The mediocre one and María Machado
The Cayapo
November 26, 2025 , 2:01 pm
All wealth, both that which founded human capitalism and that which is currently produced and accumulated, has its origin in theft (Photo: El Cayapo)
When slavery is imposed, nothing can shame us; shame is when, knowing it, we continue to accept it or wish to be the perpetrators.
When a culture deteriorates, anything, no matter how improbable, can happen. Even in the most enlightened times of the elites, imagination has never surpassed reality. But, despite the high and volatile mediocrity existing in the political, intellectual, and cultural world, it seemed unbelievable that a person could stoop to the ultimate plagiarism, as is the case with María and her manifesto of the enslaving fathers of the United States, plagiarized with artificial intelligence. But that's not all—as the propaganda says—what is astonishing, unbelievable, unprecedented, is how amazed her followers, fanatics, influencers, commentators, analysts, sages, and academics were, applauding and cheering the plagiarized piece in unison. A greater degree of terminal illness is impossible.
It's all over, the suspicion is confirmed: a thug and con artist who sells bottle caps on street corners, directed by self-important individuals, governs the United States; three drug-addicted gang members and two prostitutes control the destinies of Europe; and the rest kneel before them, claiming to be presidents of the mines they rule through fraud, drug trafficking, and prostitution. And those who still cling to a semblance of ethics and dignity are viciously attacked by self-important gang members in their armed clique.
This is not a coincidence or an accident; it is the evolution of a culture that was once luminous and ended in the most abject mediocrity.
This culture of the businessman, politician, artist, professional, religious figure, social communicator or journalist, athlete, all mediocre, damages life to satisfy their mediocre whims; they live by discourse and not by deeds; as long as it satisfies their desires for accumulation and compulsive consumption, the mediocre do not care about the problems they generate, because they are incapable of creating solutions.
Thought dries up, and mediocrity takes hold, enveloping all elites with a single idea: to cling to power regardless of the consequences. They shout at the top of their lungs that everything must belong to them. The businesspeople who were once captains of corporations, now devoid of ideas, are nothing more than common swindlers, mere mediocre entrepreneurs incapable of making anything evolve—a situation that applies to all other spheres of social and cultural activity.
Since mediocre people don't create ideas, but only parrot slogans, they are believers, conformists. The mediocre person believes they are superior, believes they have rights, believes there is democracy for them, believes they should be protected because they are human, believes in God, magic, good, evil, witchcraft, science, who moved my cheese ; they are, in short, a fool, happy as long as they consume. The mediocre person doesn't know why they should govern or lead, they only do it to stay in power, they use all their intelligence to sustain themselves and maintain power, their existence has no other reason for being.
Mediocre people rule the world, they accumulate possessions, they don't think. This is the story of the mediocre: the mediocre follow the mediocre, they don't create, they believe; they don't generate, they are always consuming, and their greatest desire in the world is to be left alone consuming, without anyone bothering them.
The mediocre person is a compulsive addict; a mediocre ruler hands over the position to an even more mediocre one to prevent them from being surpassed. They are very clever at creating organizational tangled webs, at controlling the power they claim to change, so that nothing really changes. The mediocre person believes in their own narrative because other mediocre people make it possible with their dogmas, applause, and actions.
Human capitalism did not have time to settle and reflect as such; it is a culture born from war, with the aggravating factor of its dazzling nature. It was fleeting, although widespread across the planet, which did not allow it to stop and look at itself and turn its achievements, after corrections and self-criticism, into future possibilities, since everything built and said constructed the superlative narrative of its superiority as a culture in the world, since cultures have existed, and only mediocrity remained as a corollary.
An example in Venezuela is this: every president who has governed has competed to dispute the position of the previous mediocre one, always in the belief that he is superior, because a characteristic of every mediocre person is his opinion that he is superior or better than others, until Chávez arrived and created a possibility of being a different country with its own roots, with an idea, with a sense of belonging, with an authentic identity possible to build and constitute ourselves as a people, who belong to each other with intimate ethics and dignity, in which lies what we do.
But where did this mud come from?
The spoils of war have allowed for the creation of capitalism and, as a consequence, humanism—an unnatural, uprooted, criminal, plundering, vulgar, characterless culture, armed with fragments of invaded and looted cultures. In this culture, everything is obtained at the cost of life. Its success, whether as an idealized slave or as a master, is solitude as its reward. A breeding ground for mediocrity, which transcends the centuries.
Capitalism, the mode of sustaining humanism, has been successful in fulfilling the goals set by the bourgeois class. Never before has so much wealth been accumulated, never before has an owner enjoyed so much freedom, so much equality, without ignoring the ideological baggage we all carry.
