For seven years, a tidal wave of human suffering has engulfed Venezuela. More than seven million people—25 percent of the country’s population—have been driven from their homes and forced to try to find a new life elsewhere. Many have lost everything: their families, their jobs, their homes, their savings and possessions; sometimes other loved ones, sometimes their own lives.

All this suffering was unnecessary. This crisis and upheaval were not caused by earthquakes, or floods, or any other type of natural disaster. The were caused by the economic-political system of capitalism-imperialism—a system that in its routine functioning pillaged the resources of Venezuela and impoverished the masses of Venezuelans—and by cold-blooded calculations made by the rulers of the U.S. to further punish the country and its people. 

20 Years of Imperialist Torment

This article will briefly recap essential background from the first two articles in this series, and then go into the dire situation today. 

In 2002, under then-president George W. Bush, the U.S. supported two coups intended to overthrow Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. Both failed. A “crucial figure around the coup” (as the Guardian described him) was Elliot Abrams, a top Bush advisor and longtime war criminal.

2002 also was the start of 20 years of repeated coup attempts and continually escalating economic strangulation against Venezuela. All of this was instigated and directed by the U.S., under Republican and Democratic presidents, from Bush, to Obama, to Trump, and now Biden.¹

Why did the U.S. repeatedly try to topple the elected leadership of Venezuela? The regimes of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro opposed U.S. domination of their country’s economy and political structures in a very limited way. But even that was too much for the imperialists. When Barack Obama imposed crippling sanctions on Venezuela in 2014, he claimed it was because Venezuela posed an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

Really??? Was Venezuela orchestrating rock-throwing protests of Obama’s presidency in D.C., as Chávez said the U.S. embassy did in Venezuela? Did Venezuela have island bases stationed around the U.S., and repeatedly violate its airspace, as the U.S. did to Venezuela?

Then the U.S. used the pain it inflicted on the Venezuelan people as extortion to try to break the will of the government and bring about another coup. This was clearly expressed by William Brownfield, former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela, who said this in 2018 about the punishment imposed by U.S. sanctions: “…how hard do we want … to sanction Venezuela, how much increase to malnutrition, lack of medicine, impact on the public health system, how much impact is that going to have? Now, that is a valid argument to have. That's a legitimate issue … And if we can do something that will bring that end quicker, we probably should do it. But we should do it understanding that it's gonna have an impact on millions and millions of people who are already having great difficulty finding enough to eat, getting themselves cured when they get sick, or finding clothes to put on their children before they go off to school. We don't get to do this and pretend as though it has no impact there. We have to make the hard decision. The desired outcome justifies this fairly severe punishment." 

The U.S. and its leaders, Democrat and Republican alike, intentionally created and inflamed the endless torment their system has imposed on Venezuela, for 20 years. Do you think that goes against the so-called “principles of democracy” U.S. leaders never tire of advocating? Actually, acts like these are completely in keeping with the U.S.’s longtime and bloody history of coups, invasions, assassinations, and murderous “sanctions.”²

Read closely, and think about this quote from Bob Avakian:

The essence of what exists in the U.S. is not democracy but capitalism-imperialism and political structures to enforce that capitalism-imperialism. What the U.S. spreads around the world is not democracy, but imperialism and political structures to enforce that imperialism. (BAsics 1:3)

Expulsions of Asylum Seekers

More people than ever have been trying to reach the U.S. at its southern border, and many of them want to apply for asylum. Over a million have been expelled from the U.S. in the last year under provisions of Title 42. But Title 42 never applied to Venezuelans because there were no formal relations between the U.S. and Venezuela, and Venezuela did not accept “repatriation” flights from the U.S.

The situation changed dramatically on October 12, when Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas issued this announcement: “Effective immediately, Venezuelans who enter the United States between ports of entry, without authorization, will be returned to Mexico.”

The Biden administration also announced it would allow up to 24,000 Venezuelans to enter the country legally under its new plan. To qualify, people must be sponsored by a U.S. citizen or organization who takes financial responsibility for housing them and helping them find employment; they must meet security and public health requirements; they must have a valid passport. They must travel to the U.S. by air, and apply online.

