Category Archives: Peace

U.S. approach to Venezuela is “imperial madness”

by Jim Hodgson

The claim by U.S. President Donald Trump that his forces attacked “a big facility” in Venezuela left me wondering if he was (again) flat-out lying, having another cognition meltdown, or maybe speaking some sort of truth.

In a radio interview Dec. 26, Trump said: “We just knocked out – I don’t know if you read or you saw – they have a big plant or big facility where they send the, you know, where the ships come from. Two nights ago, we knocked that out. So we hit them very hard.”

In Venezuela, officials reacted hesitantly. It turns out there was a fire earlier that day at a chemical warehouse run by a company called Primazol in Maracaibo, a major hub for the export of petroleum. But in Venezuela, the fire was treated as a minor event, and the company issued a statement rejecting “the versions circulating on social media,” stating that they “have no relation to the incident and it does not correspond to official or verified information.”

Headline and photo from TeleSur English site.

The Primazol plant is located five km from the sea, making it doubtful that there was any facility there from which boats carrying drugs could depart, much less a “dock,” as Trump claimed in a second set of comments at Mar-a-Lago Dec. 29. (“There was a major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs.”)

Today’s New York Times morning newsletter quotes U.S. officials who may be trying to provide cover for their boss or offering a semi-truthful account:

A port strike

The C.I.A. [Central Intelligence Agency] conducted a drone strike on a port facility in Venezuela last week, people briefed on the operation said. The strike was on a dock where U.S. officials believe a Venezuelan gang was storing narcotics, and it did not kill anyone, they said. The strike is the first known American operation inside Venezuela.

This Times story offers new details on the strike, which President Trump has already discussed openly, despite the secrecy that typically surrounds C.I.A. operations. 

The Trump administration has focused on three goals — to limit Nicolás Maduro’s power, to use military force against drug cartels and to secure access to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves for U.S. companies.

“We’ve had 27 weeks of imperial madness”

Venezuelan Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello denounced the silence of the international community, particularly the United Nations (UN) and other multilateral organizations, regarding the months-long offensive waged against his country by the United States government.

“We’ve had 27 weeks of imperial madness… harassment, threats, attacks, persecution, theft, piracy, murder, and the world – I mean the world, that UN and its cronies – is silent; nobody says a word,” he stated during the activation of a new security program in Aragua state. 

He added that “imperialism, those who think they own the world,” not only intend to steal Venezuela’s natural resources, but “want to go further” and subjugate the Venezuelan people because “they don’t like dignified peoples who demand respect and respect themselves.”

Cabello, who highlighted the character of the Venezuelan people in the face of years of attacks of various kinds, offered assurance: “They are not going to ruin our Christmas or New Year, they cannot because of how many things we have endured, how many things they have tried against this people.”

On Monday afternoon, the U.S. Southern Command announced that it had struck another small boat in the eastern Pacific, killing two more men. The new strike means that the U.S. military has killed more than 100 individuals in an operation widely condemned as illegal.

Mexico’s president rejects interventions, call for greater UN leadership

Speaking at a news conference early on Dec. 30, President Claudia Sheinbaum said that the UN should play a more prominent role in these cases.

“What we have to say is that we do not agree with interventions, especially military ones. That is enshrined in our country’s constitution, and that is what we will continue to defend,” she said in response to a question about the case.

When asked if there should be a call in the region to support Venezuela, she replied, “Yes, and as we have said, the United Nations must take a more prominent role in these cases.”

Mexico and other countries backed Venezuela in a Dec. 23 meeting of the UN Security Council, but the United States used its veto power to block a Venezuelan resolution from even coming to a vote. 

Diverse parts of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) are responding to the situations facing Venezuela in different ways. 

On Dec. 24, several UN experts (“special rapporteurs”) denounced the partial maritime blockade imposed by the United States on Venezuela as violating fundamental rules of international law. The same day, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yván Gil welcomed the statement: “The truth about Venezuela is breaking through around the world.”