The all-powerful religious monster, known in the West as Christianity, which ruled the West with an iron will and criminality, was replaced by an incipient idea, known centuries later as the powerful human-capitalism, which revolutionized the known world and turned it upside down, scandalizing what existed, which led people to the bonfire of fear, which enhanced hunger with abundance, which increased ignorance by eliminating thousands of cultures throughout the planet and imposing the same idea, in the name of enlightenment and wisdom, which murdered God without any mercy and exposed him to public scorn, subjecting him to the chains of capitalist production like any slave at its service.
But today, like all the deities and myths it shattered, that idea which once emerged bright amid the prolonged deterioration of Western obscurantism, rests in peace.
Humanism has never been or will ever be defeated; its apparatus of ideology, war, and propaganda is the most perfect ever created, to the point that the fevered minds of those who run the system have indulged in the luxury of inventing enemies such as terrorism, bombs of mass destruction, or narco-terrorism, which have never existed except as means of war, in order to continue existing.
Everything that has fought against it, in one way or another, has ended up being absorbed or becoming its partner. Although some have won battles against it, this system—now in marked decline—will withdraw from the world stage like an undefeated corpse, still attempting to frighten the unwary.
Millions of workers, fishermen, and peasants of all kinds have testified to this by dying in the wars and revolutions that have been forged against human capitalism; without understanding that it will die by its own means and contradictions.
Since the species will outlive it, we will have to ask ourselves: What do we replace it with?
Freedom, democracy, equality, fraternity, progress, and justice no longer inspire enthusiasm; everything now revolves around mediocrity, sustained by artificial intelligence. Intellectuals, artists, politicians, and other professionals only act on commission; none suffer or rejoice over an original idea, even if it's plagiarized. They are all preoccupied with polishing pamphlets that will guarantee them a plate of black beans or Lobster Thermidor, depending on whoever they're working for.
Everything has fallen into the hands of technology, military, pharmaceutical, and information corporations, dedicated to controlling natural resources and protecting wealth, thus guaranteeing the status quo. They promote ideas of eternity, absolute individual freedom, and self-mastery, without anyone noticing the chains that bind us like captive harnesses, guaranteeing the status quo.
This absence of a living idea takes us back to the origins, where fear, hunger, and ignorance resulted in this human-capitalist culture that dictates all the guidelines and leads us towards the perpetuation of the enslaved individual repeating himself in the inertia of death, without any possibility of evading that condition.
The desire to be a god has been fulfilled in the human-capitalist individual. Now dead as an idea, those who remain directing its repetition are mediocre beings incapable of generating new ideas. The force of habit sustains them every day, turning the same crank that guarantees their status as mediocre gods, following animal instincts, cloaked in ideological garb that justifies them. The rest is watching the corpse float by and remembering that it was once strong and beautiful.
Although subjected to the inertia of the mediocre leaders who govern the planet, devoid of any ideas to keep them awake at night, nature continues its course. Questions abound for any slave who dares to question life and offer alternative answers to what is happening—answers other than "let's reform," "let's change," "let's improve," "let's clean up," or "let's tidy up the system." Because that has already been done, and nothing has solved the problem of being slaves. The real issue is replacing the conditions that allow us to be enslaved.
Within human capitalism this is normal, but since the illusion does not take root in the slaves, we propose that we question ourselves and become a contradiction, from where ideas can arise that can replace the current system, where those illusions that keep people enslaved are not present.
We do not start from moral or ethical conditions that we slaves intimately possess, nor from manifest destiny or wisdom, but from the position we occupy in this mode of production, which must be replaced if we intend to change our condition; but if not, the complaint is useless: "a willing pain doesn't itch, and if it itches, it doesn't mortify."
The truth is that we have no rights, no one will save us, we will never change things, because they exist for the benefit of the owners, who need to keep us in the conditions we live in, so that they can be what they are.
Let us clarify: what we are saying is directed solely and exclusively to those slaves who truly wish to challenge and abandon human capitalism. The owners are not invited to these discussions, unless they go mad and want to relinquish their power; the other slaves who wish to cling to their illusions, utopias, and hopes that one day—or even tomorrow—they will be owners, brothers and sisters, don't worry, you are not invited either.
We simply want to state truths, such as the fact that Marx was never associated with anything to do with the left, as clearly stated in the Communist Manifesto written in 1848. First paragraph: "What opposition has not been accused of communism by its adversaries in power? What opposition, in turn, has not hurled the scathing epithet of communist at its adversaries of the right or of the left?"
Humanism wasn't conceived to ensure the well-being and harmony of humankind, but rather to justify the power of the individual as a substitute for God, based on free will, imposing the logic of "I think, therefore I am," "the end justifies the means," and "divide and conquer." Directing and creating everything in their own image and likeness; replacing religious reason based on a god who creates and governs nature. A magnificent source from which the mediocre will eternally drink.
