DC police arrested four members of the Embassy Protection Collective in the Venezuelan embassy today in Washington DC. Two of those arrested are members of my campaign team, Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese of Popular Resistance and the Maryland Green Party.
The Collective has been staying in the embassy since April 10 at the invitation of the elected Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro. Margaret and Kevin have been in the embassy the whole time.
They were protecting the embassy from takeover by the forces of the self-declared president, Juan Guaidó, who has called for the Venezuelan military to stage a coup on his behalf. The Trump administration, with the support of Democratic congressional leaders, has recognized Guaidó as Venezuela’s ruler.
The arrests of Margaret and Kevin and the other protectors violate the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. The US invoked this Convention when Iranian militants occupied the US embassy in Tehran in 1979. The International Court of Justice ruled in the favor of the US and ordered Iran to pay reparations.
But the US pulled out of the International Court of Justice in 1986. Last year Trump denounced the Vienna Convention. And now, the Trump administration has gotten the police of Democratic-controlled city of Washington DC, to arrest these activists in violation of international diplomatic law.
The arrests show that the US is a rogue state. Violating the diplomatic immunity of the Venezuelan embassy takes the US back before the 1200s, when Genghis Khan’s Eurasian empire brought the notion of inviolable diplomatic immunity to a West that was riddled at the time with endemic warfare and banditry among the feuding feudal fiefdoms. Trump—and his Republican and Democratic minions alike—have taken us back nearly a millennium to the Dark Ages.
The charges are more serious than simple trespassing. The Washington Post reports the charges are “interfering with the State Department’s protective functions.”
We will keep you posted on developments and how to support Margaret and Kevin
Update: video after their release
The necessity of resistance does not make a a Green a suitable choicecandidate for the Presidency. The unshakeable commitment to putting the Green Party on every State ballot, and the ability to do so, is the only valid basis of choice. When the time comes, every responsible Green will respect the partiy’s choice. Presence at protest is not a good criterion for choice, and that is because of its unreliability as a means of nonviolent resistance. It works like the camera. The Green Parties are seeking political power –not presidential power. If that search, if that commitment is blamed for a second term of Trump, so be it. The struggle will be more difficult, but the alternative for the future will flourish.
Hey Howie, thanks for calling out President Chump’s war criminal regime currently victimizing the Venezuelan people in order to steal their resources while demonizing them for choosing to be a socialist society: “Since taking office, Trump has repeatedly escalated the sanctions on Venezuela, cutting off U.S. credit to Venezuela, blocking oil sales to the United States, freezing eight billion of PDVSA/Citgo assets in the United States, urging allies to freeze Venezuelan bank accounts and gold reserves held abroad, and this week cutting off the Central Bank of Venezuela’s access to U.S. currency and international financial transactions. Acting like a U.S. colony, the United Kingdom’s Bank of England refused last month to return seven hundred million worth of gold used as collateral for a loan when Venezuela paid it off. Citibank is selling of $1.4 billion worth of Venezuelan gold that collateralized a loan that Venezuela defaulted on due to the economic blows and transaction complications imposed by sanctions. The U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund suspended Venezuela’s access to its four hundred million in Special Drawing Rights earlier this month. The sanctions are economic warfare against Venezuela whose economy is dependent on selling oil abroad for the foreign exchange needed to import most goods, notably food and medicine. Its economy was already reeling under the lower oil prices and declining oil production since before Obama started economic sanctions. Alfred de Zayas, the special rapporteur on Venezuela for the UN Human Rights Council, reported last September that sanctions are killing Venezuelans and likened them to a medieval siege. He recommended that the International Criminal Court investigate the sanctions against Venezuela as crimes against humanity.”
The heroic activists participating in the Embassy Protection Collective is exactly the type of attention-getting impact that my fellow Greens need to be more involved with because it elevates our superior platform while actively helping some of the poorest victims of our many illegal looting and pillaging campaigns especially since many of the so-called Democratic leaders in Congress (who won’t allow We The People to have a Real Democracy here in America) are now lining up to pledge allegiance to the Grandstanding Oily Parasites using another unwarranted invasion to perpetually propagate their sociopathic exploitations- in this case, the continual rape and plunder of the South American continent! However, our War Criminal Presidents using their Clandestine Invading Assassins to destabilize Venezuela in three separate coup attempts (1958, 2002 & 2018) already is just a microcosm of what our evil empire has done to every country in South America and almost every country in Central America; only Costa Rica escaping subjugation by disbanding their army which negated our chief tactic of insidious infiltration for mass-chaos caused by our corporatized process of exploitative plundering.
Unfortunately, even the most massive protests in the United States usually work only as short-term methods of inspiration for activism because our Fascist Rulers govern us without much interference and the majority of American voters seem to be totally blind to the global misery that our evil foreign policies have caused in order to generate our comparatively lavish lifestyles so I suggest that the Resistance creates an entirely revealing Political Arts District in Los Angeles (for starters) which details in murals the many war crimes suffered by all the different peoples of the Third World who have been defiled by corporate power for profit. The real existential threat to our collective safety is not Venezuela (or any other impoverished country); it is the Blood-Money Bandits using their fascist-tool sell-outs (purchased in all three branches of American government) to suck dry the resources of the Third World- THE REAL WORLD WAR THREE!!!