Joint statement from Black Alliance for Peace and United National Anti-War Coalition on Venezuela

The United States has been conducting a brutal, 20-year-long campaign of destabilization against Venezuela in an attempt to cause “regime change” in that country.  This has taken the form of economic sabotage and financial manipulation as well as support for the mobilization of right-wing forces in increasingly violent demonstrations. This is not a recent policy but one that has also been carried out under the Obama and Bush administrations as well as the present Trump administration.  In 2002, right-wing forces inside Venezuela attempted a coup against then-President Hugo Chavez. Many sources have confirmed that the U.S. gave the go-ahead to the opposition to orchestrate the coup and promised support.  Soon after the coup, the people of Venezuela turned out in the…

Lynne Stewart, the militant lawyer who went up against U.S. state power to defend African, Arab and other oppressed nation activists, died March 7 in New York. Stewart was 77 and is survived by her husband, Ralph Poynter, a member of the Black is Back Coalition. After serving 4 years of a 10-year sentence as a political prisoner, Stewart was released from prison in December 2013 as a result of popular pressure on the government in the face of breast cancer that was terminal. Stewart represented Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman after he was labeled a terrorist by the FBI which claimed Rahman issued “a fatwa that encouraged acts of violence against US civilian targets”, particularly in the New York and New Jersey…