In other words, only a small minority of well-off Venezuelans even have a chance.

All others would be “expelled”—and the process of expulsion began immediately.

The day after Mayorkas’s announcement, U.S. immigration authorities began rounding up thousands of Venezuelans seeking asylum at Texas border towns, and dumping them on the other side of the border. Many families were separated in the process—some flown to California before being taken into Mexico, others deposited in cities across the border from Texas.

Think about it. Literally millions of Venezuelans have had their lives ravaged by the workings of the U.S. system of capitalism-imperialism, and decisions made by its rulers. The right to seek asylum is a core principle of international law and is part of U.S. domestic law. Now Biden makes a show of upholding that right—while in fact creating conditions that are impossible to follow for the huge masses of people being crushed into pauperism by the crisis in Venezuela.³

“I Want to Scream”

A tragedy in three acts has been unfolding, over seven years. Act One, the U.S. ransacks and guts a country to get rid of its leader, and creates a tidal wave of human pain and anguish. Act Two, people are put through hell when they try to escape the imperialist-created hell they already live in and get to a place they can work and survive. Act Three, further utterly unjust and inhumane pain is heaped on them. But this is no play… this tragedy is unfolding in real life. The trauma and pain are real. The deaths are real.

Darrins Arrechedra, a 31-year-old Venezuelan, told a reporter he had travelled across two continents and 10 countries before arriving in El Paso. But he got there on October 13, one day after the order to expel Venezuelans. Now he is in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, penniless and homeless in a city he doesn’t know, looking at the towers of downtown El Paso, Texas—a short distance away, but seemingly in another, impossible to reach, place. He has nothing left. “I want to cry, I want to scream,” he said. “I really don’t have a plan right now.”

You can hear the pain in the words of Darrins Arrechedra. You can feel it in the brave protest of the people who crossed the river separating Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, demanding justice, only to be driven back by pigs who fired pepper ball pellets at them. You can see it on the faces of the children who held up sheets with the words “S.O.S. Help!” across the Rio Grande from a U.S. immigration post.

Make Your Choice

The Republi-fascist response to these atrocities is to seethe with open hatred for immigrants, to insult and vilify them. They call for further repression, heightened militarization of the already hyper-militarized border, to defend what they hatefully call an “invasion”—of impoverished, desperate people, many of them entire families.

Biden and the Democrats don’t want to be so blatantly hateful, so openly racist. They have a more liberal policy on immigration, due in part to the economic needs of certain sections of the ruling class and in part to keep the allegiance of both recent immigrants and native-born people who have some sense of justice and decency. But these Democrats represent the same capitalist-imperialist system as the Republi-fascists, and they too have no answer to the “immigration crisis”—no answer that isn’t rooted in and based on intensifying violence and repression.

Vice-President Kamala Harris expressed this last year when she said in Guatemala: “Do not come. Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our borders." Mayorkas gave an updated version of Harris’s threats to migrants in his announcement this week. It amounted to this: Stay where you are in the unlivable hell we and our system have created and continue to enforce, or suffer the consequences.

Intense and volatile conflicts pulse throughout the entire hemisphere of North, South, and Central America. The combination of U.S. wars of aggression in Central America in the 1980s and ’90s, economic warfare against countries like Cuba or Venezuela that defy U.S. dictates, super-exploitation of the rest of the continent, and the severe environmental disasters this has caused or made worse has created a hell in the southern hemisphere. Tens of millions of people are living intolerable lives, and are looking for a way out.

The U.S.-Mexico border is a focal point and faultline of this explosive conflict and tension. What it will lead to is yet to be determined—and what masses of people, in this country and others in South, North, and Central America will do will be a big part of determining the outcome. The words of Bob Avakian ring out strongly in conclusion:

…in fundamental terms, we have two choices: either, live with all this—and condemn future generations to the same, or worse, if they have a future at all—or, make revolution!
—Bob Avakian, from his talk Why We Need an Actual Revolution and How We Can Make Revolution