Adopted as part of regime-change operation, sanctions have killed at least 40,000 Venezuelans. Economic coercive measures, commonly known as economic sanctions, are a means of coercive pressure through disruption of trade relations and economic isolation. The use of sanctions under international law is governed chiefly by Chapter VII of the...
While sitting in my apartment in Caracas, Venezuela, and reading the online edition of Time magazine (5/19/16), I noticed a report asserting that there was not even something as basic as aspirin to be found anywhere in Venezuela: “Basic medicines like aspirin are nowhere to be found.” I walked out of the...
On October 16, 2025, Donald Trump’s second term ignited a reckless campaign against Venezuela, greenlighting covert CIA operations, deploying 4,000 Marines and F-35 jets to the Caribbean, and launching strikes on Venezuelan vessels that have killed more than 27 people—all framed as a fight against drugs and migration. This is no noble mission:...
Since September 2, 2025, the United States has bombed thirteen boats, two within twenty-four hours, killing a total of sixty-one people in international waters, under the unproven charge that the boats were carrying drugs headed for the U.S. What is amazing in this unprecedented affair is that the expected public...
On October 13th, Venezuela’s representative to the UN Samuel Moncada denounced plotting by the United States and Colombia against Venezuela’s democratically elected government at the UN Security Council. In an eight-page letter to Security Council President Martin Kimani, Moncada detailed “bellicose” statements by Colombian President Iván Duque and by U.S. Navy Admiral...
The United States government is inserting itself into a border dispute between Venezuela and Guyana on behalf of ExxonMobil. The oil-rich Essequibo region has the world’s biggest reserves per capita of crude oil and in May of this year, a “significant discovery” by ExxonMobil was announced in the area’s 6.6-million acre Staborek Block oil field...
The pre-trial conference of kidnapped and incarcerated Venezuelan political prisoners, President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores, was held on March 26 at the Southern District of New York court in Lower Manhattan. The defendants were taken hostage in an early morning raid on January 3 by the U.S....
Right-wing lobbies and ideological zealotry continue to prevent initiation of rational policy toward Venezuela On June 2, Saudi-led OPEC and its allies announced it will accelerate oil production in July and August, as the cartel’s key player, Saudi Arabia, agreed to U.S. pleadings that it take action to cool crude...
They ask if our own nation was not using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without...
At the final Cabinet meeting of 2025, Donald Trump said that the strikes on fishing boats in the Caribbean would continue, and that “We're going to start doing those strikes on land, too”—signaling that a ground invasion of Venezuela and possibly other countries may be imminent...