Over the last several months, Donald Trump has clearly been on a march to war with Venezuela with the aim of ousting the nation’s President Nicolás Maduro. Beginning in September, the president ordered the U.S. military to bomb and destroy some 30 small open boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, killing at least 105 people — accused without evidence — of being narcoterrorists linked with Venezuela’s government.
In recent weeks, Trump has declared the skies above Venezuela closed to air traffic, announced a blockade of all sanctioned Venezuelan oil exports, with the U.S. Coast Guard seizing two oil tankers. In an echo of one of the ugliest chapters in America’s imperial and interventionist history in Latin America, Trump Homeland Security advisor Stephen Miller declared on Dec. 17 that Venezuela’s oil “belongs to Washington.”
After Trump authorized CIA covert operations targeting Venezuela, he’s also threatened to bomb alleged drug factories in Mexico and Columbia. Given his anti-drug rhetoric, it’s striking that Trump has pardoned or granted clemency to at least 100 convicted drug felons, including a recent pardon given to former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández who was convicted of drug trafficking in a U.S. court and sentenced to 45 years in prison for operating his nation as a “narcostate” that moved at least 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink Women for Peace, who condemns Trump’s unconstitutional march to war with Venezuela, and assesses the state of the U.S. anti-war movement.
And yet they don’t know what they’re trying to do. There is so much division within the administration and between the base of the Republican party and of course the vast majority of Americans, no matter how they identify themselves, that I think there still is time for us to organize and to stop our government. There’s a lot of dissension within Latin America itself where you have the governments of Mexico and Lula in Brazil and Petra in Columbia that are saying, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, this doesn’t make any sense. We believe in sovereignty and self-determination. We don’t want U.S. intervention.”
And there are a lot of people inside Venezuela who don’t like Maduro, but don’t want that kind of outside intervention either. So it’s a very delicate moment. And I think if we organize enough, we can help to stop our government. And Scott, one of the ways of organizing is to be pushing for Congress people to support these war power resolutions that say Trump is not authorized to conduct attacks in Venezuela. And we had a vote in the House recently. It didn’t pass, but it came very close and hopefully we’re going to have another one in the Senate coming up. So people should be contacting their members of Congress to say, support the War Powers Resolutions.
SCOTT HARRIS: Medea, I did want to ask you about this. Since the Iraq War and the incredible organizing that you and others did to put millions of people in the streets, not only in the U.S. but around the world to oppose that war against Iraq that George W. Bush launched in 2003, but since then, the U.S. peace movement has been quiet and not a lot of energy there. And as being certainly one of the key organizers of that movement, what do you foresee in terms of the possible response here of reviving the peace movement to protest and to do all they can to prevent a war with Venezuela?
MEDEA BENJAMIN: Well, first, let me say that there has been a huge peace movement when it comes to Palestine and that is enormous. I mean, you can’t go to any place around the country without finding groups that have organized around the Palestinian issue. And we didn’t have a peace movement around Ukraine because there are such different opinions about that one and the U.S. is indirectly involved, not directly involved. And now when it comes to Venezuela, I think we have to almost build from scratch because those opinion polls that are on our side don’t translate into activism. And so far when we’ve called protests, there have been lots of them in many different cities, but small in numbers. So I think we have to increase that tremendously. We see that there’s a lot of support for those of us who are the activists, but in terms of getting people out, I don’t know.
We are building constantly and we’ll be calling more demonstrations as we move forward and I hope we are able to revive a peace movement. It’s tough when there’s so much anti-government, anti-Venezuelan government information out there and there are legitimate reasons to not be supporting Maduro, but that’s not what the issue is here. The issue is about U.S. intervention, self-determination. Is that going to be enough to get people out on the streets? Well, we shall see and we are certainly trying.
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