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By Julian Borger

IDF soldiers tell documentary of opening fire unprovoked, and arbitrary designations of who was an enemy.

5 Nov 2025 – Israeli soldiers have described a free-for-all in Gaza and a breakdown in norms and legal constraints, with civilians killed at the whim of individual officers, according to testimony in a TV documentary.

“If you want to shoot without restraint, you can,” Daniel, the commander of an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) tank unit, says in Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel’s War, due to be broadcast in the UK on ITV on Monday evening.

Some of the IDF soldiers who talked to the programme requested anonymity while others spoke on the record. All pointed to the evaporation of the official code of conduct concerning civilians.

The soldiers who agreed to talk confirmed the IDF’s routine use of human shields, contradicting official denials, and gave details of Israeli troops opening fire unprovoked on civilians racing to reach food handouts at the militarised distribution points set up by the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

“In basic training for the army, we all chanted ‘means, intent and ability’,” Capt Yotam Vilk, an armoured corps officer, says in reference to the official IDF training guidelines stipulating that a soldier can fire only if the target has the means, shows intent and has the ability to cause harm.

“There’s no such thing as ‘means, intent and ability’ in Gaza,” Vilk says. “No soldier ever mentions ‘means, intent, and ability’. It’s just: a suspicion of walking where it’s not allowed. A man aged between 20 and 40.”

Another soldier, identified in the programme only as Eli, says: “Life and death isn’t determined by procedures or opening fire regulations. It’s the conscience of the commander on the ground that decides.”

In those circumstances, the designation of who is an enemy or terrorist becomes arbitrary, Eli says in the documentary. “If they’re walking too fast, they’re suspicious. If they’re walking too slow, they’re suspicious. They’re plotting something. If three men are walking and one of them lags behind, it’s a two-to-one infantry formation – it’s a military formation,” he says.

Eli describes an incident in which a senior officer ordered a tank to demolish a building in an area designated as safe for civilians. “A man was standing on the roof, hanging laundry, and the officer decided that he was a spotter. He’s not a spotter. He’s hanging his laundry. You can see that he’s hanging laundry,” he says.

“Now, it’s not as if this man had binoculars or weapons. The closest military force was 600-700 metres away. So unless he had eagle eyes, how could he possibly be a spotter? And the tank fired a shell. The building half collapsed. And the result was many dead and wounded.”

Palestinians carry supplies from a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation site in the central Gaza Strip. Photograph: Reuters

Guardian analysis in August of the IDF’s intelligence data showed that by the reckoning of Israeli military officials, 83% of those killed in Gaza were civilians, a historic high for modern conflicts, though the IDF disputed the analysis. More than 69,000 Palestinians have been killed since the war started and more continue to die despite a ceasefire that began a month ago.

In a written statement, the IDF said: “The IDF remains committed to the rule of law and continues to operate in accordance with its legal and ethical obligations, despite the unprecedented operational complexity posed by Hamas’s systematic embedding within civilian infrastructure and its use of civilian sites for military purposes.”

Some of the soldiers interviewed in the Breaking Ranks programme said they were influenced by the language of Israeli politicians and religious leaders suggesting that after the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals were killed, every Palestinian was a legitimate target.

A UN commission concluded in September that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. On the question of intent, it pointed to incitement from Israeli leaders such as the president, Isaac Herzog, who shortly after the 7 October attack said: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true, this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true.”

Daniel, the tank unit commander, says in the documentary that the rhetoric declaring there was no such thing as an innocent in Gaza seeped down into army ranks. “You hear that all the time, so you start to believe it,” he says.

A spokesperson for Herzog said the Israeli president had been an outspoken voice for humanitarian causes and the protection of innocents.

The programme also provides evidence that such views have been propagated by some rabbis in the ranks. “One time, the brigade rabbi sat down next to me and spent half an hour explaining why we must be just like they were on October 7. That we must take revenge on all of them, including civilians. That we shouldn’t discriminate, and that this is the only way,” says Maj Neta Caspin.

Rabbi Avraham Zarbiv, an extremist Jewish cleric who served more than 500 days in Gaza, says in the programme: “Everything there is one big terrorist infrastructure.”

Zarbiv has not only given religious legitimacy to the mass demolition of Palestinian neighbourhoods but drove military bulldozers himself and claims credit for pioneering a tactic that had been adopted by the IDF as a whole, pointing to the mass purchase of armoured bulldozers.

