Oakland demands ‘Trump out of Venezuela’

Oakland, CA – On Sunday, January 4, 60 protesters rallied in Fruitvale Plaza in response to U.S. military strikes in Caracas, Venezuela, and the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores.

The Freedom Road Socialist Organization, the Oakland Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, and the Community Service Organization called the action.

Esperanza, with Community Service Organization Oakland, highlighted the termination of Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelan migrants by the Trump administration last year, saying, “The U.S. government cannot claim liberation abroad while caging, persecuting and disappearing immigrants at home. If this administration truly cared about Venezuelans, it wouldn’t have terminated TPS in October, leaving thousands of Venezuelans, one of our impacted communities here in the U.S., leaving them vulnerable for mass deportation to meet Trump’s deportation agenda. The U.S. intervention abroad creates displacement and meets those forced to migrate with criminalization, detention and violence.”

Xa’miel Thompson from the Oakland Alliance Against Racism and Political Repression spoke on the connection between the attacks on the Venezuelan people and the attacks on African American communities at home, saying, “Colonial violence abroad always finds its way back home. Techniques tested elsewhere, but perfected on us. That’s why this matters. In 1985 the United States government dropped firebombs on a Black neighborhood in Philadelphia. Not some foreign battlefield. Not a war zone. But a community.”

Isa Madrid-Lily, a member of the Oakland district of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, had this to say about the motives for the escalation, “These attacks are clearly intended to make Venezuela kneel to the U.S. economic order; they are punishment for refusing to sell out its people and resources to American oil companies and financial interests. Just like Iraq, the United States government has crafted a web of lies and fear to manufacture consent for a war that has nothing to do with the livelihood of the working people of this country, and everything to do with making money for a few rich oligarchs.”

Other allies, such as Nodutdol for Korean Community Development, the East Bay Democratic Socialists of America, and Oakland Divest, joined in the emergency response, demanding “Trump out of Venezuela, U.S. out of Latin America.”

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