Welcome back to the 1970s, everyone. Adjust your aviators and check your wiretaps, because the CIA, apparently bored with losing generational wars in the Middle East and failing to find a single person in Washington with a functioning frontal lobe, has decided to return to its roots: Latin America. It’s like a classic rock band that hasn’t had a hit since the Cold War going on a desperate reunion tour because they blew all their royalty checks on bad intel and drone strikes that hit more weddings than a high-end photographer. The news that a 'covert team' provided 'real-time support' for a raid to snatch Nicolás Maduro is about as surprising as finding out a politician lied on their tax returns or that water is, in fact, wet.

The senior U.S. official who 'declined to confirm' the specifics of these operations is performing the standard Washington Waltz—a choreographed dance of plausible deniability that fools absolutely no one but satisfies the legal department. It’s the linguistic equivalent of a teenager standing next to a broken vase with a baseball bat, saying they weren't 'technically' involved in the impact. This is the peak of bureaucratic cowardice: the inability to own the chaos you create while salivating over the potential for a press release that frames it as a 'victory for freedom.'

Let’s look at the players in this tragicomedy. On one side, we have Nicolás Maduro, a man who has successfully performed the economic miracle of transforming the world’s largest oil reserves into a country where the most valuable currency is hope, and even that is suffering from triple-digit inflation. He’s a bus driver with a God complex, ruling over a ruin of his own making while blaming every single mosquito bite and power outage on the 'Yankee Empire.' He is not a martyr; he is a mediocre autocrat who found a throne in the rubble and refused to leave until the furniture was sold for scrap metal.

On the other side, we have the United States, a nation that can’t figure out how to provide basic healthcare to its own citizens or fix a bridge in Baltimore without a decade of subcommittee meetings, but somehow possesses the budget and the hubris to believe it can micro-manage the political destiny of Caracas. The 'New Focus' on Latin America is just a fancy rebrand for an old habit. The CIA loves the region like a retired arsonist loves the smell of gasoline; it’s their comfort zone, the place where they can practice their 'regime change' hobby without the immediate risk of a global thermonuclear war—just a few decades of civil unrest and a new wave of refugees that the same politicians will then use as campaign props to terrify the suburbs.

The Right-wing ghouls in D.C. are already performing their victory laps, framing this as a triumph for 'democracy.' It’s a beautiful sentiment, provided you haven't looked at a history book for more than three seconds. 'Democracy' in the CIA handbook usually means 'whoever lets us build a pipeline and doesn’t mention the word nationalization.' They don’t want liberty for the Venezuelan people; they want a puppet who looks good in a suit, speaks fluent Davos-English, and signs the right contracts. It’s not about liberty; it’s about logistics, leverage, and making sure the crude keeps flowing to the right people.

Meanwhile, the Left is gearing up for its usual performative outrage. They’ll take to social media to decry 'imperialist interventionism' while carefully ignoring the fact that Maduro is currently presiding over a humanitarian catastrophe that would make a Victorian workhouse look like a luxury spa. To the academic Left, Maduro is a revolutionary hero simply because he hates the people they hate. They’ll ignore the secret police, the rigged elections, and the starving children because to acknowledge them would ruin the aesthetic of their anti-Western narrative. It’s a battle of two different kinds of brain rot, and as usual, the truth is being strangled in the middle.

The 'covert team' providing 'real-time support' is the most delicious part of this farce. It’s the military equivalent of saying 'I’m not touching you' during a long car ride. We didn’t do the raid; we just gave them the maps, the radios, the intelligence, and probably a very firm pat on the back. It’s a semantic shield for an empire that is too tired to lead but too insecure to let go. Why now? Because the CIA needs a win. They’ve been outplayed in Asia and exhausted in the Middle East. Returning to Venezuela is like a failed actor going back to their hometown to star in community theater; at least there, people remember the name.

In the end, nothing changes. Maduro will either stay and get more paranoid, or he’ll be replaced by some CIA-vetted empty suit who will be just as corrupt but slightly more polite to American corporations. The Venezuelan people will continue to be the collateral damage in a game played by men in air-conditioned rooms in Langley and Caracas who haven’t felt the sting of a grocery bill in thirty years. It’s all a grift. The CIA gets a new budget line, Maduro gets to play the martyr, and the rest of us get to watch this reran episode of 'Empire: The Sadness Continues' until the heat death of the universe or the next election cycle—whichever comes first. Humanity’s capacity for repetition is truly its only reliable trait. We are stuck in a loop of arrogant intervention and autocratic incompetence, fueled by a collective stupidity that spans the entire political spectrum. If there is a God, He’s probably just watching this for the comedy, though the jokes are getting increasingly stale.