“The IDF invests hundreds of thousands of shekels to destroy the Gaza Strip. We changed the conduct of an entire army,” Zarbiv says in the programme.

The soldiers giving their accounts in Breaking Ranks also confirm consistent reports throughout the two-year conflict of the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields, a practice informally known as the “mosquito protocol”.

“You send the human shield underground. As he walks down the tunnel, he maps it all for you. He has an iPhone in his vest and as he walks it sends back GPS information,” says Daniel, the tank commander, says in the documentary. “The commanders saw how it works. And the practice spread like wildfire. After about a week, every company was operating its own mosquito.”

The IDF said in a statement that “the IDF prohibits the use of civilians as human shields or coercing them in any way to participate in military operations. These orders have been routinely emphasized to forces throughout the war.”

“Allegations of misconduct are thoroughly examined, and when identifying details are provided, the matter is investigated in depth,” the IDF said. “In several cases, investigations have been opened by the Military Police Criminal Investigation Division (MPCID) following suspicions involving Palestinians in military missions. These investigations remain ongoing.”

The makers of Breaking Ranks spoke to a contractor identified only as Sam who worked at food distribution sites run by the GHF, who says he witnessed the IDF killing unarmed civilians.

He describes an incident at one distribution site where two young men were running in the general rush to get aid. “You could just see two soldiers run after them. They drop on to their knees and they just take two shots, and you could just see … two heads snap backwards and just drop,” Sam says. He recounts another incident in which an IDF tank in the vicinity of one of the distribution sites destroys “a normal car … just four normal people sat inside it”.

According to UN figures, at least 944 Palestinian civilians were killed while seeking aid in the vicinity of GHF aid sites. GHF and the IDF have denied targeting civilians seeking food at aid distribution sites, and the IDF has denied the allegations of systematic war crimes, insisting it operates in accordance with international law and takes measures to minimise civilian harm in its operations against Hamas. Internal investigations of incidents involving the killing of civilians have led to virtually no disciplinary or legal accountability.

Breaking Ranks shows the mental strain on at least some of the soldiers in Gaza.

“I feel like they’ve destroyed all my pride in being an Israeli – in being an IDF officer,” Daniel says in the programme. “All that’s left is shame.”

Julian Borger is the Guardian‘s senior international correspondent based in London.

17 November 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Al Jazeera

11 Nov 2025 – One month into the declaration of a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, Israel has violated the agreement with near-daily attacks, killing hundreds of people.

Israel violated the ceasefire agreement at least 282 times from October 10 to November 10, through the continuation of attacks by air, artillery and direct shootings, the Government Media Office in Gaza reports.

The office said Israel shot at civilians 88 times, raided residential areas beyond the “yellow line” 12 times, bombed Gaza 124 times, and demolished people’s properties on 52 occasions. It added that Israel also detained 23 Palestinians from Gaza over the past month.

Israel has also continued to block vital humanitarian aid and destroy homes and infrastructure across the Strip.

Al Jazeera tracks the ceasefire violations to date.

What are the terms of the ceasefire?
On September 29, the United States unveiled a 20-point proposal, without any Palestinian input, to end Israel’s war on Gaza, release the remaining captives held in the enclave, allow the full entry of humanitarian aid into the besieged territory and outline a three-phase withdrawal of Israeli forces.

Some of the main conditions of the first phase, which is ongoing, include:

• An end to hostilities in Gaza by Israel and Hamas
• Lifting the blockade of all aid into Gaza by Israel and stopping its interference in aid distribution
• Release of all captives held in Gaza – alive or dead – by Hamas
• Release of some 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and disappeared people from Israeli jails
• Withdrawal of Israeli forces to the “yellow line”

Following mediation by partners including Egypt, Qatar, and Turkiye, representatives from some 30 countries gathered on October 13 for a ceremony to sign the Gaza ceasefire agreement, led by US President Donald Trump.

However, Israel and Hamas were notably absent, raising doubts about the summit’s ability to achieve tangible progress towards ending the war and resolving the core issues of Israeli occupation and the 18-year-long siege of Gaza.

Israel has pledged not to allow a Palestinian state, and the US has continued its large-scale arms transfers and diplomatic backing to Israel throughout its genocidal war on Gaza, while offering only vague statements about Gaza’s future.

Israel attacks Gaza nearly every day
According to an analysis by Al Jazeera, Israel has attacked Gaza on 25 out of the past 31 days of the ceasefire, meaning there were only six days during which no violent attacks, deaths or injuries were reported.

