this effort is reflected both in recent UN and other reports on drug trafficking, as well as by the people of Venezuela, whose working-class residents report that they have, with assistance from the government, successfully cleared out drug dealers from their neighbourhoods.
The UNODC and other organisations that monitor drug trafficking identify Ecuador, Panama, Peru and Brazil as the most significant nations exporting drugs both to the USA and the rest of the world. Not only is Venezuela not a notable producer of cocaine, it is not a significant transit country for the trafficking of cocaine and has been actively working to stamp the trade out.
And what of the link to ‘terrorism’? This is both a trick of circular referencing, beloved of imperialist propagandists, and of designating all opponents of US imperialism as ‘terrorists’. The original source came from the US DEA, or other US government agencies, and has since been repeatedly recycled through academia and thinktanks. At each stage the stories have grown in scope and scale, eventually becoming tabloid-worthy tales of Hezbollah digging tunnels under the US border with the drug cartels! (Hezbollah’s drug empire in South America by Brian McDonald, The Times of Israel, 25 November 2025)
Neumann’s only direct ‘proof’ in the FPRI article of Hezbollah involvement in the drug trade in Venezuela came from the ‘confession’ of drug lord Walid Makled, who was arrested in Colombia when he fled Venezuela after his entire operation had been taken down. Who was it taken down by? The Venezuelan government!
Neither drug busts nor arrests for corruption by the Venezuelan government are ever considered as evidence of intolerance of these crimes by propagandists like Neumann, but inversely (and perversely!) serve as ‘evidence’ of their complicity in them!
Neumann also either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about the differences between organisations such as Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda, the former an anti-imperialist force, the latter a tool of imperialism. Venezuela’s links with anti-imperialist allies across the world such as Iran becomes muddled, obfuscated and reduced to the blanket charge of ‘narcoterrorism’ by Neumann.
In the same article, in an incredible display of racism, she implied that all six million muslims in Latin America are a latent terrorist force!
Lapdog of US imperialism
The Neumann family likes to emphasise their charitable enterprises as evidence of their concern for the plight of impoverished Venezuelans, but the real purpose of these activities is to provide a moralistic comfort blanket for their class, to serve as a tool for propaganda, and to provide a mechanism for cultivating talented members of the working class as their local agents.
While the Neumanns built a business empire during military dictatorships and liberal bourgeois democracies alike (under which poverty, repression and corruption were constant features), the share of Venezuelan wealth for the bottom 50 percent of the population remained steady at around 2.8 percent. It was only after the Bolivarian Revolution was launched in 1999 that their share began to increase, steadily growing to 3.6 percent by 2023, despite crippling sanctions and economic sabotage.
In contrast, the top 1 percent of Venezuela’s population has lost 4.6 percent of its share of the national wealth since 1990, dropping to 30.6 percent. The top 10 percent, holding 68.5 percent of the wealth of the nation in 1990, has similarly dropped a few points to 65.6 percent. (Venezuela profile, World Inequality Database, 2024)
But what truly scares the Neumanns and other Venezuelan bourgeois is the thought of forever losing the source of their fantastic wealth: the ability to exploit the resources and people of Venezuela. The communal constitution, the people’s militias and the shift of power away from the old bourgeois state into the hands of the workers is terrifying them because they know a time is coming when they will not simply be able to rig an election or stage a coup to regain power.
They will have to fight the people of Venezuela, who have been building their own homes, planting their own food, running industries by themselves and learning how to manage a country – all in the face of severe economic sanctions and extreme military pressure.
It is a fight they could never win, and given their dwindling strength and resources they have transformed themselves into cringingly servile lapdogs of US imperialism, begging for sanctions and war against the Venezuelan people. In the case of Dr Neumann, with her long record of providing moral arguments for regime change based on phony propaganda about ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’, she has to remain embarrassingly tight-lipped or unconvincingly feign ignorance when asked about the naked aggression of US imperialism and President Trump’s newly-announced “Donroe” doctrine.
Unfortunately for her, the time for such liberal obfuscations of imperialism is long over. Every piece of her propaganda has been exposed, the class nature of the struggle between Venezuela and the USA, and between Venezuelan workers and the opposition, is clear.
Future articles in this series will reveal the dealings of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie and its link to every major corruption case in Venezuela, as well as its links to all the leaders of the political opposition, including Juan Guaidó and María Machado.
