The Washington Examiner has uncovered deep connections between the Chavista regime in Venezuela and Black Lives Matter (BLM), an organization that presents itself as a defender of racial rights but, according to documented evidence, has served as a vehicle for foreign Marxist agendas.

It all began in late 2012, when Hugo Chávez, the eternal father of 21st-century socialism, ordered the delivery of at least $20 million in suitcases filled with cash to Opal Tometi, one of the three co-founders of BLM alongside Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza. According to a former high-ranking Venezuelan official who defected and witnessed the meeting, the purpose was to “project the Bolivarian revolutionary project onto the streets of the United States,” meaning to sow chaos and division to erode American democracy from within.

This testimony does not come out of nowhere. The defector, close to Chávez’s inner circle, described a meeting in Caracas where Tometi arrived accompanied by three other African American women and actor Danny Glover, a known sympathizer of communist regimes like those in Cuba and Venezuela. On his deathbed due to cancer, Chávez saw BLM as the perfect tool to export his anti-imperialist ideology.

Notably, BLM had already emerged in 2013, spurred by the Trayvon Martin case, but its ideological roots are steeped in declared Marxism: Cullors identifies as a “trained Marxist,” and Tometi has invoked figures like Assata Shakur, a convicted fugitive for murder living in exile in Cuba.

The connections do not end there. In 2006, Chávez had already called from the World Social Forum in Caracas for the creation of a “fifth column” of the left in the U.S. to sabotage its policies. BLM fit the role perfectly.

In 2015, Tometi personally invited Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s successor, to an event in Harlem, New York, during the UN General Assembly. There, Maduro shared the stage with Glover and a BLM co-founder, who embraced him warmly in front of a giant portrait of the dictator.

That same year, Tometi traveled to Venezuela as an electoral observer for the parliamentary elections, a process boycotted by the OAS, UN, and EU due to evident fraud. Rather than denouncing irregularities, Tometi praised the Venezuelan system as “one of the best in the world” and drafted a manifesto on behalf of BLM supporting the “Bolivarian revolution.” “Fulfilling my duty as a global citizen,” she tweeted, ignoring the extrajudicial executions and famine already plaguing the country.

This alliance is no coincidence but part of a hemispheric Marxist network orchestrated by the São Paulo Forum, promoted by Venezuela. BLM participated in its meetings, strengthening ties with dictatorships that oppress their own peoples—including millions of Venezuelan Afro-descendants massacred by Chavista repression.

Under Maduro, the Venezuelan police kill six times more people per year than in the U.S., in a country twelve times smaller and with private firearms banned. Cases like that of Genesis Carmona, a former beauty queen shot by snipers in 2014, or the racist lynching of a Black youth in 2017, symbolize the horror that Tometi endorsed.

While BLM raises millions in corporate donations—$90 million alone in 2020—its leaders buy luxury mansions and divert funds to family consultancies, leaving local chapters and victims of police violence with scraps.

From a conservative perspective, this revelation exposes the hypocrisy of the left: they preach racial justice while embracing tyrants who trample human rights. BLM is not an organic movement for equality; it is an extension of the Chavista agenda to destabilize the West, funded with dirty petrodollars from a narco-state sanctioned for drug trafficking.

Under the Trump administration, which is already pressuring Maduro over his alliance with cartels like the Cartel of the Suns, a thorough federal investigation is urgently needed. How much more money flowed? What role did corporations like Amazon or Microsoft, which donated fortunes to BLM, play?

The truth hurts, but it is the antidote to the red propaganda dividing America.

In summary, the $20 million delivered to Tometi was not philanthropy but an investment in chaos: violent protests, burning businesses, and the erosion of law. Venezuela, which exports hunger and repression, imported its poison to the U.S.

It is time for conservatives to demand transparency and the dismantling of these foreign networks. American freedom is not for sale to dictators.

—

**About The Author**

**Joana Campos**

Joana Campos es abogada y editora con más de 10 años de experiencia en la gestión de proyectos de desarrollo internacional, enfocada en la sostenibilidad y el impacto social positivo. Anteriormente, trabajó como abogada corporativa. Egresada de la Universidad de Guadalajara.
https://gatewayhispanic.com/2025/10/venezuelan-narco-regime-under-nicolas-maduro-provided-20/