That human-capitalist culture has definitively ground to a halt. All its movements are inertial; the root of thought that generated it has died; all its creativity is dedicated to production, excessive consumption, and its protection. Fattening the mediocrity that doesn't expect its share of the blame.
The human-capitalist concept is separate from nature; it thinks that transforming it is part of its rationality, that cultivating a field, building a city, or developing a vaccine is not "violence against nature" but acting in accordance with its rationality and creativity. And it even seems beautiful, but the problem is how and why, because it is not truly in anyone's rationality to change nature, but to use it for profit; it is about obtaining gain, about taking advantage of it to have power, which cannot be achieved without harming life, while mediocrity flourishes.
Sowing the land involves feeding armies, selling tools and machinery, buying and selling the produce, and ultimately, profiting by exploiting people; for this, nature must be owned. Building a city is about keeping buying and selling captive because it concentrates all resources in one place, because it allows investment in real estate, because it allows keeping everyone drugged, but also because the concentration of people, other animals, or crops in limited spaces causes us all to become pests, which allows the unnatural system to develop—even further—because poison must be used against cancer, stress, wounds, and diseases created in every aspect of the system's operation; but the worst part is that the mediocre need the mechanisms of war to keep it functioning.
So rationality is the hunger, fear, and ignorance that once instituted war and today has become the enemy of all living things. In these writings, we do not seek to glorify anyone, to assign them virtues they do not possess; we simply state that both the owner and his slaves share the same aspirations: to be rich and powerful so that they are respected and feared. There is only one small detail: both depend on the position they occupy in the mode of production.
That all wealth, both that which founded human capitalism and that which is currently produced and accumulated, has its origin in theft, as already expressed by Karl Marx and other authors. But for the owners, the justification for wealth, according to them, is the altruistic effort and dignity of the entrepreneurs who, to save humanity from slavery and plagues, founded science, human rights, creating value, freedom, equality, fraternity, justice, democracy, and progress, risking their money, their companies, their knowledge, their lives to establish well-being for millions. Of course, there is profit, but the ungrateful world must understand that, despite today's horrors, the world is more beautiful and richer; even the poor are richer, because wealth has freed them from misery. They no longer live in caves, now they live in ranches; they are no longer nomads or transhumant, now they are immigrants.
Those who founded the pillars of human capitalism taught us that, however strong the existing power, another idea can always be created to replace it. And they didn't just say it; they practiced it, creating the foundations of what exists today as power. However, knowing that nothing lasts forever, they declared that their idea, now physically and ideologically realized, was the end of history, that from then on everything would be the work of humanism, and that the only thing to do was to reform it while respecting the laws and rationality that govern it. Any other idea would be pernicious. It is no coincidence that communism was destroyed as an idea within people's bodies, with millions murdered across the globe and any attempt to establish or test it in the world viciously attacked.
The proposal of these writings has to do with the idea that life does not commit suicide, that we are in the midst of the maelstrom of the deterioration of a system whose tendency is to become a mess every day, dragging in its mush all the life that it can and will only grow as a dead mass satiated with sap, where the mediocre one thrives who, like Mary, repeats the pamphlet of the slave-owning parents.
https://misionverdad.com/chavismo/el-me ... ia-machado
Official shift in criminalization: from the Tren de Aragua to the Cartel of the Suns
November 25, 2025 , 2:08 pm .
he criminalization strategy seeks to use sanctions, blockades, and military threats to generate institutional and social fractures, thus replicating the "hybrid warfare" model perpetrated in other scenarios (Photo: AP Photo)
Last Monday, November 24, the Trump administration took an unprecedented step by designating the so-called "Cartel of the Suns" as a foreign terrorist organization, a category reserved for the most serious threats to U.S. national security
The decision opened the door to new tools of pressure against the Venezuelan government, although legal experts agree that it does not explicitly authorize the use of lethal force without additional authorization. The paradigmatic aspect of the announcement lies in the very construction of the object of the sanction: an entity that does not exist as a structured criminal organization, but rather as political rhetoric conveniently elevated to legal status.
The term "Cartel of the Suns" does not describe a traditional criminal organization with a chain of command, transnational infrastructure, and operational capacity comparable to Mexican or Colombian cartels. According to multiple analyses , it is a term the White House appropriated to refer to an alleged illicit network of national scope, whose leader is supposedly President Nicolás Maduro himself.
The expression actually emerged in the 1990s to designate specific cases of military corruption. In 1993, two generals of the National Guard (Ramón Guillén Dávila and Orlando Hernández Villegas) were accused of facilitating cocaine trafficking. The nickname, which alludes to the sun insignia on the military uniform, became established as a journalistic label for institutional corruption, not as the name of a cohesive group.
