Natural disasters reveal more than the movement of tectonic plates: the strength of societies, the resilience of communities, and the political fault lines that shape whose suffering is seen and whose suffering is exploited. Within hours of the devastating earthquakes that struck Venezuela on 24 June 2026, social media and sections of the international press were already circulating familiar narratives. Before rescue operations could even begin in earnest, the disaster had been transformed into another battlefield in the long US-led campaign to undermine the Bolivarian process set in motion by Hugo Chávez’s election in 1998.

None of this should diminish the immense tragedy facing the Venezuelan people. Entire neighbourhoods have been devastated. Hundreds of buildings have collapsed. Hospitals, roads, bridges, and other public infrastructure are in ruins. Families continue to search for loved ones while rescue workers struggle against rain, aftershocks, and difficult road access. But solidarity requires more than sympathy. It requires truth. That is why red alert no. 22, ‘Truth Amid the Rubble’, examines some of the most common myths circulating about the earthquake and places them against the available evidence.

Myth One: Venezuela’s government has failed to respond effectively to the earthquake.

The scale of the catastrophe must be understood before any serious judgement can be made. The death toll climbs every day as first responders and volunteers sift through the debris, with tens of thousands still missing. Nearly two hundred buildings collapsed completely, with hundreds more partially destroyed. Hospitals that would normally receive the injured were themselves damaged. A major bridge and several roads were damaged in the state of La Guaira, where the earthquake struck the hardest of the six impacted states, making it extraordinarily difficult to move rescue equipment and teams into affected areas. Continuous rainfall and nearly 800 aftershocks have further complicated rescue operations while the partial collapse of the Caracas airport has forced international rescue teams to arrive via more distant airports and then travel by road. No country has unlimited emergency capacity in the face of destruction on this scale.

Yet Venezuela entered this disaster carrying an additional burden that few countries have ever experienced at this scale: years of economic warfare through unilateral coercive measures imposed principally by the United States and its allies. These measures have frozen more than $30 billion in Venezuelan public assets that could otherwise have strengthened disaster preparedness, modernised infrastructure, and financed emergency reserves. They have severely restricted the country’s ability to purchase specialised rescue equipment, heavy machinery, medicines, replacement parts, and construction materials and driven mass migration.

The tightening of US-driven sanctions in 2017 drove emigration and led to a profound drain of workers from key public services. United Nations Special Rapporteur Alena Douhan reported that by 2021 public services had lost between 30% to 50% of their personnel, including many doctors, nurses, engineers, teachers, judges, and other skilled professionals, and many public hospitals reported that between 50% to 70% of specialist posts were vacant. This loss of personnel weakened the country’s emergency capacity: fewer trained workers, heavier workloads for those who remained, and public services less able to respond when disaster struck.

The effects of natural disasters cannot be separated from the political and economic conditions under which they occur. Yet Venezuela is not a helpless victim. Despite the devastating toll on human life, the country slowly began to recover. After a 75% contraction in GDP between 2013 and 2021, Venezuela’s GDP grew by around 9% in 2024 and again in 2025. It moved from importing more than 70% of its food supply in 2017 to producing 96% domestically by March 2026. Oil revenue, which had fallen from $93 billion in 2012 to $4.2 billion in 2020, had recovered to around $18 billion in recent years. Life was not without significant challenges, nor had the country returned to pre-crisis levels, but – despite around 1,000 unilateral coercive measures that remain in place – Venezuela’s economy, infrastructure, public services, and the quality of life of many of its people had begun to improve – including disaster response.

Myth Two: The Venezuelan government is blocking humanitarian relief.

Perhaps the most widely circulated claim has been that Venezuelan authorities have deliberately prevented volunteers and aid from reaching affected communities. Yet modern search-and-rescue operations depend on careful coordination. Rescue dogs require silence to detect survivors beneath rubble. Heavy machinery needs clear access routes. Ambulances require roads free of congestion. The uncoordinated movement of thousands of civilians through disaster zones, however well intentioned, can obstruct rescue operations and cost lives.

Reports from the ground indicate that rescue vehicles were becoming trapped in civilian traffic. Journeys that normally take forty minutes took hours. Ambulances carrying critically injured victims were delayed by congested and impassable roads. Restricting access to disaster zones is, therefore, not evidence of repression but rather a standard emergency practice employed around the world.

At the same time, organised volunteer participation has been extensive from the start, with thousands formally registering after 26 June for coordinated relief efforts alongside professional emergency services, ensuring that solidarity strengthens rather than disrupts rescue operations. The question has never been whether civilians should help but whether assistance is organised in ways that save lives.

Myth Three: Affected communities are being neglected by the Venezuelan government.

On the first day of the tragedy, joint efforts by Civil Protection, the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB), police, and victims’ families and communities responded and helped rescue 2,407 people from the most affected areas in La Guaira. By 1 July, one week after the earthquake, approximately 26,000 personnel from civil protection agencies, emergency services, the police, armed forces, and other public institutions had been deployed across the disaster zone. Roughly 17,000 volunteers had formally joined relief operations. Across the affected areas, 6,461 people have been rescued. Authorities have coordinated rescue efforts with over 4,000 foreign rescue personnel and at least 41 international delegations participating in humanitarian efforts. The humanitarian response has already directly delivered nearly 9 million kilogrammes of food, around 28,000 food parcels, and 3.2 million litres of drinking water to affected areas – numbers that rise significantly every day with ongoing relief efforts and daily reports from the National Assembly. More than 80,000 families have received assistance including food, transportation, medical care, psychological support, and emergency shelter.

Medical teams have treated more than 17,000 people in hospitals, field clinics, and emergency triage centres. Electrical service has largely been restored across affected areas. Claims that homes built through Gran Misión Vivienda Venezuela – the government’s flagship housing programme, which has provided housing for 5.2 million families – were poorly constructed fell apart when those built under prior governments and by private contractors suffered similar damage. Thirteen large shelters have been opened in La Guaira, with twelve more operating across Caracas, Miranda, and other affected states and expansion efforts underway. None of these achievements erase the enormous suffering that remains. But they show that, far from standing aside, Venezuela’s public institutions and thousands of organised citizens continue the relief effort under extraordinarily difficult conditions.

Myth Four: US concern for Venezuela can be separated from US hybrid warfare.

Every genuine humanitarian contribution deserves recognition, regardless of its source. But humanitarian gestures cannot be separated from the broader political reality nor from the historical record. The United States continues to impose sanctions that have systematically weakened Venezuela’s economy, restricted its access to international finance, blocked imports of critical goods, and frozen billions of dollars belonging to the Venezuelan people. One cannot simultaneously praise humanitarian assistance while maintaining policies that make humanitarian emergencies more severe.

Sanctions and other unilateral coercive measures are often politically effective precisely because they are invisible. Unlike bombs, they rarely produce dramatic images. Instead, they slowly erode public health systems, infrastructure, productive capacity, and state institutions over many years. When disaster eventually strikes, weakened institutions are then presented as evidence of governmental incompetence rather than the cumulative effect of deliberate economic warfare. The human cost of this economic warfare has been devastating, with US sanctions causing more than 40,000 deaths between 2017 and 2018 and placing 300,000 people at risk of the same fate because they lacked access to essential medicines or treatment.