Despite continuing attacks, the US insists that the “ceasefire” is still holding.

Israel still killing Palestinians
Since the ceasefire took effect at noon on October 10, Israel has killed at least 242 Palestinians and injured 622, according to the latest figures from the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

On October 19 and 29 – two of the deadliest days since the latest ceasefire – Israel killed a total of 154 people.

On October 19, accusing Hamas of violating the ceasefire after two Israeli soldiers were killed in Rafah, Israeli forces killed 45 people in a massive wave of air raids across the Gaza Strip.

Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, pointed out that Israel controls the Rafah area and it had no contact with any Palestinian fighters there.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9t2Cx2SN3U]

On October 29, Israel killed 109 people, including 52 children, after an exchange of gunfire in Rafah that killed one Israeli soldier.

Israel also said a body transferred from Gaza by Hamas via the Red Cross did not belong to one of the captives due to be released under the ceasefire.

“The Israelis hit back, and they should hit back,” Trump told reporters, calling Israel’s attacks “retribution” for the soldier’s death.

17 November 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies

11 Nov 2025 – For decades, Washington has sold the world a deadly lie: that “regime change” brings freedom, that U.S. bombs and blockades can somehow deliver democracy. But every country that has lived through this euphemism knows the truth—it instead brings death, dismemberment, and despair. Now that the same playbook is being dusted off for Venezuela, the parallels with Iraq and other U.S. interventions are an ominous warning of what could follow.

As a U.S. armada gathers off Venezuela, a U.S. special operations aviation unit aboard one of the warships has been flying helicopter patrols along the coast. This is the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR) — the “Nightstalkers” — the same unit that, in U.S.-occupied Iraq, worked with the Wolf Brigade, the most feared Interior Ministry death squad.

Western media portray the 160th SOAR as an elite helicopter force for covert missions. But in 2005 an officer in the regiment blogged about joint operations with the Wolf Brigade as they swept Baghdad detaining civilians. On November 10, 2005, he described a “battalion-sized joint operation” in southern Baghdad and boasted, “As we passed vehicle after vehicle full of blindfolded detainees, my face stretched into a long wolfish smile.”

Many people seized by the Wolf Brigade and other U.S.-trained Special Police Commandos were never seen again; others turned up in mass graves or morgues, often far from where they’d been taken. Bodies of people detained in Baghdad were found in mass graves near Badra, 70 miles away — but that was well within the combat range of the Nightstalkers’ MH-47 Chinook helicopters.

This was how the Bush–Cheney administration responded to Iraqi resistance to an illegal invasion: catastrophic assaults on Fallujah and Najaf, followed by the training and unleashing of death squads to terrorize civilians and ethnically cleanse Baghdad. The UN reported over 34,000 civilians killed in 2006 alone, and epidemiological studies estimate roughly a million Iraqis died overall.

Iraq has never fully recovered—and the U.S. never reaped the spoils it sought. The exiles Washington installed to rule Iraq stole at least $150 billion from its oil revenues, but the Iraqi parliament rejected U.S.-backed efforts to grant shares of the oil industry to Western companies. Today, Iraq’s largest trading partners are China, India, the UAE, and Turkey—not the United States.

The neocon dream of “regime change” has a long, bloody history, its methods ranging from coups to full-scale invasions. But “regime change” is a euphemism: the word “change” implies improvement. A more honest term would be “government removal”—or simply the destruction of a country or society.

A coup usually involves less immediate violence than a full-scale invasion, but they pose the same question: who or what replaces the ousted government? Time after time, U.S.-backed coups and invasions have installed rulers who enrich themselves through embezzlement, corruption, or drug trafficking—while making life worse for ordinary people.

These so-called “military solutions” rarely resolve problems, real or imaginary, as their proponents promise. They more often leave countries plagued by decades of division, instability, and suffering.

Kosovo was carved out of Serbia by an illegal US-led war in 1999, but it is still not recognized by many nations and remains one of the poorest countries in Europe. The main U.S. ally in the war, Hashim Thaçi, now sits in a cell at the Hague, charged with horrific crimes committed under cover of NATO’s bombing.

In Afghanistan, after 20 years of bloody war and occupation, the United States was eventually defeated by the Taliban—the very force it had invaded the country to remove.