The qualitative leap occurred when that internal rhetoric was adopted by Washington. In March 2020, the Department of Justice filed formal charges against Maduro, the Vice President for Citizen Security, Justice and Peace, Diosdado Cabello, and the Minister of Defense, Vladimir Padrino López, framing them under the label of the "Cartel of the Suns."
In 2025, the rearticulation of this narrative coincided, first, with the invocation of the obsolete Foreign Enemies Act of 1798, an instrument that suspends due process to accelerate mass deportations and, recently, with an unprecedented military deployment in the Caribbean Sea.
The sequence reveals a pattern in which every time the "maximum pressure" strategy requires a discursive boost, the criminalizing specter of the Venezuelan state resurfaces with renewed vigor.
Tren de Aragua, rise and fall of a criminalizing excuse
The rise of the Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang from media obscurity to the status of a "global terrorist threat" is one of the most telling examples of enemy-making in the Trump era. Until 2022, the gang was virtually nonexistent in US headlines. Although the Insight Crime website — directly funded by the State Department—had been covering it since 2019, its presence in the American public debate was marginal until the current immigration and political climate made it convenient.
The turning point came in August 2023, when Jason Owens, then chief of the Border Patrol, posted on Twitter the first official mention of alleged TdA members attempting to enter the United States. The post was picked up by CNN, establishing the pattern that would dominate the following months: accusations based on suspicion, immediate media validation, and little to no forensic evidence.
In September 2023, Operation Liberation Cacique Guaicaipuro at the Tocorón prison—where the gang operated—generated massive simultaneous coverage in The Washington Post, The Economist, Insight Crime and the OCCRP, another US-funded investigative portal that specializes in Washington's geopolitical enemies.
The criminalization of immigration reached its peak in February 2024 with the murder of Laken Riley, a nursing student in Georgia. The accused, José Ibarra, is Venezuelan, and his brother Diego was linked to the TdA "based solely on tattoos," according to the Venezuelan Public Prosecutor's Office.
The pressure intensified. In July 2024, OFAC designated it a transnational criminal organization, and on January 20, in his first series of executive orders, Trump elevated it to the status of a global terrorist organization. The aforementioned murder became a legislative catalyst; on January 29, Trump signed the Laken Riley Act.
The criminalization mechanism has operated on three levels:
Media sensation : the gang went from being a local prison phenomenon to a "megaband" with a presence in 16 states, according to the New York Post in November 2024.
Political : Congressmen like María Elvira Salazar and Mario Díaz-Balart, with a strong influence from the Cuban-American lobby , framed Venezuelan migration as a "criminal invasion".
Military : The deployment of warships in the Caribbean was justified as an anti-drug response to target the TdA, although an expert like retired Colonel Mark Cancian, advisor to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, admitted that it was "a matter of political signaling", without authority for real interdiction operations.
The Venezuelan government effectively dismantled the organization. In September 2023, Operation Cacique Guaicaipuro resulted in the arrest of 44 members and arrest warrants issued for 102 more, including its leader, Héctor Guerrero Flores. In 2024, official figures showed a 93% reduction in vehicle thefts, an 87% reduction in aggravated homicides, and a 77% reduction in aggravated robberies since 2019. However, the true effectiveness of the Venezuelan state was systematically ignored, while suspicions about Venezuelans abroad multiplied without forensic corroboration.
Recycling and a shift towards the myth of the "Cartel of the Suns"
If the TdA (Traffic in the Americas) served to criminalize migration, the "Cartel of the Suns" functions as a high-level political justification for the military and financial encirclement. The recent designation introduces no new evidence; rather, it recycles an accusation that lacks support in even US intelligence reports.
The DEA's 2024 National Drug Threat Assessment (NDTA) is explicit : the groups with the greatest control are the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. Neither Venezuela, nor the "Cartel of the Suns," appear as structural threats.
The data dismantles the narrative. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), 61% of cocaine originates in Colombia, 26% in Peru, and 13% in Bolivia. Venezuela is not a significant producer. Regarding routes, 87% of the drugs leave via the Pacific; only 8% transit through the Eastern Caribbean, where the Venezuelan coast is located. Of that small percentage, Venezuelan authorities seize and destroy 70%, according to official figures . The geography of drug trafficking does not coincide with the political geography portrayed by Washington.
The recycling of this myth follows a geopolitical "false flag" logic. In March 2020, when the "maximum pressure" strategy was showing signs of exhaustion, Attorney General William Barr convinced Trump to pivot to the anti-drug narrative. The deployment of naval and air forces in the Caribbean under the pretext of counternarcotics operations generated headlines of firmness without committing resources to a direct conflict. As journalist Elías Ferrer documented in his investigation for Guacamaya, the intention was to "begin an orderly withdrawal" from the regime change policy without appearing weak.