Approximately 31 tonnes of Venezuelan gold – valued at about $1.95 billion in 2020 – remain held at the Bank of England after the United Kingdom aligned itself with Washington’s pressure campaign against Venezuela. The country also faces a reported debt burden of around $240 billion, including defaulted sovereign and PDVSA bonds, accrued interest, unpaid invoices, arbitration awards, and bilateral loans. Though the financial sanctions imposed in 2017 did not create this entire debt burden, they cut Venezuela off from US financial markets and severely constrained its capacity to service and restructure its obligations. The continued withholding of assets and the debt overhang hinder the country’s efforts to rebuild infrastructure, provide housing, and care for survivors with dignity.

The most meaningful humanitarian gesture today would not be another statement of concern. It would be the immediate lifting of all unilateral coercive measures and release of Venezuela’s frozen sovereign assets for reconstruction.

Myth Five: The earthquake proves that the Bolivarian process has failed.

The disaster has revealed the capacity of an organised society capable of collective action under extraordinary pressure. Communes, neighbourhood organisations, public health networks, food distribution systems, volunteer brigades, and local institutions built over decades have become indispensable to the emergency response. Across the country, organised communities have mobilised food, shelter, transport, medical care, and volunteers through structures that long predate the earthquake.

No society can eliminate the suffering produced by a disaster of this magnitude. But societies with organised communities are generally better able to withstand and respond to such crises than those that rely exclusively on markets and private initiative. This resilience did not emerge spontaneously. It rests upon decades of investment in public education, literacy, healthcare, and community organisation. Since the beginning of the Bolivarian process, millions of Venezuelans have gained access to education, illiteracy was eradicated, new public universities have expanded higher education, and public investment in healthcare has increased dramatically. Despite the damage inflicted by US-led hybrid warfare, these advances have strengthened not only social indicators but also the forms of collective organisation that become indispensable in moments of national emergency.

For the Venezuelan people, the following measures must be undertaken:

1. All unilateral coercive measures, including economic sanctions, imposed on Venezuela must be lifted immediately, and Venezuelan public assets that remain frozen, withheld, or otherwise inaccessible abroad must be released.
2. Foreign intervention of all forms must be ended.
3. Venezuela’s foreign debt must be cancelled.
4. Humanitarian assistance must be coordinated with Venezuela’s public institutions and organised communities rather than used as an instrument of political or military intervention.
5. International movements must continue to support the Venezuelan people long after international media attention inevitably shifts elsewhere.

Natural disasters cannot be prevented. But whether they become humanitarian catastrophes is shaped by political choices. The Venezuelan people now confront the immense challenge of rebuilding homes, schools, hospitals, and communities while bearing the consequences of decades of economic warfare. International solidarity must therefore mean more than sympathy: it must reject the myths pushed by Venezuela’s enemies, demand an end to the sanctions and asset restrictions that have weakened Venezuela’s capacity to respond, and defend the country’s right to recover, rebuild, and determine its own future free from external coercion.

What is the reality on the ground in Sudan?

On 15 April 2023, war broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) – led by the head of the Transitional Military Council, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan – and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) – led by Lieutenant General Mohamed ‘Hemedti’ Hamdan Dagalo. Since then, backed by various governments from outside of Sudan, the two sides have fought a terrible war of attrition in which civilians are the main victims. It is impossible to say how many people have died, but clearly the death toll is significant. One estimate found that between April 2023 and June 2024 alone the number of casualties was as high as 150,000, and several crimes against humanity committed by both sides have already been documented by various human rights organisations. At least 14.5 million Sudanese of the population of 51 million have been displaced. The people who live in the belt between El Fasher, North Darfur, and Kadugli, South Kordofan, are struggling from acute hunger and famine. A recent analysis by the UN’s Integrated Food Security Phase Classification found that around 21.2 million Sudanese – 45% of the population – face high levels of acute food insecurity, with 375,000 people across the country facing ‘catastrophic’ levels of hunger (i.e., on the brink of starvation).

Since the war began, hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people sought refuge in El Fasher, then held largely by the SAF. Roughly 260,000 civilians were still there in October 2025 when the RSF broke the resistance, entered the city, and carried out a number of documented massacres. Among those killed were 460 patients and their companions at the Saudi Maternity Hospital. The city’s fall has meant that the RSF is now largely in control of the vast province of Darfur, while the SAF holds much of eastern Sudan – including Port Sudan, the country’s access to the sea and international trade – as well as the capital city of Khartoum.

There is no sign of de-escalation at present.

Why are the SAF and the RSF fighting?

No war of this scale has one simple cause. The political reason is straightforward: this is a counter-revolution against the 2019 popular uprising that succeeded in ousting President Omar al-Bashir, who governed from 1993 and whose last years in power were marked by rising inflation and social crisis.

The left and popular forces behind the 2019 uprising – which included the Sudanese Communist Party, the National Consensus Forces, the Sudanese Professional Association, the Sudan Revolutionary Front, the Women of Sudanese Civic and Political Groups, and many local resistance and neighbourhood committees – forced the military to agree to oversee the transition to a civilian government. With the assistance of the African Union, the Transitional Sovereignty Council was established, composed of five military and six civilian members. Abdalla Hamdok was appointed prime minister and judge Nemat Abdullah Khair chief justice, with al-Burhan and Hemedti on the council as well. The military-civilian government wrecked the economy further by floating the currency and privatising the state, thereby making gold smuggling more lucrative and strengthening the RSF (this government also signed the Abraham Accords, which normalised relations with Israel). The policies of the military-civilian government exacerbated the conditions toward the showdown over power (control over the security state) and wealth (control over the gold trade).

Despite their roles on the council, al-Burhan and Hemedti attempted coups until succeeding in 2021. Having set aside the civilians, the two military leaders went after each other. The SAF officers sought to preserve their command over the state apparatus, which in 2019 absorbed 82% of the state’s budgetary resources (as confirmed by Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok in 2020). They also moved to retain control of its enterprises, running more than 200 companies through entities such as the SAF-controlled Defence Industries System (estimated $2 billion in annual revenue) and capturing a significant share of Sudan’s formal economy across mining, telecommunications, and import-export commodity trade. The RSF – rooted in the Janja’wid (devils on horseback) militia – tried to leverage the autonomous war economy centralised around the Al Junaid Multi-Activities Corporation, which controls major gold-producing areas in Darfur and about half a dozen mining sites, including Jebel Amer. Since 50–80% of Sudan’s overall gold production is smuggled (as of 2022) – mainly to the UAE – rather than officially exported, and since the RSF dominates production in western Sudan’s artisanal mining zones (which account for 80–85% of total production), the RSF captures huge sums from gold revenue every year (estimated at $860 million from Darfur mines alone in 2024).

