Oppression Abroad & Repression at Home: Connecting Venezuela & ICE
On Saturday, January 3rd, President Nicolás Maduro was kidnapped by US armed forces in an operation which took the lives of over 100 innocent Venezuelan and Cuban citizens. Days before, on New Year's Eve, an off duty ICE agent murdered US citizen Keith Porter in Northridge, CA. And a week later, on Wednesday, January 7th, Renée Nicole Good (another citizen) was executed, shot in the head by an agent at the scene of an ICE arrest in Minneapolis. These are not isolated, unrelated incidents.
Long before Maduro's abduction, we've seen decades of bipartisan attempts to crush Venezuela's economy. Venezuela's sin was attempting to use its own natural resources to take care of its citizens instead of allowing corporations unfettered access to rape and pillage their country. For this, liberals and conservatives alike have never forgiven the Venezuelan people. The recent military actions against Venezuela (blatant violations of international law) are nothing but overt attempts to reverse the hard fought victory of Venezuela over western colonial interests. US imposed sanctions and multiple coup attempts have succeeded in producing extreme hardship among the populace of Venezuela since the success of the Bolivarian Revolution in 1999, which in turn has caused a mass refugee crisis, with many fleeing to the US.
This process has been repeated across the globe as the US destabilizes countries that dare to pursue self determination and their own course of development. The influx of displaced peoples into the US thus provides our government at all levels a pretext to funnel taxpayer money into expanding the police state—inflating local police budgets to "deal with crime" supposedly brought by immigrants and building up racist terror squads in ICE.
Infused with a massive budget of $170 Billion, ICE has now transformed into an immense apparatus of repression which acts with impunity. ICE offers a job and a gun to anyone depraved enough to go hunt down those deemed undesirable by the State (i.e. anyone not white). With the recent executions of Keith Porter and Renée Nicole Good, and the countless other nameless victims ICE has murdered when the cameras weren't rolling, the illusion that being a citizen or white will protect you has vanished.
The ruling class has made it clear that there is no line that can be crossed, no limit to what they will do in order to secure and maintain their power over the everyday working people of the world. We cannot rely on international law, or foreign intervention, or our elected officials to act in opposition to the will of the ruling class. No one is coming to save us. Only the workers have the power to liberate themselves.