Five years later, the script is being revived with adjustments. The joint designation of the TdA and the "Cartel of the Suns" allows the application of the U.S. Antiterrorism Act against Venezuela while preserving business interests: OFAC sanctioned the "cartel" as a global terrorist entity but did not identify specific individuals, allowing corporations like Chevron to continue operating without violating the regulations. Marco Rubio, Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, has been the discursive architect of this framework, aligning Venezuelan rhetoric with the "America First" agenda and the Cuban-American lobby in South Florida.
The media campaign has a clear objective of psychological pressure. By saturating the news with stories about organized crime infiltrating the highest levels of government and the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB), the aim is to sow distrust, demoralization, and chaos. The underlying message for Venezuelan military personnel is: "Your superiors are narco-terrorists; join us." It is a classic psychological warfare strategy designed to fracture institutional loyalty and create the conditions for dismantling the institutional and social fabric—an essential element for any scenario of forced regime change.
The military deployment in the Caribbean, which includes armed incursions against vessels in international waters off the coast of Venezuela, is not a response to a real drug trafficking threat. As Cancian explained , "The ships don't have the authority to enforce the law, unlike the Coast Guard." Their role is to signal a wartime readiness, not to interdict drugs. The Paria Peninsula, identified as a supposed corridor, has experienced a marked decline in illicit activity since 2020, with seizures such as the 790 kilos of cocaine destroyed in Macuro in February 2025.
Psychological pressure on the Venezuelan population operates on two fronts:
Externally , migrants face mass criminalization — or crimigration —, 238 Venezuelans who were deported to El Salvador's maximum security prison (Cecot) in March 2025, without prior trial, invoking the Foreign Enemies Law.
Internally , the campaign seeks to erode the morale of the FANB and the population in order to generate institutional breakdown and social chaos.
Last Thursday, Vice President Delcy Rodríguez denounced that the US strategy responds to a historical interest in controlling Venezuelan territory, not only for its natural resources and geostrategic location but also for its "anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist strategic political conception."
In response to the designation of the alleged "Cartel of the Suns," the high-ranking official stated that "we are not a military power nor are we the ones who murder millions of people in the world to steal resources."
The US financial system absorbs 85% of global drug trafficking profits, equivalent to 2.7% of its GDP (Photo: Archive)
The strategy aims to use sanctions, blockades, and military threats to create fractures within the military leadership, thus replicating the "hybrid warfare" model orchestrated in other contexts. This is coupled with the use of new technologies—via Operation Southern Spear —in which the participation of Trump's new allies, Big Tech , would be paramount .
Washington has fabricated an enemy that fits its narrative, regardless of the evidence. While the US financial system absorbs 85% of global drug trafficking profits—equivalent to 2.7% of its GDP—and while Ecuador, according to the World Customs Organization, has become the world's leading exporter of cocaine, attention remains fixed on Venezuela.
The Tren de Aragua and the "Cartel of the Suns" are discursive wild cards used to violate International Law, justify the military and financial siege, and create the conditions of internal chaos necessary for a regime change that, in the end, seeks to seize the country's strategic resources and eliminate a critical reference to its decadent unipolar vision.
https://misionverdad.com/venezuela/giro ... -los-soles
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Venezuela Under Siege: A Hundred Deaths At Sea; Hundreds Of Thousands By Sanctions
By Roger D. Harris, Popular Resistance.
November 22, 2025
Above photo: Brian Garvey.
Washington is targeting the Venezuelan people in an escalating regime-change offensive.
Combining open military violence with an economic siege that has quietly claimed far more lives.
Most of the world looks on in disbelief at the now-routine murders on the high seas off Venezuela’s coast – serial killings that the newly minted War Department calls Operation Southern Spear.
On October 31, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk condemned the attacks, saying that the “mounting human costs are unacceptable.” The People’s Social Summit in Colombia (November 8-9) excoriated Washington. Four days later in Caracas, a meeting of jurists from 35 countries denounced the “homicidal rampage.” The Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild charged “egregious war crimes and violations of international human rights, maritime, and military law.”
Even The New York Times, an outlet that is not squeamish about US atrocities, described Washington’s flimsy drug-interdiction rationale as being “at odds with reality.”
The notion that the US – the world’s leading consumer of illegal narcotics, the major launderer of trafficking profits, and the cartels’ favored gun runner – is concerned about the drug plague is ludicrous.
In reality, Venezuela is essentially free of drug production and processing – no coca, no marijuana, and certainly no fentanyl – according to the authoritative United Nations World Drug Report 2025. The European Union’s assessment of global drug sources does not even mention Venezuela.
Most inconveniently for Mr. Trump, the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment does not list Venezuela as a cocaine producer and only as a very minor transit country. Nor is Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro cited as a drug trafficker.