Beneath these political and material contests lie ecological pressures that compound the crisis. Part of the reason for the long conflict in Darfur has been the desiccation of the Sahel. For decades, erratic rainfall and heatwaves due to the climate catastrophe have expanded the Sahara Desert southward, making water resources a cause of conflict and sparking clashes between nomads and settled farmers. Half of Sudan’s population now lives with acute food insecurity. The failure to create an economic plan for a population wracked by rapid changes in weather patterns – alongside the theft of resources by a small elite – leaves Sudan vulnerable to long-term conflict. This is not just a war between two strong personalities, but a struggle over the transformation of resources and their plunder by outside powers. A ceasefire agreement is once more on the table, but the likelihood that it will be accepted or upheld is very low as long as resources remain the shining prize for the various armed groups.

What are the possibilities of peace in Sudan?

A path toward peace in Sudan would require six elements:

1. An immediate, monitored ceasefire that includes the creation of humanitarian corridors for the transit of food and medicines. These corridors would be under the leadership of the Resistance Committees, which have the democratic credibility and networks to deliver aid directly to those in need.
2. An end to the war economy, specifically shutting down the gold and weapons pipelines. This would include imposing strict sanctions on the sale of weapons to and the purchase of gold from the UAE until it severs all relations with the RSF. Export controls at Port Sudan must be implemented as well.
3. The safe return of political exiles and the start of a process to rebuild political institutions under a civilian government elected or supported by the popular forces – mainly the Resistance Committees. The SAF must be stripped of its political power and economic assets and subjugated to the government. The RSF must be disarmed and demobilised.
4. The immediate reconstruction of Sudan’s higher judiciary to investigate and prosecute those responsible for atrocities.
5. The immediate creation of a process of accountability that includes the prosecution of warlords through a properly constituted court in Sudan.
6. The immediate reconstruction of Sudan’s planning commission and its ministry of finance to shift surplus from export enclaves toward public goods and social protections.

These six points elaborate upon the three pillars of the African Union and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development’s AU-IGAD Joint Roadmap for the Resolution of the Conflict in Sudan (2023). The difficulty with this roadmap – as with similar proposals – is that it is dependent on donors, including actors that are implicated in the violence. For these six points to become a reality, outside powers must be pressured to end their backing of the SAF and the RSF. These include Egypt, the European Union, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the United States. Neither this roadmap nor the Jeddah channel – a Saudi-US mediation track launched in 2023 that focuses on short truces and humanitarian access – includes Sudanese civilian groups, least of all the Resistance Committees.

In February 2006, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez travelled to Havana to receive the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s José Martí Prize from Fidel Castro. In his speech, he likened Washington’s threats against Venezuela to dogs barking, saying, ‘Let the dogs bark, because it is a sign that we are on the move’. Chávez added, ‘Let the dogs of the empire bark. That is their role: to bark. Our role is to fight to achieve in this century – now, at last – the true liberation of our people’. Almost two decades later, the empire’s dogs continue to bark. But will they bite? That is the question that this red alert seeks to answer.

The Sound of Barking

In February 2025, the US State Department designated a criminal network called Tren de Aragua (Aragua Train) as a ‘foreign terrorist organisation’. Then, in July, the US Treasury Department added the so-called Cartel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns) to the Office of Foreign Assets Control’s sanctions list as a ‘transnational terrorist group’. No previous US government report, either from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) or the State Department, had identified these organisations as a threat, and no publicly verifiable evidence has been offered to substantiate the claimed scale or coordination of either group. There is no evidence that Tren de Aragua is a coherent international operation. As for the Cartel de los Soles, the first time the name appeared was in 1993 in Venezuelan reporting on investigations of two National Guard generals – a reference to the ‘sun’ insignia on their uniforms – years before Hugo Chávez’s 1998 presidential victory. The Trump administration has alleged that these groups, working with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government, are the primary traffickers of drugs into the US – while providing zero evidence for the connection. Moreover, reports from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the DEA itself have consistently found Venezuelan groups to be marginal in global drug trafficking. Even so, the US State Department has offered a $50 million reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest – the largest in the programme’s history.

The US has revived the blunt instrument of the ‘War on Drugs’ to pressure countries that are not yielding to its threats or that stubbornly refuse to elect right-wing governments. Recently, Trump has targeted Mexico and Colombia and has invoked their difficulties with the narcotics trade to attack their presidents. Though Venezuela does not have a significant domestic drug problem, that has not stopped Trump from attacking Maduro’s government with much more venom. In October 2025, the Venezuelan politician María Corina Machado of the Vente Venezuela (Come Venezuela) movement won the Nobel Peace Prize. Machado was ineligible to run for president in 2024 largely because she had made a series of treasonous statements, accepted a diplomatic post from another country in order to plead for intervention in Venezuela (in violation of Article 149 of the Constitution), and supported guarimbas (violent street actions in which people were beaten, burned alive, and beheaded). She has also championed unilateral US sanctions that have devastated the economy. The Nobel Prize was secured through the work of the Inspire America Foundation (based in Miami, Florida, and led by Cuban American lawyer Marcell Felipe) and by the intervention of four US politicians, three of them Cuban Americans (Marco Rubio, María Elvira Salazar, and Mario Díaz-Balart). The Cuban American connection is key, showing how this political network that is focused on the overthrow by any means of the Cuban Revolution now sees a US military intervention in Venezuela as a way to advance regime change in Cuba. This is, therefore, not just an intervention against Venezuela, but one against all those governments that the US would like to overthrow.

The Bite

In August 2025, the US military began to amass naval forces in the southern Caribbean, including Aegis-class destroyers and nuclear- powered attack submarines. In September it began a campaign of extrajudicial strikes on small motorboats in Caribbean waters, bombing at least thirteen vessels and killing at least fifty-seven people – without offering evidence of any drug trafficking links. By mid-October, the US had deployed more than four thousand troops off Venezuela’s coast and five thousand on standby in Puerto Rico (including F-35 fighter jets and MQ-9 reaper drones), authorised covert operations inside the country, and flown B-52 ‘demonstration missions’ over Caracas. In late October, the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group was deployed to the region. Meanwhile, Venezuela’s government has mobilised the population to defend the country.

Five Scenarios for US Intervention

Scenario no. 1: the Brother Sam option. In 1964, the US deployed several warships off the coast of Brazil. Their presence emboldened General Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco, chief of the Army General Staff, and his allies to stage a coup that ushered in a twenty-one-year dictatorship. But Venezuela is a different terrain. In his first term, Chávez strengthened political education in the military academies and anchored officer training in defence of the 1999 Constitution. A Castelo Branco figure is therefore unlikely to save the day for Washington.

Scenario no. 2: the Panama option. In 1989, the US bombed Panama City and sent in special operations troops to capture Manuel Noriega, Panama’s military leader, and bring him to a US prison while US-backed politicians took over the country. Such an operation would be harder to replicate in Venezuela: its military is far stronger, trained for protracted, asymmetric conflicts, and the country boasts sophisticated air defence systems (notably the Russian S-300VM and Buk-M2E surface-to-air systems). Any US air campaign would face sustained defence, making the prospect of downed aircraft – a major loss of face – one Washington is unlikely to risk.

