By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, February 20, 2026

I’m on a U.S. delegation to Venezuela. We arrived Friday.

Less than two months ago, the U.S. government bombed this place, sending missiles and a huge number of planes and helicopters into Caracas, and kidnapped the president and his wife. Ships and a submarine are still nearby. Every few days we read about the crew of another Venezuelan boat being murdered. A blockade is in place, as is one on Cuba. Yet attention passes on to newer catastrophes and threatened armageddons. The suffering remains, the danger of a new escalation, the poverty and hunger, the deprivation of basic human needs — all remain, even as the Trump trainwreck teleports to Iran or Greenland, Ukraine or Canada, Minneapolis or Mexico.

The demand here is to free Nicolas Maduro and Cilia Flores. Not to like them or support them or believe them or give them any particular ranking, but merely to not kidnap them. How is this even controversial? Who is ready for a world in which governments kidnap each other’s presidents? This is an extremely reckless, dangerous, and criminal means of changing a government, and would be even if it served to replace a brutal dictatorship with a perfect democracy. In this case, it served purely to exercise influence over a government by a foreign government. The U.S. Congress may soon vote on whether or not to redundantly declare that attacking Iran would be illegal. That shouldn’t be needed, and I shouldn’t have to argue that it is illegal to kidnap people. The demand should be not only to undo the kidnapping but to apologize and make reparations for the killings.

We’ve had a big public discussion in the United States about the legality of saying that one should disobey an illegal order, and yet the illegal murdering of people in boats just goes on. That needs to stop immediately. Halt the murdering of people. That should be demand #1. Not just to act concerned by double-tap strikes but to stop blowing people up with one, two, or 100 missiles.

The curse of oil is not just killing us all globally, but imposing extra damage on those who live where the oil is found. For centuries, Latin America has been cursed with silver, gold, sugar, coffee. The North steals and profits, the South provides and pays. Venezuela has benefitted from oil — and that benefitting, not the oil, is bitterly resented in Washington. But Venezuela and almost everywhere else have been made to depend on massive endless burning of Satan’s mierda for its own basic survival, and to depend on corporate plunderers for the distribution of the deadly goo.

Venezuela can send neither oil nor food to Cuba. It sells its oil to two big trading companies — either of which may have sold oil to Israel, which would mean Venezuelan oil ending up in Israel but not exactly that Venezuela itself is selling anything to Israel.  In fact, the Venezuelan government gives every appearance of having changed nothing. Billboards demand the return of the president. A screen in Bolivar square counts the seconds since his kidnapping.

We went to a rally in Bolivar square. A delegation was there from Mexico as well. Venezuelans rally for others as well, including demanding an end to the genocide in Gaza. In the United States, people are still arguing over whether opposing a genocide in Gaza is some sort of bigotry, but much of the world is looking at Gaza as a threat. Do enough of what the empire demands, or be Gazaed. That’s a pretty serious threat.

Not long after we were warmly welcomed at the rally, we were invited to walk up the street to meet with the Minister of Foreign Affairs in his office. Having spent much of the day traveling through airports with all their endless “security” theater, it was interesting that there was none of that at the Minister’s office — just walk in and have a seat.

Yván Gil, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, remembered with appreciation those in Washington, D.C., who had protected the Venezuelan embassy building from being handed over to a would-be coup government. He spoke about peace and nonviolent activism, and about organizing a global movement of movements united around non-intervention. He and others we’ve spoken with were clear that their choice of nonviolence results not so much from recognizing its power as from recognizing a massive imbalance in military technology, as long as those attacking stay off the ground. Still, he pointed to a tradition of no foreign wars for Venezuela until now in the past two centuries.

I asked how we might build deeper solidarity, perhaps moving people in the U.S. to do more for peace abroad, and people in other countries to support the U.S. public against the assaults of ICE. People in the United States are never asked before the U.S. government lauches a new disaster, but neither do we do enough to stop them.

Veterans For Peace promotes this slogan: Peace At Home And Abroad!

While I want reparations, disarmament, impeachments, and support for the rule of law, the demands that the Venezuelan government makes of the U.S. government seem small indeed, things like recognition and reopening an embassy in Washington.

If you’re going to do business with a government and declare it to be doing a great job, why not let it have an embassy to facilitate a little more talking and a little less insane violence going forward? Is that too much to ask?

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