Announcement 🇻🇪📢

Amid the smoke from the attacks on 3 January 2026, which sought to dampen the hopes of an entire continent, the Araña Feminista network raises its voice, wounded but steadfast. 

These imperialist bombings did not just target geographic coordinates or strategic facilities – they struck at the very heart of an alternative society that refuses to be colonised.

The United States attack is a violent, desperate response from a global patriarchy that fears the construction of a communal state, where power ceases to take the form of a pyramid led by men and becomes a horizontal fabric of care and collective decision-making.

They bomb us because our socialism, born of the communes and communal councils, is deeply feminist and Chavist. They attack us because Venezuela was bold enough to propose a new form of socialism with life at the centre at a time when the rest of the region is suffering the onslaught of conservative right-wing governments that seek to return women to the silence of the home and to the precarious conditions of the market.

Unable to crush Venezuela with hunger, the empire is now firing missiles in an attempt to stifle a participatory, protagonist democracy where we, women from working-class neighbourhoods and rural areas, sustain food sovereignty, community health and everyday resistance.

This show of aggression is the crudest expression of violent masculinity transformed into foreign policy; a force that seeks to punish the audacity of a population that has decided never to ask permission to be free. This is not a war for “freedom”, it is a war against the possibility that the Global South might manage its own wealth and future without Washington’s tutelage.

This is why we appeal to the conscience of feminists around the world to recognise that to defend Venezuela is to defend all struggles against the patriarchy and colonial capitalism. 

If genocidal imperialism is permitted to extinguish the flame burning within the communal state, silence may be imposed on any project that dares to challenge the status quo.

We demand an immediate end to the hostilities and violence against Venezuela and our Latin American and Caribbean region, as well as full respect for our right to self-determination. 

We condemn the kidnapping of the constitutional President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores by the US Government. We demand that they are released and returned to Venezuela with immediate effect. 

Our response to the rumbling of war will always be to establish deeper communal organisation, strengthen our support networks and uphold our unswerving conviction that the future will be feminist, sovereign and communal or there will be no future.

Venezuela, 3 January 2026.