The State Department is designating the so called Cartel de los Soles, allegedly headed by Maduro, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), However, the entity is nowhere to be found in the DEA assessment for the simple reason that it does not exist.
Meanwhile, the body count from the killing spree is nearing one hundred, yet not an ounce of narcotics has been found. In contrast, the Venezuelan government has seized 64 tons. Clearly Washington’s intent is not drug interdiction but regime change.
Sanctions kill
As horrific as the slaughter by direct US military violence against Venezuela may be, a far greater contributor to excess deaths has received scant media attention. The toll from sanctions is well over a hundred-fold larger.
Sanctions are not an alternative to war but a way of waging war with a less overt means of violence – but deadly, nonetheless.
Sanctions, more properly called illegal unilateral coercive measures, are as lethal as the missiles Washington rains down on small boats in the southern Caribbean and the Pacific from Ecuador to Mexico.
Economists Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs demonstrated that US sanctions imposed 2017-2018 drastically worsened Venezuela’s economic crisis and directly contributed to an estimated 40,000 excess deaths.
By 2020, former UN Special Rapporteur Alfred de Zayas estimated a death toll of over 100,000. An expert in international law, de Zayas argues that sanctions function as collective punishment, harming civilians rather than government officials.
Washington is now escalating its regime-change offensive – while maintaining the sanctions – precisely because Venezuelans have successfully resisted the punitive measures.
Sanctions disproportionately kill children
A peer-reviewed scientific report in The Lancet reveals that a disproportionate number of the sanction’s victims globally are children under the age of five. In fact, the study finds that more human life is extinguished by sanctions than by open warfare.
The SanctionsKill! Campaign describes itself as an activist project to expose the human cost of sanctions and what can be done to end them. They are inviting health workers to sign a letter to the US Congress and the executive branch to end these child-killing sanctions.
Drawing from The Lancet study, the health workers’ letter details how sanctions are particularly deadly for small children by:
Provoking increases in water-borne illnesses and diarrheal diseases
Causing low birth weight
Exacerbating hunger and malnutrition
Denying lifesaving cancer care and organ transplants
Obstructing access to and import of antibiotics and other common medicines
Hindering sanctioned countries from receiving assistance during natural disasters
Among the signatories are Margaret Flowers, MD, a pediatrician and long-time health reform advocate; professor emeritus Amy Hagopian, PhD, at the University of Washington and former chair, International Health Section, American Public Health Association; internist Nidal Jboor, co-founder of Doctors Against Genocide; and pediatrician Ana Malinow, National Single Payer leader.
Others include health policy professor Claudia Chaufan, MD and PhD, York University; child and adolescent psychiatrist Claire M. Cohen, MD, National Single Payer, PNHP; and Kate Sugarman, MD, Georgetown Law School and George Washington School of Medicine.
Their letter concludes that there is a clear consensus in the literature that broad unilateral economic sanctions have devastating health and humanitarian consequences for civilian populations: “This is a global public health crisis caused by US government policy. We implore you to fulfill your inescapable obligation to end it…Imposing such collective punishment on the innocent is morally reprehensible.”
Sanctions and slaughter
Blogger Caitlin Johnstone quips: “civilized nations kill with sanctions.” That the US kills by both sanctions and open military force does not prove her wrong. Rather, it demonstrates that today’s US empire is not civilized.
Because open warfare is more dramatic than unilateral coercive measures, there is a danger that child-killing sanctions are becoming normalized.
Indeed, this form of hybrid warfare by the US impacts roughly one-quarter of humanity. History shows – as in the case of the 1961 John F. Kennedy sanctions against Cuba – that once imposed, sanction regimes are politically difficult to end.
The campaign against unilateral coercive measures is as central to the struggle for peace as opposition to overt military aggression. Sanctions are not a benign substitute for war; they are an additional mechanism of lethal collective punishment.
PS: The health-workers’ letter will not be submitted until early 2026, so health professionals of all disciplines still have time to sign on.
https://popularresistance.org/venezuela ... 6bf040dcd8
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Mision Verdad: The fundamental role of the Venezuelan population in the face of military threats
https://misionverdad.com/venezuela/el-r ... -militares
The increasingly less covert US military deployment, ostensibly under the guise of an “anti-drug operation,” has the clear objective of regime change in Venezuela. The scenarios range from a direct military attack against the national government to the creation of an internal rupture, accelerated by mercenaries hired from Washington, that would shatter the cohesion of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB), among other effects.
The Venezuelan population has reacted in a way that is, perhaps, unexpected by the global media exerting psychological pressure on them. There is no visible unrest in the streets, and, as those same media outlets have reported, the majority rejects foreign intervention in the country. Many questions arise from this social behavior, requiring an analysis of the factors that might help answer them.