Scenario no. 3: the Iraq option. A ‘Shock and Awe’ bombing campaign against Caracas and other cities to rattle the population and demoralise the state and military, followed by attempts to assassinate senior Venezuelan leadership and seize key infrastructure. After such an assault, Nobel Peace Prize winner Machado would likely declare herself ready to take charge and align Venezuela closely with the US. The inadequacy of this manoeuvre is that the Bolivarian leadership runs deep: the roots of the defence of the Bolivarian project run through working-class barrios, and the military would not be immediately demoralised – unlike in Iraq. As the interior minister of Venezuela, Diosdado Cabello, recently noted, ‘Anyone who wants to can remember Vietnam… when a small but united people with an iron will were able to teach US imperialism a lesson’.

Scenario no. 4: the Gulf of Tonkin option. In 1964, the US escalated its military engagement in the Vietnam War after an incident framed as an unprovoked attack on US destroyers off the country’s coast. Later disclosures revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) fabricated intelligence to manufacture a pretext for escalation. The US claims it is now conducting naval and air ‘training exercises’ near Venezuelan territorial waters and airspace. On 26 October, the Venezuelan government said it had received information about a covert CIA plan to stage a false-flag attack on US vessels near Trinidad and Tobago to elicit a US response. Venezuelan authorities warned of US manoeuvres and said they will not give in to provocations or intimidation.

Scenario no. 5: the Qasem Soleimani option. In January 2020, a US drone strike ordered by Trump killed Major General Qasem Soleimani, head of Iran’s Quds Force. Soleimani was one of Iran’s most senior officials and was responsible for its regional defence strategy across Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, and Afghanistan. In an interview on 60 Minutes, former US chargé d’affaires for Venezuela James Story said, ‘The assets are there to do everything up to and including decapitation of [the] government’ – a plain statement of intent to assassinate the president. After the death of President Hugo Chávez in 2013, US officials predicted that the project would collapse. Twelve years have now passed, and Venezuela continues along the path set forth under Chávez, advancing its communal model whose resilience rests not only on the revolution’s collective leadership but also on strong popular organisation. The Bolivarian project has never been a one-person show.

China and Russia are unlikely to permit a strike on Venezuela without pressing for immediate UN Security Council resolutions, and both routinely operate in the Caribbean, including joint exercises with Cuba and global missions such as China’s Mission Harmony 2025.

We hope that none of these scenarios come to pass and that the United States takes its military options off the table. But hope alone is not enough – we must work to expand the camp of peace.

Oslo II and the Occupied Palestinian Territory

In September 1995, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and the Israeli government signed the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (Oslo II), which initiated a process aimed at eventually creating a Palestinian state adjacent to Israel in parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). The OPT only accounts for 22% of historic Palestine (defined as the territory that was under the British Mandate). In other words, Palestinians were left less than a quarter of their historic land, and even on that land, they have little to no authority. Following the interim agreement, the West Bank was divided into three areas:

1. Area A, which is technically under full Palestinian civil and security control through the Palestinian Authority and constitutes approximately 18% of the West Bank, or 3.96% of historic Palestine.
2. Area B, which is under Palestinian civil control through the Palestinian Authority but effectively with Israeli security control and makes up around 22% of the West Bank, or 4.62% of historic Palestine.
3. Area C, which is fully controlled by Israel and comprises over 60% of the West Bank, or 13.42% of historic Palestine.

Effectively, according to the logic of Oslo II – and after the annexation of East Jerusalem and occupation of Gaza – Israel controls 97% of historic Palestine.

The Suffocation of Palestinians in the West Bank

Israel’s operations in the West Bank have been designed to make life unbearable for Palestinians. The controls and restrictions on movement have made it virtually impossible for Palestinians to educate their youth and employ their adults. Before October 2023, Israel operated 590 roadblocks and checkpoints in the West Bank, which has risen to nearly 900 since then and resulted in a near-complete stoppage of basic human activity. It has become impossible for Palestinians to access water and land for agricultural production as well as the potable water necessary for a decent life. Israel’s criminalisation of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has severely disrupted the organisation’s operations, preventing Palestinian refugees (roughly a quarter of the Palestinians who live in the West Bank) from accessing basic education, health, and employment services.

Displacement and Confiscation

Israel is carrying out ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, using tactics such as shootings, pogroms, sexual violence, and the destruction of homes and farms to expel people from their lands even more rapidly. Since the start of Operation Iron Wall in January 2025, the Israeli military has forcibly displaced 8,255 Palestinian families from their homes in the refugee camps of Jenin (3,840 families displaced), Nur Shams (1,910 families displaced), and Tulkarm (2,505 families displaced). These families are the direct descendants of the Palestinian refugees who were ethnically cleansed from their homes during the 1948 Nakba and have been denied their right of return ever since. In addition to these refugee camps, Israel’s occupation forces – which include both the formal Israeli army and armed Israeli settlers – drove 28 Palestinian communities off their lands between January 2022 and September 2023 and destroyed over 3,500 built structures, including homes, livestock sheds, and water cisterns in the West Bank between October 2023 and April 2025.

Death, Arrest, and Torture

Since October 2023, Israel’s occupation forces have killed approximately 900 Palestinians in the West Bank, including at least 190 children, and injured 8,400 more. These numbers are likely higher given the lack of humanitarian organisations to properly document the violence carried out by Israel in an area whose institutions have been deeply impacted by the genocide and ongoing occupation. Since late 2023, Israel’s occupation forces have arrested 15,000 Palestinians, many under the category of ‘administrative detention’, which does not require a formal charge (these figures are likely deflated due to the severe restrictions on legal representation). Since 7 October 2023, there have been more than 65 documented cases of Palestinians being murdered in Israeli prisons, detention centres, and concentration camps. Sexual violence is routine in these camps.

The Bisan Center for Research and Development, the International Peoples’ Assembly, and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research call upon intellectuals, civil society groups, and political and social organisations to pay close attention to the developments not only in Gaza, but also in the other parts of the OPT. The ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity cannot be ignored or allowed to continue with impunity.

What is RIMPAC?

The US and its allies have held Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercises since 1971. The initial partners of this military project were Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, which are also the original members of the Five Eyes (now Fourteen Eyes) intelligence network built to share information and conduct joint surveillance exercises. They are also the major Anglophone countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO, set up in 1949) and are the members of the Australia-New Zealand-US strategy treaty ANZUS, signed in 1951. RIMPAC has grown to be a major biennial military exercise that has drawn in a number of countries with various forms of allegiance to the Global North (Belgium, Brazil, Brunei, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Peru, the Philippines, Republic of Korea, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Tonga).

