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Guest: Anya ParampilRecorded: 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: 1:27:07Direct 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

Subscribe to Radio War Nerd at patreon.com/radiowarnerd

Sound production by Telescope Audio

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Comments

ExtraJudicial Pod

Very cool, I've been thinking about reading her book so will give it a try now

James Whale

Very sick here in Washington state ! Its up here too!

Hugo

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.

Dave in KS

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.

SB

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?

Kevin Walsh

The direct link to the episode in the main body of the post is broken.

John

Its in ireland aswell. Seems to be everywhere.

Scott

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!

Schaeffer Mallory

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

gatito

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.

David Haigh

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

Baron

Hope yall can do an episode on Iran soon, seems like this week’s protests are escalating very quickly!

Schaeffer Mallory

I'm not saying Maduro is a saint or even "Maduro good," I'm saying being anti-Maduro - i.e. taking a public political stance - as an American leftist is idiotic. There is one position that is appropriate for American leftists, and its end sanctions, full stop, nothing else

Arya

Not quite just that, there used to be a button to copy a link to the RSS feed so we could add it to other podcast apps. Could this be re-enabled please? Thank you!

Christopher Small

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

gatito

100% agree

William

Isn’t it pretty obvious

Nomad22

Something tells me you’ll be doing an episode on Iran soon.

no tomorrow

Cuba is a hotbed for the mercenary market, probably some sort of private guard employed by Venezuela

gatito

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

SB

Not obvious to me yet. Was there a firefight with the 32:0 outcome? Were they bombed in their barracks? Were they captured unarmed and then executed? Were they killed by Venezuelans?

SB

They all seem to have had military ranks. Judging by the Cuban announcement, I think they were more likely from the Cuban military. Would make a lot more sense than some mercenaries. 🤷

Adam Murphy

Fantastic episode. Bought the book.

jkjkjkj

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

Nosreffej

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.

Scott

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?

radiowarnerd

One of our problems is that we're still on the old system, ours being an early patreon podcast and all. We should switch everything over to the new system, but the first time we tried that back in 2016 it caused a shitshow and we had to struggle to restore it back to where it was. So we're spooked, on top of being tech-spooked. But yeah, we should take that leap now, the newer system has a lot more "functionality" as they say.