Our Venezuelan Embassy protest aims to push peace and diplomacy
over war
A Secret Service officer watches as supporters of Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó block Code Pink activists from entering the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington on May 2. (Shawn Thew/EPA-EFE)
By Medea Benjamin
May
7 at 5:42 PM
Medea Benjamin is co-director of Code Pink and
a member of the Embassy Protection Collective.
Memories from Iraq keep running over and over in
my mind as I and a group of peace
activists continue to struggle to remain in the Embassy of Venezuela here
in Washington, determined to prevent another reckless war.
My colleague Jodie Evans and I were in Baghdad in
February 2003, when the feared Saddam Hussein was still in power. Some of our
Iraqi friends hated him so much that they prayed for an U.S. invasion. A year
later, when chaos reigned and so many of their loved ones had died, they cursed
the American invaders and rued the day they had welcomed them.
Fast-forward 16 years. Many Venezuelans are
anxious to get rid of Nicolás Maduro. Disheartened by the failure of opposition
leader Juan Guaidó to spark an uprising, some are looking at U.S. intervention
as the answer. Trump’s war hawks, including national security adviser John
Bolton, U.S. Special Representative for Venezuela Elliott Abrams and Vice
President Pence, seem only too
eager to oblige. I cringe at the thought of my government, once
again, invading another country and turning a bad situation into a catastrophic
one. U.S. intervention in Venezuela could lead to a civil war that would plague
Venezuela for decades and affect the entire region.
Many scenarios could ignite a war with Venezuela,
including a fight over embassies. The United States and Venezuela broke
diplomatic ties on Jan. 23, when Guaidó declared
himself interim president and the Trump administration
immediately recognized him. Diplomats in both capitals vacated their embassies,
leaving skeletal staff but keeping the buildings intact. Then on March 18,
Guaidó’s representatives in the United States escalated the tensions by
appropriating Venezuela’s military attaché building in Washington and the
consulate in New York City, while announcing plans to take over the D.C.
embassy.
A takeover would be symbolic, since Guaidó’s
appointees cannot fulfill diplomatic or consular activities without holding
power in Venezuela, but it would still be illegal. According to Article 22 of
the 1961 Vienna
Convention on Diplomatic Relations, diplomatic premises are
inviolable and the receiving state must protect the premises against any
"intrusion or damage and … prevent any disturbance of the peace of the
mission or impairment of its dignity."
It would also be provocative because the
Maduro government would likely reciprocate by taking over the U.S. Embassy in
Caracas. This could be just the pretext that this administration is looking for
to begin military aggression.
Determined to stop this nightmare, a group of
peace activists formed the Embassy Protection Collective. We have various
opinions about the Maduro government —some pro, some neutral, some skeptical —
but we are all determined to stop U.S. intervention. With the permission of the
Venezuelan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on April 10 we moved into the
four-story embassy in the Georgetown neighborhood. For weeks we went in and out
of the building freely, staying overnight on sofas and floors to maintain our
presence. Except for banners we posted outside saying things such as “No Coup,
Peace With Venezuela” and “No War for Oil,” our vigil was low-key and barely
noticed by the public.
All this changed on April 30, when a group of
Guaidó supporters — almost coinciding with his call for an uprising inside
Venezuela — descended on the embassy, determined to oust us and seize the
building. They came banging pots and pans, blaring piercing sirens, horns and
megaphones. They have used lasers to flash into our eyes at night while banging
menacingly on the doors with sledgehammers. They plastered their own signs all
over the building.
Most concerning, they have surrounded the embassy
with tents and canopies to block every entrance, refusing to allow food or
medicine to the activists inside, with the objective of starving us out. When
we tried to devise ways to get food (such as a pulley to the second-floor
window), they attacked us, screaming, “No food, no water, get out of our
embassy.”
Shockingly, this atmosphere of hate and
intimidation and the threat against diplomatic property belonging to the Maduro
government are all taking place under the watchful eyes of dozens of agents
from the Secret Service, the agency tasked with guarding embassies. If you call
the Secret Service to complain, officers will read you a statement saying that
no individuals, medicine or food have been prevented from entering the
building, but this is not true. Even packages sent through the U.S. Postal
Service are not allowed in. It is appalling that the Secret Service is allowing
mob rule to take over in the heart of Washington.
Our people inside, who are subsisting without
sufficient supplies and sleeping at night with a terrible sense of insecurity,
are determined to hold on until a diplomatic agreement is reached. Indeed, if
the two countries can come to an agreement about their embassies, that could be
the beginning of talks that might roll back the Trump administration’s reckless
policy of gross interference in Venezuela’s internal affairs.
Once an agreement about the embassies is reached,
our group will happily leave the premises, satisfied because we can go back to
our lives but also because Trump’s war hawks will have one less excuse to drag
our nation into another war.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
