Trump pardons drug trafficker, declares war on Venezuela

Based on a talk given in Caracas, Venezuela, on Dec. 11 at the People’s Assembly for Peace and Sovereignty in Our Americas, organized by the Simón Bolívar Institute.

The execution of defenseless survivors in the water is a blatant war crime. This deliberate killing of shipwrecked people — and the killing of over 80 people assassinated by drone, since none of them were a result of an armed conflict — the killing of defenseless civilians is murder under U.S. law.

This disregard for stated law is not new, especially today. The illegal kidnapping of Venezuelan immigrants, treated worse than dogs, tortured, deported to El Salvador, is also not new and reflects the treatment in the U.S. against Black and Brown and Indigenous people, including the kidnappings of children, with the added insult and horror of child abuse, sometimes ending in death in the detention centers. All of this is continuing at this very minute. This is the so-called land of freedom and democracy in the USA.

On Nov. 18, six Democratic members of Congress — each with backgrounds in the military or intelligence agencies — released a video reminding U.S. troops of their duty to refuse illegal orders. That level of division in the ruling class does not usually happen. But their long-overdue sudden courage against Trump’s fascism does not represent a turn by the Democratic Party away from collaboration in genocide and past and present war crimes.

Where were those so-called democrats when the Israeli murder of Palestinians is on a scale that goes way beyond the killings of the most deranged serial killers, using U.S.-supplied bombs, dismembering and killing over 100,000, with over 2 million now facing starvation in Gaza? Where were they when the U.S. bombed Sudan, and now continue contributing to the starvation in Sudan? These are crimes that go beyond the killings by drug cartels and even the made-up drug cartels in the made-up stories of the fascist Trump administration.

Former U.S. presidents Obama and Biden, whose policies enabled Trump’s fascism, make the collaboration with genocide by both parties more clear – they are a continuing blueprint by imperialism against humanity in the so-called United States of America.

Extrajudicial killings at sea and threats against Venezuela’s sovereignty are not an example of strength; it’s a component of the decline of U.S. imperialism in the world economy. And history shows that imperialism becomes most dangerous in crisis, when its ability to manipulate through economic dominance is fading, which also explains the increasing threats against China, a country that challenges the U.S. domination of the global economy and allows the Global South less dependence on the IMF, while allowing the production of self-owned infrastructure with less debilitating debt.

The IMF – the International Monetary Fund — was created at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944. And the primary architects of Britain and the United States ensured that African, Latin American, and Asian self-determination would be denied in the service of the maximization of profits of the financial and industrial monopolies of the United States and Britain.

But the IMF sits in Washington, D.C., which guarantees that the U.S. Treasury exerts the greatest influence.

African scholar Walter Rodney exposed in 1968 the imperialist tactic of sabotaging development in his book “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.” He wrote: “In the first place. The wealth created by African labor, and from African resources, was grabbed by the capitalist countries in Europe and in the second place restrictions were placed upon African capacity to make the maximum use of its economic potential, which is what development is all about.”

So, the war on China is also not justified.

Trump justifies the war against Venezuela as the so-called fight against drug cartels that are killing people in the U.S. – but there is no evidence for Venezuela’s part in that, but plenty on the plate of the drug leader he just pardoned.

Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was extradited in 2022 and sentenced to 45 years in prison in 2024. At that time, U.S. authorities said he had played a central role in “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.” Yet on Dec. 1, Trump gave him a full pardon and released him from federal prison.

Why? Because Trump is more flagrant in ending any moves prioritizing humanity. By pardoning a convicted narco-state leader, Trump aimed to boost his right-wing National Party ally in Honduras’ election and undermine the government of President Xiomara Castro and former president Manuel Zelaya – mortal enemies because they represent the Global South’s push toward socialism.

Well, now Trump is, like Obama before him, trying to steal another election in Honduras. And in Venezuela, the U.S. government is putting its hopes on puppet María Machado, hoping for another attempt at a coup – a puppet who idolized the fascist Netanyahu’s holocaust in Gaza. The U.S. war on Venezuela is not about drugs – it’s a lie in service of imperialism.

Trump, convicted of 34 felonies, justifies the war on immigrants as targeting only criminals, but they are workers targeted – they are the people who are the means to the creation of wealth going to the capitalist class. And, while we are talking about exploitation and means to the imperialist wealth, we must mention the attempt to hide the exploitation and slavery of our oppressed nationalities and the general working class.

The U.S is built on cotton, and shows the need for racism – an ideological justification for kidnapping African people into slavery and justifying the following generations that continue to be exploited, villified and killed today by lack of health care and fascist repression by the state and police. That’s why we African Americans and Africans in general can always be counted on to be in solidarity with the people of Venezuela. There is history here. 

For example, Hugo Chávez said Haitian people were owed a debt since Alexandre Pétion, president of the Republic of Haiti, provided warriors and training to help ensure the success of Simón Bolívar’s liberation of Latin America. Pétion’s leadership and the Republic of Haiti were only possible after the successful slave revolution that led to Haitian independence in 1804. All peoples of the African diaspora have a history and ongoing mission of international solidarity and self-determination.

And while I’m on the subject of my ancestors – who were taken to the United States in chains from Africa – I want to talk more about cotton and its relation to the financial behemoths and even the IMF.

The great wealth that was used to catapult capitalism in the U.S. was from cotton, thanks to the invention of the cotton gin and other advances in technology that increased production by enslaved people. Annual cotton exports reached four million bales by 1860. The cotton traveled north and through New York, bound for England and other destinations – allowing the fortunes of the industries that facilitated that movement to grow exponentially. And who were those beneficiaries? The Vanderbilts’ railroads. J.P. Morgan’s banking empire and steel consolidation. The Manhattan Bank that became Chase Manhattan. And the capital for Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and the Mellon fortune. All thanks to African slaves who were producing for them and for the world – for free.

That’s where this insane wealth of the ruling class originated, and also some of the wealth of the English ruling class and even made the IMF possible. That is the origin of the strongest financial and industrial monopolies in the U.S., which created U.S. imperialism. Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. said the world’s most dangerous, violent entity was U.S. imperialism, and we also know that U.S. imperialism is the most anti-human entity this earth has seen. This threatens not only you, but the entire working class in the U.S.

Vladimir Lenin said the most likely origins of revolution in the imperialist stage of capitalism would come from the states we now call the Global South. That prediction was made because the conditions those nations are forced to endure, they are also forced to overcome.

The evidence of that is so clear in the Bolivarian Revolution we see here in the eyes of the people, we see the advancing empowerment of women, of all sexual orientations, of Indigenous and African people, of the poor, of the general working class, all of whom raised their power in Venezuela when the U.S. tried to orchestrate a coup against our beloved Hugo Chávez – and the power of the people is heard around the world today – inspiring a quickening pace toward socialism. That’s the inspiration that especially Venezuela and Cuba gave to us.

As revolutionary leaders from Vladimir Lenin to Amílcar Cabral to Mao to Frantz Fanon, to Clara Zetkin, Nelson and Winnie Mandela, to Fidel Castro and Assata Shakur, and Hugo Chávez and Simón Bolívar – as they all explained – and now the explanation is heard by President Maduro – that the role of the revolutionary is to expose the contradictions of the ruling class and unite a movement, not for capitalism, not for profits and exploitation – but for socialism – did I mention socialism?

And we must all continue to prepare for the rule of the agents of human progress – that is, our international working class.

La lucha continúa

WE – WILL – BE – VICTORIOUS