Radio War Nerd EP #572 — Venezuela: From Corporate Coup to Kinetic Coup, feat. Anya Parampil
Guest: Anya Parampil
Recorded: January 8, 2026
Journalist Anya Parampil joins us to talk about her personal impressions of Maduro and Delcy Rodriguez, and making sense of Trump's kidnapping/coup. We also discuss America's long war on Venezuela's chavismo governments over the past 25 years, focusing on some of the outrageous examples of legal-financial piracy waged by Washington and its Venezuelan agents since Maduro came to power in 2013.
Buy Anya's book Corporate Coup: Venezuela and the End of US Empire. Follow Anya on Twitter.
Total time: 1:27:07
Direct link to this episode's mp3 here
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Buy & review John Dolan's new book, They Should Have Been Hanged: War Nerd Essays on the U.S. Civil War
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Sound production by Telescope Audio
Comments (24)
Delcy Supreme
I was disappointed Mark did not ask about the 2024 election. Mark was very quick to call it a corrupt and stolen election. Without giving the proper context of an election in a country at war with the global hegemon. I have not been able to fully trust his analysis since then.
Agree with Anya that Chavez was in a lot of ways a bigger threat in the Americas to American empire than Castro and imo it’s largely because Castro governed by a one party state and took power via force, which is not really applicable to the US context while Chavez and Maduro basically won as and governed as left wing liberal democrats (allowing oppositional private media, multiple parties, allowing division of power in the different branches etc), something a lot more applicable to the us (and most Latin American) political contexts
Fantastic episode. Bought the book.
Is it possible to get RWN RSS feed direct to other podcast apps? I can’t find the same option that other patreon creators have
Something tells me you’ll be doing an episode on Iran soon.
Ironically, if what we're hearing from Trump's meeting with oil executives earlier today is true, they're not worried about the Chavistas blowing up their business dealings anymore, they're worried about Trump doing it
fixed the direct mp3 link!
To explain, every other podcast I listen to through Patreon provides a button that says “Add to podcast app” that we can use to generate a link that will do just that. Your show did as well, until a short time ago. Now it does not, and the Patreon app itself is just awful for listening. Can we get that button back, o War Nerds, who I have paid well over $1000 in subscriptions to over the 9 or 10 years I have been a subscriber to this show?
Hope yall can do an episode on Iran soon, seems like this week’s protests are escalating very quickly!
It speaks to the small mindedness of the academic left in America that the explanation for Venezuela's precipitous decline has been "Maduro bad" rather than crippling American siege. I genuinely believe most of the anti Maduro left in America is just stupid rather than malicious, which is worse
The failure two hold two truths simultaneously is possibly more disturbing? Yes America is the great satan, they intended to crush Venezuela with sanctions at the cost of countless human lives, but at the same time, there is credible documentation as far as I know, about the PDVSA resources not being used to the full betterment of the people etc etc. You can say that every negative aspect of the Chavista government is a downstream effect of US aggression and pressure, but the government was not without its share of issues before the sanctions were imposed.
Hey Mark and John, the Patreon app is not providing a link to add this to our podcast apps for some reason. I’ve been listening to Radio War Nerd since War Nerd Wednesdays on NSFWPod, please comrades get someone to fix this!
fixed the direct mp3 link!
The direct link to the episode in the main body of the post is broken.
fixed it!
Very educational. One important question that wasn't answered (because it wasn't asked) is who killed the 32 Cubans and under what circumstances. What do Anya's sources on the ground say about it?
Isn’t it pretty obvious
I'm a Patreon subscriber to multiple podcasts; but this interview is really the most informative I've listened to by any podcast in, like, forever, regarding not only this particular country, but also, the ancillary stuff as well. Please keep guests like Anya on this podcast regularly.
Mostly just want to second this. Its hard to overstate just how much I've been trying to find this level of analysis. Just a really insightful drawing together of all the disparate thoughts I had in my head into a cohesive image. Not to takeaway from that, but its taken me by surprise just how feckless most interviews with 'latin-america speicalists' etc. have been, even on my usual go to's. Maybe everyone's too focussed on Greenland and trying to loo scry the future in the debris of the RBA. Either way this was just what I needed
Thank you for this great episode. It’s been so tiring to hear apparently independent left voices trot out the same tropes about Maduro being incompetent or feckless with no basis for their claims. There’s a sort of crypto Trotskyism that seems to dominate the US left where every armchair commentator thinks that they had the solution for what went wrong in Venezuela. People think they’re so smart when they say ‘well, the problem with the bolivarian revolution is they didn’t diversify their economy.’ As though in a nation of 10s of millions of people with an extremely politically developed leader leadership, no one ever considered this problem before then.
Very sick here in Washington state ! Its up here too!
Its in ireland aswell. Seems to be everywhere.
Very cool, I've been thinking about reading her book so will give it a try now