Meanwhile, the OHCHR has announced a new “fact-finding” mission to Venezuela that will include Alex Neve, former secretary general of Amnesty International Canada.

And Canada?

Silence from Ottawa regarding U.S. aggression towards Venezuela has been resounding – even in the face of reports that Canada helps the United States in those boat attacks. It’s clear that the government of Prime Minister Mark Carney is choosing its words carefully in the face of U.S. threats to Canada’s sovereignty.

But Canada should at least uphold the 2014 declaration by Latin America and Caribbean countries that their region is a “zone of peace,” support calls for UN leadership in peace-making, and reject the new U.S. National Security Strategy. 

“Security for whom?” asks KAIROS after Canada cuts foreign aid

by Jim Hodgson

Canada’s newest cuts to foreign aid spending follow cuts by other wealthy countries (most notably the elimination earlier this year of the U.S. Agency for International Development). Beyond immediate impacts, these cuts point to a reshaping of sixty years of international cooperation for development.

Over the next four years, Canada will chop $2.7 billion from its aid budget. At the same time, at the behest of the Trump regime next door, it will increase military spending with $81.8 billion over five years.

In June, Canada announced its commitment to increase military spending: CodePink, Development and Peace, and CBC headlines.

Few analysts bring together the issues of development assistance, militarism and climate justice the way that the ecumenical coalition KAIROS Canada has in its statement on the budget:

Canada needs to decide what role it wants to play in the world. These issues are inseparable: climate justice, Indigenous sovereignty, migrant justice, gender equality and peacebuilding rise or fall together — and Canada’s future depends on advancing them as one interconnected project of justice. 

KAIROS added that it is concerned by the prospect of a scaled-up military-industrial complex in Canada. “Even today, arms components made in Canada are used against civilians in Gaza and other conflict zones due to loopholes that allow them to flow indirectly through allies, helping to further entrench global insecurity.” (Canadian-built military surveillance and targeting equipment was used in at least two of the U.S. attacks on small ships in the Caribbean Sea, as reported recently by another Canadian ecumenical coalition, Project Ploughshares.)

KAIROS said the government “could have introduced a wealth tax to tackle the historic wealth gap and fund real climate action. It could have ended subsidies for fossil fuel corporations. Instead, it cut public services, forcing job losses that fall hardest on women, Indigenous Peoples and racialized communities,” as the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives warns.

While there are no actual projections yet of where the foreign aid cuts will hit, the budget statement cites Canada’s spending on global health programs as an example, saying this has “grown disproportionately” in comparison to other countries.

“Any reductions to Canada’s global health investments will have devastating consequences for women and children around the world, while threatening the health, security and prosperity of Canadians,” said Charmaine Crockett of the Canadian Partnership for Women and Children’s Health (CanWaCH) in a joint statement with Cooperation Canada. “Canada’s decades of leadership in global health have always been about investing in a safer, more equitable world, because we know that when we turn our back on the world’s most marginalized people, we all suffer.”

The cut to Canadian aid, elimination of USAID, and reduced spending announced by Britain, Germany, Netherlands and others means that in total, G7 countries are trimming their aid budgets by nearly one-third, the steepest reduction since 1960, according to the Globe and Mail. 

Several Canadian organizations (350.org Canada, World Beyond War, Migrant Rights Network, Council of Canadians, and the Canadian Association of Professional Employees) have come together in a letter-writing campaign to opposition leaders to encourage them to demand change before Parliament votes again on the budget.

Where to now with international development?

I want to share links to some articles that delve more deeply into the significance of what may become a shift away from a model in which rich countries of the Global North “donated” funds to impoverished countries of the Global South. The model has always been criticized as it promotes dependence and blocks systemic change. This is “big picture” stuff, very distant from issues of how to support refugees at border posts or funding for cooperative farming in Central America. (I am, as always, grateful to Brian Murphy for sharing these and other articles. You can follow him on Bluesky @murphyslog.bsky.social.)