In Haiti, the CIA and U.S. Marines toppled the popular democratic government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004, plunging the country into an ongoing crisis of corruption, gang rule, and despair that continues to this day.

In 2006, the U.S. militarily supported an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia to install a new government—an intervention that gave rise to Al Shabab, an Islamic resistance group that still controls large swaths of the country. U.S. AFRICOM has conducted 89 airstrikes in Al Shabab-held territory in 2025 alone.

In Honduras, the military removed its president, Mel Zelaya, in a coup in 2009, and the U.S. supported an election to replace him. The U.S.-backed president Juan Orlando Hernandez turned Honduras into a narco-state, fueling mass emigration—until Xiomara Castro, Zelaya’s wife, was elected to lead a new progressive government in 2021.

Libya, a country with vast oil wealth, has never recovered from the U.S. and allied invasion in 2011, which led to years of militia rule, the return of slave markets, the destabilizing of neighboring countries and a 45% reduction in oil exports.

Also in 2011, the U.S. and its allies escalated a protest movement in Syria into an armed rebellion and civil war. That spawned ISIS, which in turn led to the U.S.-led massacres that destroyed Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria in 2017. Turkish-backed, Al Qaeda-linked rebels finally seized the capital in 2024 and formed a transitional government, but Israel, Turkey, and the U.S. still militarily occupy other parts of the country.

The U.S.-backed overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014 brought in a pro-Western leadership that only half the population recognized as a legitimate government. That drove Crimea and Donbas to secede and put Ukraine on a collision course with Russia, setting the stage for the Russian invasion in 2022 and the wider, still-escalating conflict between NATO and Russia.

In 2015, when the Ansar Allah (Houthi) movement assumed power in Yemen after the resignation of a U.S.-backed transitional government, the U.S. joined a Saudi-led air war and blockade that caused a humanitarian crisis and killed hundreds of thousands of Yemenis—yet did not defeat the Houthis.

That brings us to Venezuela. Ever since Hugo Chavez was elected in 1998, the U.S. has been trying to overthrow the government. There was the failed 2002 coup; crippling unilateral economic sanctions; the farcical recognition of Juan Guaido as a wannabe president; and the 2020 “Bay of Piglets” mercenary fiasco.

But even if “regime change” in Venezuela were achievable, it would still be illegal under the UN Charter. U.S. presidents are not emperors, and leaders of other sovereign nations do not serve “at the emperor’s pleasure” as if Latin America were still a continent of colonial outposts.

In Venezuela today, Trump’s opening shots—attacks on small civilian boats in the Caribbean—have been condemned as flagrantly illegal, even by U.S. senators who routinely support America’s illegal wars.

Yet Trump still claims to be “ending the era of endless wars.” His most loyal supporters insist he means it—and that he was sabotaged in his first term by the “deep state.” This time, he has surrounded himself with loyalists and sacked National Security Council staffers he identified as neocons or warhawks, but he has still not ended America’s wars.

Alongside Trump’s piracy in the Caribbean, he is a full partner in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the bombing of Iran. He has maintained the global empire of U.S. military bases and deployments, and supercharged the U.S. war machine with a trillion dollar war chest—draining desperately needed resources out of a looted domestic economy.

Trump’s appointment of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor was an incendiary choice for Latin America, given Rubio’s open hostility to Cuba and Venezuela.

Brazilian President Lula made that clear when he met Trump in Malaysia at the ASEAN conference, saying: “There will be no advances in negotiations with the United States if Marco Rubio is part of the team. He opposes our allies in Venezuela, Cuba, and Argentina.” At Lula’s insistence, Rubio was excluded from talks over U.S. investments in Brazil’s rare earth metals industry, the world’s second largest after China’s.

Cuba-bashing may have served Rubio well in domestic politics, but as Secretary of State it renders him incapable of responsibly managing U.S. relations with the rest of the world. Trump will have to decide whether to pursue constructive engagement with Latin America or let Rubio corner him into new conflicts with our neighbors. Rubio’s threats of sanctions against countries that welcome Cuban doctors are already alienating governments across the globe.

Trump’s manufactured crisis with Venezuela exposes the deep contradictions at the heart of his foreign policy: his disastrous choice of advisers; his conflicting ambitions to be both a war leader and a peacemaker; his worship of the military; and his surrender to the same war machine that ensnares every American president.