The scenarios proposed for a regime change
Recently, the first scenario has been attempted through false flag operations, such as those orchestrated from Guyana. On several occasions, armed actors have provoked confrontations with security forces from this neighboring country, which occupies the Essequibo region, in order to establish a casus belli that would lead to a US military occupation.
It is well known that Secretary of State and Acting National Security Advisor Marco Rubio intends to use the territorial dispute over Essequibo as a trigger for this scenario. Furthermore, the hypothesis that the recent flights of US fighter jets, bombers, and reconnaissance aircraft are intended to provoke reactions—or errors—from the Venezuelan Armed Forces (FANB) to justify this being a trigger for military escalation.
The media-savvy opposition figure Maria Corina Machada ostentatiously displays her desire for internal strife within the Venezuelan military. The rhetoric she employs includes creating excessive anxiety that foreshadow scenes of mass military desertion “in search of redemption.” In contrast, last week the New York Times revealed that Trump “is reluctant to approve operations that could endanger U.S. troops or result in an embarrassing failure,” which, if true, is understandable.
The second scenario attempts to replicate the violent escalations of 2014 and 2017, adding the element of criminal gangs, as was tested on July 29, 2024, after the presidential elections. The failed swarming tactic consists of creating virulent hotspots in different regions of the country through the use of weaponry to create conditions that lead to the first scenario.
Establishing the narrative of a “repressive Venezuelan government” serves Washington—and the opposition it sponsors—to activate the well-established mechanisms of color revolution that, as in Libya and Syria, pave the way for the militarization of the conflict under the guise of defending civilians. In both cases, with their various ramifications and variations, the population plays a decisive role.
The role of the Venezuelan population in a war scenario
The reasons for the internal rupture are complex because the opposition has lost political influence and, consequently, its ability to mobilize support, but also because terrorist plots aimed at creating chaos have been consistently dismantled. Furthermore, actors infiltrated within the country have been detected and neutralized, in many cases with the help of intelligence by the people, that is, information from the civilian population.
On the other hand, when the militaristic threat of the Trump administration increased, the Venezuelan government called on the people to enlist to “transition from a peaceful revolution to an armed revolution.” This transition relies on the Bolivarian National Militia, created by Commander Hugo Chávez in 2009 as a volunteer corps, a civilian complement to the FANB (National Bolivarian Armed Forces), with the objective of defending national sovereignty and peace. What for years functioned as an auxiliary body formalized its role in 2020 when it was elevated to the status of the fifth component of the FANB, giving it unprecedented institutional weight.
President Maduro has stated that Venezuela’s strategy in the face of threats from the United States is “primarily defensive,” encompassing “diplomatic and political struggle.” However, he warned that if “Venezuela were attacked, it would immediately enter a period of armed struggle in defense of the national territory” and “constitutionally declare the republic in arms.” This is a military strategy of irregular resistance that, based on Bolivarian doctrine, assumes that, just as the Liberator mobilized entire populations against an empire, Venezuela is called upon to resist any foreign power through a total mobilization of its citizens.
In this regard, the Vice President for Political Affairs, Citizen Security, and Peace, Diosdado Cabello, described the strategy for a potential conflict as “not conventional warfare. It’s a different kind of war, and we have to move to that phase and prepare ourselves.” He added, “We’re going to wage it in every part of the country, on every terrain, on every front, and with whatever resources we have at hand.”
Are there conditions ripe for social confrontation?
The socio-economic difficulties, a consequence of the blockade and sanctions, have been viewed by Washington as a breeding ground for social discontent to carry out its destabilizing work in a hidden way without having to resort to an armed invasion.
The Venezuelan government has implemented various strategies for national economic stabilization and is not without its challenges in this area. It has also addressed the socio-political front by deepening actions that strengthen the organizational fabric of grassroots power.
In this regard, the government has redirected social investment and allocated resources to be managed by grassroots social organizations. To this end, Bolivarian Integral Base Committees (CBBIs) have held national popular consultations, beginning with a series of community meetings, or citizens’ assemblies, in which the people propose priority projects to address the collective problems of their communities. These range from the construction of schools and street lighting to support for community-based businesses.
Based on their own concrete proposals, each CBBI commune or communal circuit chooses the project to be implemented and then manages the allocated resources. The concept aims at community self-governance and seeks to territorialize the exercise of democracy based on Articles 5 and 62 of the Constitution, as well as establish conditions to achieve the so-called “fourth transformation” envisaged in the 7T Plan, which is the 2025-2031 government plan. Some facts:
During 2024, two National Popular Consultations were held, the first on April 21 and the second on August 25; these reflected 2,259 water projects, 1,319 road projects, 1,239 habitat projects, 1,153 electricity projects, 873 education projects and 798 sanitation projects.