First, “The end of the global aid industry,” by Zainab Usman. Usman proposes a focus on industrialization – what has worked for China and South Korea and is unfolding now in Vietnam and Thailand. Usman writes:

Part of the problem with the aid industry is that its benefits have been spread too thinly across a multitude of domains and not focused enough on productivity-enhancing sectors. To this end, advocates of global development should focus on enabling poorer countries to access cheap development financing for targeted investments in sectors that connect people, such as electricity, telecommunications, and mass transit. 

Second, “The geopolitics of international development (after foreign aid),” by Ken Opalo in An Africanist Perspective. Opalo examines a series of essays in Foreign Policy magazine’s Fall 2025 issue that all deal with development issues. Opalo sets his description of the decline of the foreign aid model in the context of a rising multipolarity that is matched by the “ongoing general decline of the authority and influence of Western states.”  

There’s no denying that the financial, intellectual, and institutional hegemony of Western countries significantly shaped development practice over the last 60 years. This era had both good and bad elements. The good elements included efforts to incentivize the modernization of economic management and policymaking in low-income countries (work that’s far from finished, and which has yielded some good results); while the bad elements included the fostering of aid dependence, cyclical faddism, reflexive policy extraversion, lack of elite ambition, and implicit support for a hierarchical world order that permanently placed low-income countries at the bottom of the global totem pole.

AIDS prevention education in decades past: Haiti in 1984 (top); Atlantic coast of Nicaragua in 2007 (below). Jim Hodgson photos.

Third, “Three ways to help the developing world survive the end of aid,” by Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of UNAIDS, in The Guardian. Byanyima reminds us that developing countries are still drowning in debt and facing interest rates up to 12 times higher than wealthy countries. “Low- and middle-income countries now pay $4 to the richest in the global north for every $1 they receive in aid. Thirty-four of Africa’s 54 countries spend more on debt than on healthcare.” She adds:

  • Governments must relieve the “chokehold of sovereign debt.”
  • The richest need to pay their fair share: the wealth of billionaires soared by $2 trillion in 2024, but they paid an effective tax rate of just 0.3 per cent.
  • Governments need to treat lifesaving medicines not as commodities, but as global public goods. “This has been one of the great successes of the HIV response” (at least over the past 20 years, though not before—and threatened again with loss of U.S. funding this year).

One Nobel winner to another: Why did you ask U.S. to invade Venezuela?

by Jim Hodgson

Perhaps I should be grateful to the Norwegian Nobel Committee for again putting Venezuela into the headlines with its absurd award of the Nobel Peace Prize to María Corina Machado, a woman who has never rejected violence as she sought the overthrow of successive Venezuelan governments since 1998. 

The prize came as the United States stepped up its attacks on fishing boats it alleged (without evidence) were carrying drugs from the Venezuelan coast to the United States. It came as the Trump administration ended a “quiet diplomacy” effort with President Nicolás Maduro that was led by Richard Grenell – a victory for hard-liners like Secretary of State Marco Rubio. If the United States opts for war. In the words of James B. Greenberg: “it will not be because diplomacy failed. It will be because war itself is the preferred instrument.”

And today, the New York Times reports that Trump has authorized “covert CIA action” in Venezuela. U.S. officials “have been clear, privately, that the end goal is to drive Mr. Maduro from power.” (That, by the way, is not news: it’s been the goal all along.)

I was astonished by the award, but then also by the responses. 

Most “progressive” U.S. commentators, including historian Heather Cox Richardson, celebrated Machado simply because she was not Donald Trump. Likewise Occupy Democrats, The Other 98%, and U.S. Democratic Socialists: one of them (I forget which) erred in saying she was Colombian. 