RIMPAC 2024 began on 28 June and runs through 2 August. It is being held in Hawaiʻi, which is an illegally occupied territory of the United States. The Hawai’ian independence movement has a history of resisting RIMPAC, which is understood to be part of the US occupation of sovereign Hawai’ian land. The exercise includes over 150 aircraft, 40 surface ships, three submarines, 14 national land forces, and other military equipment from 29 countries, though the bulk of the fleet is from the United States. The goal of the exercise is ‘interoperability’, which effectively means integrating the military (largely naval) forces of other countries with that of the United States. The main command and control for the exercise is managed by the US, which is the heart and soul of RIMPAC.

Why is RIMPAC so dangerous?

RIMPAC-related documents and official statements indicate that the exercises allow these navies to train ‘for a wide range of potential operations across the globe’. However, it is clear from both US strategic documents and the behaviour of the US officials who run RIMPAC that the centre of focus is China. Strategic documents also make it clear that the US sees China as a major threat, even as the main threat, to US domination and believes that it must be contained.

This containment has come through the trade war against China, but more pointedly through a web of military manoeuvres by the United States. This includes establishing more US military bases in territories and countries surrounding China; using US and allied military vessels to provoke China through freedom of navigation exercises; threatening to position US short-range nuclear missiles in countries and territories allied with the US, including Taiwan; extending the airfield in Darwin, Australia, to position US aircraft with nuclear missiles; enhancing military cooperation with US allies in East Asia with language that shows precisely that the target is to intimidate China; and holding RIMPAC exercises, particularly over the past few years. Though China was invited to participate in RIMPAC 2014 and RIMPAC 2016, when the tension levels were not so high, it has been disinvited since RIMPAC 2018.

Though RIMPAC documents suggest that the military exercise is being conducted for humanitarian purposes, this is a Trojan Horse. This was exemplified, for instance, at RIMPAC 2000, when the militaries conducted the Strong Angel international humanitarian response training exercise. In 2013, the United States and the Philippines cooperated in providing humanitarian assistance after the devastating Typhoon Haiyan. Shortly after that cooperation, the US and the Philippines signed the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement (2014), which allows the US to access bases of the Philippine military to maintain its weapons depots and troops. In other words, the humanitarian operations opened the door to deeper military cooperation.

RIMPAC is a live-fire military exercise. The most spectacular part of the exercise is called Sinking Exercise (SINKEX), a drill that sinks decommissioned warships off the coast of Hawai’i. RIMPAC 2024’s target ship will be the decommissioned USS Tarawa, a 40,000-tonne amphibious assault vessel that was one of the largest during its service period. There is no environmental impact survey of the regular sinking of these ships into waters close to island nations, nor is there any understanding of the environmental impact of hosting these vast military exercises not only in the Pacific but elsewhere in the world.

RIMPAC is part of the New Cold War against China that the US imposes on the region. It is designed to provoke conflict. This makes RIMPAC a very dangerous exercise.

What is Israel’s role in RIMPAC?

Israel, which is not a country with a shoreline on the Pacific Ocean, first participated in RIMPAC 2018, and then again in RIMPAC 2022 and RIMPAC 2024. Although Israel does not have aircraft or ships in the military exercise, it is nonetheless participating in its ‘interoperability’ component, which includes establishing integrated command and control as well as collaborating in the intelligence and logistical part of the exercise. Israel is participating in RIMPAC 2024 at the same time that it is waging a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Though several of the observer states in RIMPAC 2024 (such as Chile and Colombia) have been forthright in their condemnation of the genocide, they continue to participate alongside Israel’s military in RIMPAC 2024. There has been no public indication of their hesitation about Israel’s involvement in these dangerous joint military exercises.

Israel is a settler-colonial country that continues its murderous apartheid and genocide against the Palestinian people. Across the Pacific, indigenous communities from Aotearoa (New Zealand) to Hawai’i have led the protests against RIMPAC over the course of the past 50 years, saying that these exercises are held on stolen ground and waters, that they disregard the negative impact on native communities upon whose land and waters live-fire exercises are held (including areas where atmospheric nuclear testing was previously conducted), and that they contribute to the climate disaster that lifts the waters and threatens the existence of the island communities. Though Israel’s participation is unsurprising, the problem is not merely its involvement in RIMPAC, but the existence of RIMPAC itself. Israel is an apartheid state that is conducting a genocide, and RIMPAC is a colonial project that threatens an annihilationist war against the peoples of the Pacific and China.

Te Kuaka (Aotearoa)
Red Ant (Australia)
Workers Party of Bangladesh (Bangladesh)
Coordinadora por Palestina (Chile)
Judíxs Antisionistas contra la Ocupación y el Apartheid (Chile)
Partido Comunes (Colombia)
Congreso de los Pueblos (Colombia)
Coordinación Política y Social, Marcha Patriótica (Colombia)
Partido Socialista de Timor (Timor Leste)
Hui Aloha ʻĀina (Hawai’i)
Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) Liberation (India)
Federasi Serikat Buruh Demokratik Kerakyatan (Indonesia)
Federasi Serikat Buruh Militan (Indonesia)
Federasi Serikat Buruh Perkebunan Patriotik (Indonesia)
Pusat Perjuangan Mahasiswa untuk Pembebasan Nasional (Indonesia)
Solidaritas.net (Indonesia)
Gegar Amerika (Malaysia)
Parti Sosialis Malaysia (Malaysia)
No Cold War
Awami Workers Party (Pakistan)
Haqooq-e-Khalq Party (Pakistan)
Mazdoor Kissan Party (Pakistan)
Partido Manggagawa (Philippines)
Partido Sosyalista ng Pilipinas (Philippines)
The International Strategy Center (Republic of Korea)
Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (Sri Lanka)
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Socialist)
CODEPINK: Women for Peace (United States)
Nodutdol (United States)
Party for Socialism and Liberation (United States)

Why is there an increase in anti-French and anti-Western feeling in the Sahel?

From the mid-nineteenth century, French colonialism has galloped across North, West, and Central Africa. By 1960, France controlled almost five million square kilometres (eight times the size of France itself) in West Africa alone. Though national liberation movements from Senegal to Chad won independence from France that year, the French government maintained financial and monetary control through the African Financial Community or CFA (formerly the colonial French Community of Africa), maintaining the French CFA franc currency in the former West African colonies and forcing the newly independent countries to keep at least half of their foreign exchange reserves in the Banque de France. Sovereignty was not only restricted by these monetary chains: when new projects emerged in the area, they were met by French intervention (spectacularly with the assassination of Burkina Faso’s Thomas Sankara in 1987). France maintained the neocolonial structures that have allowed French companies to leech the natural resources of the region (such as the uranium from Niger, which powers a third of French lightbulbs) and have forced these countries to crush their hopes through an International Monetary Fund-driven debt-austerity agenda.