On February 2nd of this year, 36,685 initiatives proposed by the People’s Power throughout the national territory were voted on, and the formation of the popular self-government centers began in order to achieve direct contact between the central government and the 5,334 communal circuits.
On April 27, during the second National Popular Consultation of 2025, 36,612 proposals were submitted nationwide, and voting took place in 5,718 polling stations across the country. At that time, the Minister of Communes, Ángel Prado, stated that Venezuela had invested $148 million in communities over the course of a year and had consolidated 14,000 projects.
On July 27, the third National Youth Council of the year was held, focusing on projects submitted by young people. A week later, President Maduro reported that, up to that date, 23,455 projects had been approved by vote, 70% of which had already been completed by the communities themselves and “delivered as works that positively impact schools, housing, health centers, access roads, local infrastructure, among other areas.”
The fourth National Popular Consultation of the Bolivarian Integral Base Committees will be held on November 23. The president announced that 13% of the projects are for economic entrepreneurship and production; 42% are focused on public services such as roads, water, electricity, health, and education; 5% on security; 27% are for social programs; 5% are for justice of the peace and community centers; and 6% are for scientific projects.
Faced with the rightwing opposition hope to create an internal conflict, the population is making progress in improving collective living conditions through popular organization and the exercise of territorial politics; this minimizes the conditions for social confrontation because political differences are resolved through dialogue and the collective construction of solutions.
The National Popular Consultations of the Bolivarian Integral Base Committees, as local development plans, allow for the deepening of participatory democracy and the revitalization of leadership for political representation and the construction of new social consensus.
What remains of the US “humanitarian” excuse
The war against Venezuela is not a recent issue. In any confrontation, it is necessary to surround the target and cut off its supplies: the goal of the sanctions and blockade measures implemented by the United States.
These measures harmed the health and nutrition of the population. Researcher Clara Sánchez has highlighted that, starting in 2015, malnourishment reappeared and increased “proportionately to the number of unilateral coercive measures imposed.” She adds that, according to the FAO, this scourge reached its highest level in 2019.
The ongoing regime change operation was anchored in the narrative of a food crisis as a “channel to carry out a ‘humanitarian’ military intervention in the country, endorsed by the international community,” while sectors of the extremist opposition stole national assets in collusion with the Trump and Biden administrations. But the “complex humanitarian emergency” narrative failed, so both the opposition and its allies in Washington shifted gears and are now criminalizing those they considered victims less than two years ago: Venezuelan migrants.
Last September, President Maduro announced that the country has food reserves equivalent to 101 days of consumption, the highest figure in the nation’s history. He added that the country produces and supplies 100% of the food consumed domestically, while also generating a surplus that allows for exports.
The economy has been growing for 18 consecutive quarters, and this recovery, which is due to a strategy based on the 13 Productive Engines that combine structural recovery in sectors that have traditionally sustained the economy, such as hydrocarbons, with the incorporation of other non-traditional sectors.
The farming and fishing sectors, part of the social base of food production, have contributed strengths in the food sector:
With the participation of both sectors, undernourishment decreased from 17.6% between 2021 and 2023 to 5.9% between 2022 and 2024. This represents a recovery of more than 66%.
The national primary production of plant and animal food has not stopped growing in the last six years and in 2024 it rose to 6.2%.
Venezuelan farmers have increased coffee exports by 500% in the first half of the year, compared to the previous year, demonstrating the sector’s capacity to export.
Last September, 15,400 peasant councils were revitalized and, in assemblies, they elected their respective spokespeople for organization and training, productive economy, and territorial defense and national sovereignty.
Malnutrition in children under 5 years of age fell from 14.8% in 2019 to 1.2% in 2024, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Fishing activity and industrial processing in the fishing sector has increased by over 7% this year.
The products of “Blue Venezuela” —fishing and aquaculture— have reached 33 countries, with a 225% increase in their international marketing.
Organization in food-producing sectors such as fishing has generated results that dismantle the “humanitarian excuse”
Faced with internal upheaval induced by external factors, the antidote has been the building of popular participation in comprehensive security and defense, increased local political participation, and food sovereignty. This results from a social cohesion based on collective achievements, the deepening of governance practices, and the division among anti-Chavista sectors.
The attempt to dismantle the Bolivarian Republic remains in force in an extremist sector that opted for anti-politics and that assumed the so-called “electoral route” as a device to sharpen the confrontation and seek the implosion of electoral participation.
A broader perspective gives a clearer understanding of the results: extremism has lost influence among its followers; its errors are as evident as the foreign elites sponsorship and leadership over the extremist opposition. Their agendas have become detached from the people, and it would seem that María Corina Machado’s capitulationist promises to these elites confirm this.
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