If there is one lesson from the long history of U.S. interventions, it’s that “regime change” doesn’t bring democracy or stability. As the United States threatens Venezuela with the same arrogance that has wrecked so many other countries, this is the moment to end this cycle of imperial U.S. violence once and for all.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, available from OR Books in November 2022.

17 November 2025

Source: transcend.org

By David Swanson

16 Nov 2025 – In 2007, then-President of Ecuador Rafael Correa said he wanted a military base in Miami if the United States were to continue using a military base in Ecuador.

Bye bye, U.S. bases!

More recently, however, times changed. Pressures were applied. A new Ecuadorean government expressed its willingness to do as it is told.

But there was one flaw in the new plan for the spreading of U.S. democracy by force, namely democracy. The people of Ecuador have just voted down their government’s proposal to amend their constitution to allow foreign bases.

Here is the vote count.

Sixty-one percent said No to this question:

¿Está usted de acuerdo con que se elimine la prohibición de establecer bases militares extranjeras o instalaciones extranjeras con propósitos militares, y de ceder bases militares nacionales a fuerzas armadas o de seguridad extranjeras, reformando parcialmente la Constitución de conformidad con el Anexo de la pregunta?

David Swanson is the author of War Is A Lie and Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union.

17 November 2025

Source: transcend.org

By The Cradle

President Trump has stated that a land invasion of Venezuela may be next.

14 Nov 2025 – US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced today the launch of a US military operation in Latin America, claiming to target “narco-terrorists” as part of its broader campaign to destabilize Venezuela.

“Today, I’m announcing Operation SOUTHERN SPEAR. Led by Joint Task Force Southern Spear and SOUTHCOM, this mission defends our Homeland, removes narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere, and secures our Homeland from the drugs that are killing our people,” Hegseth wrote in a post on X.

“The Western Hemisphere is America’s neighborhood – and we will protect it,” he claimed.

The US military’s Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) is responsible for projecting Washington’s power across South America, Central America, and the Caribbean.

The announcement comes amid a major US military build-up in the Caribbean near the Venezuelan coast, including the recent deployment of the USS Gerald R Ford aircraft carrier.

SOUTHCOM issued a statement claiming the operation is part of US President Donald Trump’s campaign to “disrupt illicit drug trafficking and protect the homeland,” which has included airstrikes on boats allegedly transporting drugs from Venezuela to the US.

The US military carried out a new strike on a boat on Monday, killing four people. At least 80 people have died in 20 such strikes in recent months.

Trump has said the airstrikes may expand to become an invasion of Venezuela, warning, “the land is going to be next.”

The US president has provided no evidence to show that the boats are carrying drugs to the US, nor has he provided a legal justification for the strikes, suggesting the campaign is part of a US effort to destabilize oil-rich Venezuela.

International Crisis Group (ICG) senior analyst Elizabeth Dickinson told AP that “there’s nothing that an aircraft carrier brings that is useful for combating the drug trade” in the region.

“I think it’s clearly a message that is much more geared towards pressuring Caracas,” Dickinson added.

The Guardian noted that Venezuela is not a significant source of cocaine, which is primarily produced in Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru. It also noted that Venezuela is not part of the fentanyl smuggling network, which moves the deadly drug from China to the US via Mexico.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said on state television on Wednesday that US claims of Venezuelan drug trafficking are propaganda meant to justify an attack on his country.

“Since they cannot say that we have hidden biological or chemical weapons, they invent a bizarre narrative,” said Maduro.

“No more forever wars. No more unjust wars. No more Libya. No more Afghanistan. Long live peace,” Maduro stated in another speech the following day, referencing previous US regime change wars.

Earlier this week, Venezuela’s Ministry of Defense mobilized 200,000 troops for exercises meant to prepare for a possible US attack.

“Don’t you dare [attack]. We are ready,” warned Venezuela’s Foreign Minister, Yvan Gil.

17 November 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Chris Hedges

El Presidente Donald Trump is the gringo version of brutal and corrupt dictators foisted on Latin American countries by their oligarchs and Yankee imperialists.

10 Nov 2025 – El Presidente Trump is cast in the mold of all tinpot Latin American despots who terrorize their populations, surround themselves with sycophants, goons and crooks, and enrich themselves — Trump and his family have amassed more than $1.8 billion in cash and gifts from leveraging the presidency — while erecting tawdry monuments to themselves.