The simmering resentment against France escalated after the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) destroyed Libya in 2011 and exported instability across Africa’s Sahel region. A combination of secessionist groups, trans-Saharan smugglers, and al-Qaeda offshoots joined together and marched south of the Sahara to capture nearly two-thirds of Mali, large parts of Burkina Faso, and sections of Niger. French military intervention in the Sahel through Operation Barkhane (2013) and through the creation of the neocolonial G-5 Sahel Project led to an increase in violence by French troops, including against civilians. The IMF debt-austerity project, the Western wars in West Asia, and the destruction of Libya led to a rise in migration across the region. Rather than tackle the roots of the migration, Europe tried to build its southern border in the Sahel through military and foreign policy measures, including by exporting illegal surveillance technologies to the neocolonial governments in this belt of Africa. The cry ‘La France, dégage!’ (‘France, get out!’) defines the attitude of mass unrest in the region against the neocolonial structures that try to strangle the Sahel.

Why are there so many coups in the Sahel?

Over the course of the past thirty years, politics in the Sahel countries have seriously desiccated. Many parties with a history that traces back to the national liberation movements and even the socialist movements (such as Niger’s Parti Nigérien pour la Démocratie et le Socialisme-Tarayya) have collapsed into being representatives of their elites, who, in turn, are conduits of a Western agenda. The entry of the al-Qaeda-smuggler forces gave the local elites and the West the justification to further squeeze the political environment, reducing already limited trade union freedoms and excising the left from the ranks of established political parties. The issue is not so much that the leaders of the mainstream political parties are ardently right-wing or centre-right, but that whatever their orientation, they have no real independence from the will of Paris and Washington. They have become – to use a word often voiced on the ground – ‘stooges’ of the West.

Absent any reliable political or democratic instruments, the discarded rural and petty-bourgeois sections of the Sahel countries turn to their urbanised children in the armed forces for leadership. People like Burkina Faso’s Captain Ibrahim Traoré (born in 1988), who was raised in the rural province of Mouhoun and studied geology in Ouagadougou, and Mali’s Colonel Assimi Goïta (born in 1983), who comes from the cattle market town and military redoubt of Kati, represent these broad class fractions. Their communities have been utterly marginalised by the hard austerity programmes of the IMF, the theft of their resources by Western multinationals, and the payments for Western military garrisons in the country. Discarded with no real political platform to speak for them, large sections of the country have rallied behind the patriotic intentions of these young military men, who have themselves been pushed by mass movements – such as trade unions and peasant organisations – in their countries. That is why the coup in Niger is being defended in mass rallies from the capital city of Niamey to the small, remote towns that border Libya. These young leaders do not come to power with a well-worked agenda. However, they have a level of admiration for people like Thomas Sankara: Captain Ibrahim Traoré of Burkina Faso, for instance, sports a red beret like Sankara, speaks with Sankara’s left-wing frankness, and even mimics Sankara’s diction.

Will there be a pro-Western military intervention to remove the government of Niger?

Condemnations of the coup in Niger came quickly from the West (particularly France). The new government of Niger, led by a civilian (former finance minister Ali Mahaman Lamine Zeine), told French troops to leave the country and decided to cut uranium exports to France. Neither France nor the United States – which has built the largest drone base in the world in Agadez (Niger) – are keen to directly intervene with their own military forces. In 2021, France and the United States protected their private companies, TotalEnergies and ExxonMobil, in Mozambique by asking the Rwandan army to intervene militarily. In Niger, the West first wanted the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to invade on their behalf, but mass unrest in the ECOWAS member states, including condemnations from trade unions and people’s organisations, stayed the hands of the regional organisation’s ‘peacekeeping forces’. On 19 August of this year, ECOWAS sent a delegation to meet with Niger’s deposed president and with the new government. It has kept its troops on stand-by, warning that it has chosen an undisclosed ‘D-day’ for a military intervention.

The African Union, which had initially condemned the coup and suspended Niger from all union activity, recently stated that a military intervention should not take place. This statement has not stopped rumours from flying about, such as that Ghana might send its troops into Niger (despite the Presbyterian Church of Ghana’s warning not to intervene and the trade unions’ condemnation of a potential invasion). Neighbouring countries have closed their borders with Niger.

Meanwhile, the governments of Burkina Faso and Mali, which have sent troops to Niger, have said that any military intervention against the government of Niger will be taken as an invasion of their own countries. There is a serious conversation afoot about the creation of a new federation in the Sahel that includes Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, and Niger, which have a combined population of over 85 million. Rumblings amongst the populations from Senegal to Chad suggest that these might not be the last coups in this important belt of the African continent. The growth of platforms such as the West African Peoples Organisation is key to the political advancement in the region.

What is happening in Haiti?

A popular insurrection has unfolded in Haiti throughout 2022. These protests are the continuation of a cycle of resistance that began in 2016 in response to a social crisis developed by the coups in 1991 and 2004, the earthquake in 2010, and Hurricane Matthew in 2016. For more than a century, any attempt by the Haitian people to exit the neocolonial system imposed by the US military occupation (1915–34) has been met with military and economic interventions to preserve it. The structures of domination and exploitation established by that system have impoverished the Haitian people, with most of the population having no access to drinking water, health care, education, or decent housing. Of Haiti’s 11.4 million people, 4.6 million are food insecure and 70% are unemployed.

The Haitian Creole word dechoukaj or ‘uprooting’ – which was first used in the pro-democracy movements of 1986 that fought against the US-backed dictatorship – has come to define the current protests. The government of Haiti, led by acting Prime Minister and President Ariel Henry, raised fuel prices during this crisis, which provoked a protest from the trade unions and deepened the movement. Henry was installed to his post in 2021 by the ‘Core Group’ (made up of six countries and led by the US, the European Union, the UN, and the Organisation of American States) after the murder of the unpopular president Jovenel Moïse. Although still unsolved, it is clear that Moïse was killed by a conspiracy that included the ruling party, drug trafficking gangs, Colombian mercenaries, and US intelligence services. The UN’s Helen La Lime told the Security Council in February that the national investigation into Moïse’s murder had stalled, a situation that has fuelled rumours and exacerbated both suspicion and mistrust within the country.

How have the forces of neocolonialism reacted?

The United States and Canada are now arming Henry’s illegitimate government and planning a military intervention in Haiti. On 15 October, the US submitted a draft resolution to the United Nations Security Council calling for the ‘immediate deployment of a multinational rapid action force’ in the country. This would be the latest chapter in over two centuries of destructive intervention by Western countries in Haiti. Since the 1804 Haitian Revolution, the forces of imperialism (including slave owners) have intervened militarily and economically against people’s movements seeking to end the neocolonial system. Most recently, these forces entered the country under the auspices of the United Nations via the UN Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), which was active from 2004 to 2017. A further such intervention in the name of ‘human rights’ would only affirm the neocolonial system now managed by Ariel Henry and would be catastrophic for the Haitian people, whose movement forward is being blocked by gangs created and promoted behind the scenes by the Haitian oligarchy, supported by the Core Group, and armed with weapons from the United States.

How can the world stand in solidarity with Haiti?

