Last Saturday morning, US president Donald Trump announced on his Truth Social platform that he was closing down the airspace ‘above and surrounding Venezuela’ in an escalation of his war drive to effect regime change and seize control of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves.
In a statement on Saturday afternoon, the Venezuelan Ministry of Foreign Affairs denounced Trump’s statement as amounting to a ‘colonialist threat’ and accused Trump of threatening ‘the sovereignty of the national airspace … and the full sovereignty of the Venezuelan state.’
The statement added that Trump’s words were part of a ‘permanent policy of aggression against our country’ that breached international law and the UN Charter.
Saturday’s proclamation follows US imperialism’s build-up of the largest military deployment to the region in decades, including sending the USS Gerald R Ford, America’s most advanced aircraft carrier, dozens of aircraft and thousands of military personnel to the Caribbean Sea.
Last week Trump threatened to ramp up attacks on Venezuela, threatening that US ‘actions’ would soon be moved from sea to land.
For two months the Trump administration has launched attacks against Venezuela and its president Nicolas Maduro under the banner of war against ‘narco-terrorism’ claiming, without providing a shred of evidence, that Maduro is head of a drug cartel responsible for flooding the US with the deadly drug fentanyl.
In fact, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in the US, along with every other expert on the scourge of fentanyl in America, none of it comes from or via Venezuela.
This hasn’t stopped Trump’s administration from targeting small boats in international waters killing around 83 people in air strikes since early September excusing their extra judicial murder on the grounds that these were smuggling drugs, again without bothering to provide any evidence.
These missile attacks on small boats caused a political eruption on Friday when the Washington Post paper reported that US defence secretary Pete Hegseth had ordered a second strike on two survivors of the first strike who were clinging to the wreckage.
According to one person involved, the verbal order from Hegseth was ‘to kill everybody’, a move that amounts to a war crime because individuals who are shipwrecked have protected status under the law.
Hegseth has denied this, and the White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt on Monday insisted Admiral Frank Bailey gave the order. She claimed the attack was in the ‘self-defence’ of the US.
In the same week that Trump was threatening the ground invasion of Venezuela, and the illegal killing of 83 people on the grounds of a war on ‘narco-terrorism’, he was pledging to grant a ‘full and complete pardon’ for former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez.
Hernandez was convicted last year by a US Federal Court for conspiring to import over 400 tons of cocaine into the US and sentenced to 45 years in jail.
Behind the mountain of lies used by Trump and his administration is the simple truth that the real intention behind the military campaign is to grab the largest oil reserves in the world.
This was revealed by the US Republican Congresswomen for Florida, Maria Salazar, who said last week: ‘Venezuela for the American companies will be a field day because it will be more than a trillion dollars in economic activity.’
Imperialism is driven by the world crisis of capitalism to attempt to seize Venezuela’s vast oil reserves for exploitation by any means.
Having failed in its coup attempts and trying to bring the Venezuelan people to their knees by imposing vicious sanctions, an increasingly desperate US imperialism is on the verge of a military intervention to secure domination.
The working class in the US, Britain and across the world must defend Venezuela from imperialist war by putting an end to imperialism through the victory of the world socialist revolution.
Now is the time to build sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to organise the working class to end imperialist wars forever by consigning capitalism to the dustbin of history.
This is the way forward.
