In the Line of Fire: Occupied Puerto Rico and the U.S. War on Venezuela

In recent weeks, Puerto Rico has once again become a forward operating base for imperialist war games in the Caribbean. Off the southern coast, U.S. Navy sailors and Marines practice amphibious landings while a fleet of F-35 fighter jets, P-8 maritime surveillance aircraft, and MQ-9 reaper drones are deployed to one or more of the various U.S. military installations occupying more than 78,000 acres of land across the archipelago. To date, U.S. forces have twice conducted airstrikes on Venezuelan fishing vessels, claiming fourteen lives in total. Such maneuvers are made seamless by the total subversion of Puerto Rico’s national sovereignty and more than 127 years of covert operations and open warfare against the independence movement seeking to liberate the nation from U.S. colonial rule.

The mobilization of lethal force follows Washington’s characterization of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as “one of the most powerful drug traffickers in the world” and a threat to the national security of the United States, a peculiar accusation given the longtime involvement of U.S. agencies in the production and distribution of narcotics in the Western Hemisphere.[1] Furthermore, according to its annual report published in March, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) found Venezuela to be neither a producer nor a major transit country facilitating the trafficking of narcotics in the Americas, a conclusion supported by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.

But the expansive record of false pretexts, flimsy and transparent justifications, and nakedly dishonest state propaganda advanced by the U.S. ruling class leads us to logically conclude that this escalation has little to do with Washington’s commitment to fostering a drug-free hemisphere. Nearly six decades into the U.S. “war on drugs,” its primary function has been the systematic targeting of poor and racialized communities by militarized police and the likes of the CIA and DEA, an agency operating 93 foreign offices in 69 countries. Predictably, the flow of drugs remains largely unimpeded.

Similarly, any notion of U.S. concern for Venezuela’s alleged “democratic deficit” can be readily dismissed. An empire founded on settler-colonial genocide and chattel slavery, currently mounting a widespread domestic campaign to systematically limit voter participation among its own citizenry, is unqualified to enforce democratic processes abroad. Its purported loyalty to democratic ideals obscures its character as a dictatorship of capital without regard for the political will and aspirations of its subjects. Venezuela’s participatory structures, meanwhile, are visible reflections of its commitment to popular protagonism and grassroots democracy.

In truth, U.S. warships and personnel are aimed at the people, state, and territory of Venezuela in open and belligerent pursuit of regime change to capture the nation’s vast oil reserves and to neutralize the ongoing Bolivarian revolutionary process. As a result, all elements are seemingly in place for an intensification of the longstanding war imposed upon the Caribbean by the United States.

These actions are but the latest in Washington’s long-term campaign to undermine the Bolivarian process inaugurated by Hugo Chávez and absorb Venezuela back into its sphere of control. A key element of this hybrid war is the utilization and impact of sanctions and other coercive economic measures targeting government officials, public finances, foreign trade, and virtually all sectors of Venezuela’s economy. International legal scholars have noted that “given the specific targeting of the health and nutrition of the Venezuelan people, including their access to food and essential medicines, the United States is responsible for attempted genocide targeting Venezuela.”

As in Cuba, Iran, Zimbabwe, and Korea, U.S. economic warfare aims to weaken and discipline insubordinate peoples and governments, provoking systemic crises designed to enable the forced collapse of targeted states. The U.S. drive toward conventional war must be understood within this context.

Five hundred miles to the north, U.S. armed forces have enlisted the support of a key colonial possession and strategic military asset in the heart of the Caribbean. In the event that U.S. aggression is justifiably repelled, Puerto Ricans will find themselves thrust into the line of fire through no fault of their own. The decision to host U.S. military infrastructure, to act as a bridge for imperialism’s incursions into the wider Caribbean Basin, is not theirs to make.

Puerto Rico’s lands and waters have long been exploited by the U.S. military to further its agenda across the world, serving as a logistics hub and a training, staging, and launching ground to facilitate armed interventions in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Grenada, Panama, and elsewhere across the Americas.

In the midst of World War II, the Pentagon seized nearly eighty percent of the island of Vieques to create an extensive practice range for war exercises and weapons testing. Occupied by the U.S. Navy for more than sixty years, the island was systematically subjected to what Puerto Rican psychologist Monisha Ríos describes as “the sights, sounds, smells, and sensations of exploding bombs, gunfire, deployment of chemical weapons, aerial attacks, and ship-to-shore bombardment.” While the courageous people of Vieques successfully evicted the Navy in 2003, the toxic legacy of its presence has left survivors with elevated cancer rates and unexploded ordnance scattered throughout the island. Given the recent deployment of vessels and weaponry to U.S. zones of control throughout Puerto Rico, concern abounds for what many describe as the remilitarization of the archipelago.

Such flagrant disregard for the lives of Puerto Ricans, for the health of our air, water, and soil, and for the rights and dignity of all peoples and nations across the Americas, is enabled by our status as a colony of the United States. Absent the decisive defeat and expulsion of U.S. forces from our archipelago, the Americas will remain hostage to the dictates of the U.S. ruling class.

This reality is clear to the vibrant and growing coalition of organizations comprising our independence movement, as it is to the forces of imperialism who have relied for more than a century on surveillance, arrests, and assassination to ensure compliance with U.S. colonial rule.[2]

For more than 127 years, the United States has relegated Puerto Ricans to the lower rungs of the international division of labor, consigned to a lifetime of dependence, dispossession, and forced migration. As it persists in binding its Caribbean colony into a position of permanent submission, such an entity dares to project itself as the arbiter of justice in the Western Hemisphere.

But ours is truly one struggle waged on many fronts. Puerto Rico’s state, society, and economy are captured by the very forces undertaking the mass extermination of Palestinians in full view of the world and in flagrant violation of international law; the same agents of chaos and destabilization maintaining the blockade on Cuba and the plunder of the Congo.

With what credibility could the greatest purveyor of violence in the world speak of itself as a savior of the Venezuelan people from the depredations of socialism? To feign concern for the proliferation of narcotics despite its recorded willingness to poison its own population to advance its strategic objectives? To act as a guardian of public health and international order while prosecuting a war on children, a crime against the totality of humanity, in Palestine?

Puerto Rico remains both a strategic enclave for the waging of war across the region and a key site of anti-colonial resistance in the Americas. The advancement of our struggle for national liberation (for land, independence, and socialism) is an integral component of the international struggle to diminish and defeat U.S. hegemonic power, a unifying objective to which our siblings in Venezuela, Cuba, and elsewhere have contributed generations of sacrifice. Indeed, humanity owes an undying debt to the Bolivarian Revolution and to the achievements of anti-imperialist resistance and socialist construction across the world.

To that end, all people of conscience and organizations concerned with peace and human rights must stand unequivocally opposed to the impositions of imperialism on the peoples and nations of Our Americas, and ensure that our region is respected as a Zone of Peace. Mateo Feliciano is a co-coordinator of the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) Solidarity Network and a national organizer for Diaspora Pa’lante, an organization committed to independence, socialism, and the defeat of U.S. imperialism worldwide. __________________________________________________________________________________

[1] See for example: Gary Webb, Dark Alliance: the CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999.); Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press. (London: Verso, 1999)

[2] Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars against Dissent in the United States (Boston: South End Press, 1990) pg. 63-90