Haiti’s crisis can only be solved by the Haitian people, but they must be accompanied by the immense force of international solidarity. The world can look to the examples demonstrated by the Cuban Medical Brigade, which first went to Haiti in 1998; by the Via Campesina/ALBA Movimientos brigade, which has worked with popular movements on reforestation and popular education since 2009; and by the assistance provided by the Venezuelan government, which includes discounted oil. It is imperative for those standing in solidarity with Haiti to demand, at a minimum:

1. that France and the United States provide reparations for the theft of Haitian wealth since 1804, including the return of the gold stolen by the US in 1914. France alone owes Haiti at least $28 billion.
2. that the United States return Navassa Island to Haiti.
3. that the United Nations pay for the crimes committed by MINUSTAH, whose forces killed tens of thousands of Haitians, raped untold numbers of women, and introduced cholera into the country.
4. that the Haitian people be permitted to build their own sovereign, dignified, and just political and economic framework and to create education and health systems that can meet the people’s real needs.
5. that all progressive forces oppose the military invasion of Haiti.

Are these floods in Pakistan an ‘act of God’?

A third of Pakistan’s vast landmass was inundated by floods in the last week of August. Satellite imagery showed the rapid spread of the waters which broke the banks of the Indus River, covering large sections of two major provinces, Balochistan, and Sindh. On 30 August 2022, the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called it a ‘monsoon on steroids’, as the rainwaters swept away more than 1,000 people to their deaths and displaced about 33 million more. The situation is dire, with those who fled their homes in immediate and long-term danger. The people camped out on higher land, such as major roadways, are currently at risk of starvation and in danger of contracting water-borne diseases such as diarrhoea, dysentery, and hepatitis. In the long-term, people who have lost their standing crops (cotton and sugarcane) and livestock face guaranteed impoverishment. Pakistan’s Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal estimates that the damages will total more than $10 billion.

At first glance, the primary reason for the floods appears to be additional heavy rain at the tail end of an already record-breaking monsoon or rainy season. A very hot summer with temperatures of over 40°C for long periods in April and May made Pakistan ‘the hottest place on earth’, according to Malik Amin Aslam, a former minister for climate change. These scorching months resulted in abnormal melting of the country’s northern glaciers, whose waters met the torrential rain spurred by a ‘triple dip’ – three consecutive years of La Niña cooling in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. In addition, catastrophic climate change – driven by global carbon-fuelled capitalism – has also caused the glacial melt and downpour.

But the nature of the floods themselves are not wholly due to turbulent weather patterns. Significantly, the impact of the rising waters on Pakistan’s population is due to unchecked deforestation and deteriorated infrastructure such as dams, canals, and other channels to contain water. In 2019, the World Bank said that Pakistan faces a ‘green emergency’ because each year about 27,000 hectares of natural forest is cut down, making rainwater absorption in the soil much more difficult.

Furthermore, lack of state investment in dams and canals (now heavily silted) has made it much harder to control large quantities of water. The most important of these dams, canals, and reservoirs are the Sukkur Barrage, the world’s largest irrigation system of its kind, which draws the Indus into the southern Sindh River, and the Mangla and Tarbela reservoirs, which divert the waters from Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. Illegal real estate construction on floodplains further exacerbates the potential for human tragedy.

God has little to do with these floods. Nature has only compounded the underlying crises of capitalist-driven climate catastrophe and neglect of water, land, and forest management in Pakistan.

What are the urgent multiple crises afflicting Pakistan?

The floodwaters have revealed a set of enduring problems that paralyse Pakistan. Surveys in May, before the floods, showed that 54% of the population considered inflation to be their main problem. By August, the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics reported that the wholesale price index, which measures fluctuation in the average prices of goods, increased by 41.2% while the annual inflation rate was 27%. Despite inflation rising globally and the acknowledgment that the cost of the floods would be over $10 billion, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has promised a mere $1.1 billion with austerity-like conditions attached to it such as ‘prudent monetary policy’. It is criminal that the IMF would impose strict austerity when the country’s agricultural infrastructure is utterly destroyed (this inadequate action is reminiscent of the British colonial policy to continue the export of wheat from India during the 1943 Bengal famine). The 2021 Global Hunger Index already placed Pakistan at 92 out of 116 countries with its hunger crisis – prior to the floods – at a serious level. Yet, as none of the country’s bourgeois political parties have taken these findings to heart, undoubtedly, its economic crisis will intensify with little recovery.

This brings us to the acute political crisis. Since its independence from the British in 1947, 75 years ago, Pakistan has had 31 prime ministers. In April 2022, the thirtieth, Imran Khan, was removed to install the current Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. Khan, who faces charges of terrorism and contempt of court, alleged that his government was removed at the behest of Washington owing to his close ties to Russia. Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI or ‘Justice Party’) did not win a majority in the 2018 elections, which left his coalition vulnerable to the departures of a handful of legislators. That is precisely what was done by the opposition which stormed into power through legislative manoeuvres, without a new mandate from the public. Since his removal, the standing of Imran Khan and the PTI has risen in Pakistan, having won 15 out of 20 of July’s by-elections in Karachi and Punjab, before the floods. Now, as anger rises against Sharif’s government due to the slow pace of relief for flood victims, the political crisis will only deepen.

What are the tasks at hand?

Pakistan is suffering from ‘climate apartheid’. This country of over 230 million people contributes only 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet it is threatened by the eighth highest climate risk in the world. The failure of Western capitalist countries to acknowledge their destruction of the planet’s climate means that countries like Pakistan, which have low levels of emissions, are already disproportionately bearing the brunt of rapid climate change. Western capitalist countries must at least provide their full support to the Global Climate Action Agenda.

Left and progressive forces – such as the Mazdoor Kisan Party – and other civilian groups have organised a flood relief campaign in Pakistan’s four provinces. They are reaching out mainly with food relief to tackle starvation in hard to reach, largely rural areas. The Pakistani Left is demanding that the government stem the tide of austerity and inflation that is sure to exacerbate the humanitarian crisis.

What is the Organisation of American States?

The Organisation of American States (OAS) was formed in Bogotá, Colombia in 1948 by the United States and its allies. Though the OAS Charter invokes the rhetoric of multilateralism and cooperation, the organisation has been used as a tool to fight against communism in the hemisphere and to impose a US agenda on the countries of the Americas. Roughly half of the funds for the OAS and 80 percent of the funds for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), an autonomous organ of the OAS, come from the US. It is worth noting that – despite providing the majority of its budget – the US has not ratified any of the IACHR’s treaties.

The OAS showed its true colours after the Cuban Revolution (1959). In 1962, at a meeting in Punta del Este (Uruguay), Cuba – a founding member of the OAS – was expelled from the organisation. The declaration from the meeting stated that ‘the principles of communism are incompatible with the principles of the inter-American system’. In response, Fidel Castro called the OAS the ‘US Ministry of Colonies’.

