August 6, 2019, Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) condemns the Trump Administration’s’ economic embargo as a racist assault on the people of Venezuela that will be disproportionately borne by Black working class Venezuelans and campesinos in general. BAP calls on all progressive elements in the U.S. and around the world to oppose this dangerous escalation by the Trump administration along with support from Congress to impose a right-wing counterrevolutionary government on the people of that nation through state terror.

National BAP Coordinating Committee members Netfa Freeman and Vanessa Beck just returned from Venezuela as part of the Embassy Protectors delegation that spend 10 days in the country meeting with community leaders, social organizations and government officials, including a private meeting with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

Freeman and Beck are prepared to speak on behalf of BAP and report on the conditions that they observed in Venezuela. With the national conversation centered on Trump’s racist agenda encouraging white nationalist violence in the U.S., Vanessa Beck asserts that

“it is a contradictory position on the part of progressives in the U.S. and even the general public not to link Trump’s racism domestically with his foreign policies that clearly have no regard for the lives of people of color.”

BAP national organizer Ajamu Baraka, therefore, poses the question to progressive forces in the U.S. “How much more war, how much more death and destruction will you endure before you break with the capitalist duopoly of the U.S. and say no more war, no more subversion, no more killings in my name by a state that by every definition has become a rogue state and threat to global humanity?

Background on Embassy Protector Collective

For 37 days, members of the Embassy Protection Collective heroically refused to hand over the control of the Venezuelan Embassy, with the permission of the legitimate government of Venezuela, to a representative of the US-appointed, self-proclaimed “interim President” of Venezuela, Juan Guaidó.

The arrested Embassy Protectors are now facing trials on the trumped-up charge of “interfering with certain protective functions” of the Federal Government, a misdemeanor charge that carries a maximum of one-year imprisonment and $100,000 fine for each one of them.

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Featured image: Activists gather in front of the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, DC in March, 2019.