Even World Council of Churches and Pax Christi congratulated her. Made me wonder who they talk with in Latin America, where the reaction is strongly against Machado. Then I welcomed the flow of criticism in the threads that followed the WCC and Pax Christi Facebook posts. During the weekend, the WCC amended its message, and Pax Christi shared a new message (above). 

In the United States, author Greg Grandin told Democracy Now that the Nobel prize was the “opposite of peace.” 

But still: how can the Nobel committee see her together with previous Latin American winners like Rigoberta Menchu and Adolfo Pérez Esquivel who allied themselves persistently with the social movements of the poor, the workers, the Indigenous people, women?

I met Pérez Esquivel at least twice: once in Toronto and again in Buenos Aires (above left) at an economic alternatives conference in 2003. Right: the open letter to Machado.

From one Nobel peace prize winner to another

Let’s hear from Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Nobel peace prize winner in 1980 for his non-violent defense of democracy and human rights in the face of Latin America’s military dictatorships, especially the regime of Jorge Rafael Videla in Argentina. He published an open letter to Machado on Oct. 13 in the Buenos Aires daily, Página 12. The text is partly translated to English here, source of the following excerpts:

“In 1980, the Nobel Committee granted me the Nobel Peace Prize; 45 years have passed and we continue serving the poorest, alongside Latin American peoples. I accepted that high distinction in their name — not for the prize itself, but for the commitment to shared struggles and hopes to build a new dawn. Peace is built day by day, and we must be coherent between what we say and what we do,” he asserted.

“At 94, I am still a learner of life, and your social and political stance worries me. So I am sending you these reflections,” he emphasized.

In the letter, he argued that the Venezuelan government, led by President Nicolás Maduro, “is a democracy with lights and shadows,” and he underscored the role of former president Hugo Chávez, who, he said, set a path of freedom and sovereignty for the people and fought for continental unity.

“It was an awakening of the Patria Grande,“ he emphasized.

At the same time, he asserted that the United States has not only “attacked” Venezuela but also refuses to allow any country in the region to step outside its orbit and colonial dependence, treating Latin America as its “backyard.” He also highlighted the more than 60-year blockade against Cuba, which he called an attack on the freedom and rights of peoples.

In one of the letter’s toughest passages addressed to Machado, he rebuked her for clinging to Washington even as it confronts her country.

“I am surprised by how tightly you cling to the United States: you should know it has no allies and no friends — only interests. The dictatorships imposed in Latin America were instruments of its drive for domination, and they destroyed lives and the social, cultural and political organization of peoples who fight for freedom and self-determination. Our peoples resist and struggle for the right to be free and sovereign, not a colony of the United States,” he wrote.

On that point, he said the government of Nicolás Maduro «lives under threat» from Washington and from the “blockade,” with U.S. naval forces in the Caribbean and «the danger of an invasion of your country».

“You have not said a word, or you support the interference of the great power against Venezuela. The Venezuelan people are ready to confront the threat,” he warned.

He also criticized that, after receiving the prize, the far-right leader dedicated it to U.S. President Donald Trump. “Corina, I ask you: why did you call on the United States to invade Venezuela?”

“Upon the announcement that you were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, you dedicated it to Trump — an aggressor against your country — who lies and accuses Venezuela of being a narco-state,” Pérez Esquivel said. He compared that accusation to George W. Bush’s false claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, used as a pretext for an invasion that looted that nation and caused “thousands of victims.”

“It troubles me that you did not dedicate the Nobel to your people but to Venezuela’s aggressor. I believe, Corina, that you must analyze and understand where you stand,” the Argentine insisted, arguing that her posture makes her “another piece of U.S. colonialism.”

“You resort to the worst when you ask the United States to invade Venezuela,” he added.

Pérez Esquivel concluded: “Now you have the chance to work for your people and build peace — not provoke greater violence. One evil is not resolved with a greater evil; we would only have two evils and never a solution to the conflict. Open your mind and your heart to dialogue and to meeting your people; empty the jug of violence and build the peace and unity of your people so that the light of freedom and equality can enter.”