The OAS set up the Special Consultative Committee on Security Against the Subversive Action of International Communism in 1962, with the purpose of allowing the elites in the Americas – led by the US – to use every means possible against popular movements of the working class and peasantry. The OAS has afforded diplomatic and political cover to the US’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as it has participated in the overthrow of governments that attempt to exercise their legitimate sovereignty – sovereignty that the OAS Charter purports to guarantee. This exercise has gone all the way from the OAS’s expulsion of Cuba in 1962 to the orchestration of coups in Honduras (2009) and Bolivia (2019) to the repeated attempts to overthrow the governments of Nicaragua and Venezuela and ongoing interference in Haiti.

Since 1962, the OAS has openly acted alongside the US government to sanction countries without a United Nations Security Council resolution, which makes these sanctions illegal. It has, therefore, regularly violated the ‘principle of non-interference’ in its own charter, which prohibits ‘armed force but also any other form of interference or attempted threat against the personality of the State or against its political, economic, and cultural elements’ (chapter 1, article 2, section b and chapter IV, article 19).

What is the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC)?

Venezuela, led by President Hugo Chávez, initiated a process in the early 2000s to build new regional institutions outside of US control. Three major platforms were built in this period: 1) the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) in 2004; 2) the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) in 2004; and 3) the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in 2010. These platforms established inter-governmental connections across the Americas, including summits on matters of regional importance and technical institutions to enhance trade and cultural interactions across borders. Each of these platforms have faced threats from the United States. As governments in the region oscillate politically, their commitment to these platforms has either increased (the more left they have been) or decreased (the more subordinate they have been to the United States).

At the 6th Summit of CELAC in Mexico City in 2021, Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador suggested that the OAS be disbanded and that CELAC help to build a multilateral organisation at the scale of the European Union to resolve regional conflicts, build trade partnerships, and promote the unity of the Americas.

What is the Summit of the Americas?

With the fall of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the United States attempted to dominate the world by using its military power to discipline any state that did not accept its hegemony (as in Panama, 1989 and Iraq, 1991) and by institutionalising its economic power through the World Trade Organisation, set up in 1994. The US called the OAS member states to Miami for the first Summit of the Americas in 1994, which was subsequently handed over to the OAS to manage. The summit has convened every few years since to ‘discuss common policy issues, affirm shared values and commit to concerted actions at the national and regional level’.

Despite its stronghold over the OAS, the US has never been able fully to impose its agenda at these summits. At the third summit in Quebec City (2001) and the fourth summit in Mar del Plata (2005), popular movements held large counter-protests; at Mar del Plata, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez led a massive demonstration, which resulted in the collapse of the US-imposed Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement. The fifth and sixth summits at Port of Spain (2009) and Cartagena (2012) became a battlefield for the debate over the US blockade on Cuba and its expulsion from the OAS. Due to immense pressure from the member states of the OAS, Cuba was invited to the seventh and eighth summits in Panama City (2015) and Lima (2018), against the wishes of the United States.

However, the United States has not invited Cuba, Nicaragua, or Venezuela to the upcoming ninth summit to be held in Los Angeles in June 2022. Several countries – including Bolivia and Mexico – have said that they will not attend the meeting unless all thirty-five countries in the Americas are in attendance. From 8–10 June, a range of progressive organisations will hold a People’s Summit to counter the OAS summit and to amplify the voices of all the peoples of the Americas.

Who is Julian Assange and what is WikiLeaks?

Julian Assange is an Australian journalist and publisher who co-founded WikiLeaks in 2006. WikiLeaks is a website that was designed to publish documents leaked to it anonymously by officials from governments and corporations. The project was inspired by Daniel Ellsberg’s 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers, a US government internal document that showed the extent of its deceit in prosecuting the war in Vietnam. Between 2006 and 2009, WikiLeaks published a series of important documents that contained revelations such as the membership list of the fascist British National Party (2008), the Petrogate oil scandal in Peru (2009), and a report on the US-Israeli cyber-attack on Iranian nuclear energy facilities (2009). In 2013, the International Federation of Journalists called WikiLeaks a ‘new breed of media organisation based on the public’s right to know’.

In 2010, while based in Iraq, US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning downloaded hundreds of thousands of documents, including videos, from US government servers. She sent them to WikiLeaks with a note, saying, ‘This is possibly one of the more significant documents of our time removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of 21st century asymmetric warfare’. In November 2010, WikiLeaks partnered with major newspapers (Der Spiegel, El Pais, The Guardian, Le Monde, The New York Times) to publish the diplomatic cables (CableGate) that came from Manning’s tranche of documents. WikiLeaks also published the Iraq War Logs and the Afghan War Diaries, which contained materials that suggested that US forces had committed war crimes in both countries. Amongst these documents was a classified video from 2007 showing US forces killing civilians, including employees of the news organisation Reuters. This video, released by WikiLeaks as Collateral Murder, had an enormous impact on public opinion about the nature of US warfare.

In November 2010, US Attorney General Eric Holder said that his office had opened ‘an active, ongoing criminal investigation’ against WikiLeaks.

Why is Julian Assange in Belmarsh Prison (London, UK)?

By early December 2010, senior US politicians called upon the US government to prosecute Assange under the Espionage Act (1917). Sexual assault allegations in Sweden drew Assange into a legal net. While willing to return to Sweden to face the allegations, he wanted an undertaking that Sweden would not extradite him to the US, where he faced life imprisonment on potential espionage charges. Sweden, in close contact with the US, refused to provide this undertaking. In 2012, Assange received asylum at Ecuador’s embassy in London. In April 2019, Ecuador’s government – in exchange for what it considered a favourable deal with the International Monetary Fund – handed Assange over to British authorities. Assange was taken to Belmarsh prison to await hearings for extradition not to Sweden, which had dropped its investigation, but to the United States.

The US government indicted Assange on 18 charges related to the obtaining and publishing of classified documents, which could result in a sentence of up to 175 years in prison. However, 17 of these charges were only levied after Assange entered British custody. Initially, Assange was only charged with conspiring with Manning to crack a password and hack into the Pentagon’s computer system, which on its own carries a short prison term of up to 5 years. The problem here, it appears, is that the US government has no evidence that Assange colluded with Manning to break into US servers; Manning says that she acted alone in acquiring and delivering the documents to WikiLeaks.

Thus, the US government seeks to bring Assange to the US to be tried under the Espionage Act for soliciting, obtaining, and then publishing classified information – in other words, precisely the work of an investigative journalist. It is journalism, therefore, that Assange is being prosecuted for.

What can you do to free Julian Assange from prison?

Mobilise. Take to the streets on 25 February 2022. Protest outside the embassies and consulates of the United Kingdom and the United States. Demand that these governments respect international law and Julian Assange’s fundamental rights.

Send a letter. Sign this letter drafted by the International Peoples’ Assembly and send it to your local British embassy or consulate telling them to respect their legal responsibilities.

Participate. Follow the International Peoples’ Assembly on social media to learn more about Assange’s case and his contributions to the anti-imperialist struggle today. Share our materials with your communities and movements. Help us get the word out about why we must #FreeAssangeNOW! Register online to participate in the Belmarsh Tribunal to free Julian Assange.