“Trujillo on Earth, God in Heaven” — Trujillo en la tierra, Dios en el cielo — was posted by state order in churches during the 31-year reign of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. His supporters, like Trump’s, nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump’s con artist pastor, Paula White-Cain, offered an updated version of Trujillo’s self-deification when she warned, “To say no to President Trump would be saying no to God.”

Trump is the gringo version of Anastasio “Tachito” Somoza in Nicaragua or Haiti’s François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who amended the constitution to have himself anointed “President for Life.” One of the most celebrated images of the Haitian dictator’s long rule shows Jesus Christ with a hand on the shoulder of a seated Papa Doc, with the caption, “I have chosen him.”

ICE thugs are the incubus of Papa Doc’s dreaded 15,000-strong Tonton Macoute, his secret police who indiscriminately detained, beat, tortured, jailed or killed 30,000 to 60,000 of Duvalier’s opponents and which, along with the Presidential Guard, consumed half the state budget.

El Presidente Trump is Venezuela’s Juan Vicente Gómez, who looted the nation to make himself the wealthiest man in the country and disdained public education to — in the words of the scholar Paloma Griffero Pedemonte — “keep the people ignorant and docile.”

El Presidente — in every dictatorship — follows the same playbook. It is a grotesque opera buffa. No encomium is too outrageous. No bribe too small. No violation of civil liberties too extreme. No stupidity too absurd. All dissent, no matter how tepid, is treason.

Executive orders, budget cuts, gerrymandering, the seizure of polling stations and voting machines, the abolition of mail-in balloting, the overseeing of the vote count and the purging of voter rolls ensure fixed election results.

Institutions, from the press to the universities, kneel down before the idiocy of El Presidente. Legislatures are obsequious echo chambers for El Presidente’s whims and self-delusions. It is a world of magical realism, where fantasy replaces reality, mythology replaces history, the immoral is moral, tyranny is democracy and lies are true.

It is not only violence and intimidation that keep El Presidente in power. It is the stupefying inversion of reality, the daily denial of what we perceive and its replacement by disorienting fictions that keep us off balance. This, combined with state-induced fear, turns countries into open-air prisons. Human consciousness is bombarded until it is broken and becomes a well-oiled cog in the vast carceral machine.

The warped psychology of El Presidente Trump is captured by Miguel Ángel Asturias in his novel “El Señor Presidente,” inspired by the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera who ruled Guatemala for 22 years; Gabriel García Márquez’s “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” Julia Alvarez’s “In the Time of the Butterflies” and Mario Vargas Llosa’s “The Feast of the Goat” and “Conversation in the Cathedral.” These novels offer better insight into where we are headed than most tomes on U.S. politics.

“Everything is for sale here,” writes Julia Alvarez in her novel, “everything but your freedom.”

Dictators — hermetically sealed in the cloying adulation of court life — swiftly lose touch with reality. Conspiracy theories, quack science, bizarre beliefs and superstitions take the place of evidence and facts. Sociopathic, incapable of empathy or remorse and given to describing the world in vulgarities and childish sentimentality, dictators cannot distinguish between good and evil. They wield power solely for how it makes them feel. If they feel good, it is good. If they feel bad, it is bad. L’état, c’est moi.

“The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility,” Hannah Arendt writes in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” “he can never admit an error. Mass leaders in power have one concern which overrules all utilitarian considerations: to make their predictions come true.”

The dictator of El Salvador in the 1930s, Gen. Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, who passed a series of laws that restricted Asian, Arab, and Black immigration and who ordered the massacre of an estimated 30,000 peasants in the wake of an abortive uprising in January 1932, was convinced sunlight cast through colored bottles cured illnesses. In the midst of a smallpox epidemic, he ordered colored lights to be hung throughout the capital, San Salvador. When his youngest son had appendicitis, he brushed aside doctors to try his colored-lights cure, which resulted in his son’s death. He turned down a donation of rubber sandals for the country’s schoolchildren, announcing: “It is good for children to go barefoot. That way they better receive the beneficial effluvia of the planet, the vibrations of the Earth. Plants and animals do not wear shoes.”

El Presidente Trump is cut from this vein. He does not exercise because he insists the human body resembles a battery with a finite amount of energy. He urged the public — during the COVID-19 crisis — to inject disinfectant into themselves and irradiate with ultraviolet light. He warned pregnant women not to take Tylenol during a press conference where he babbled incoherently, suggesting it causes autism. He dismissed the climate crisis, tweeting, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive,” only to later say he was joking while claiming that “it’ll change back again.” The noise of wind turbines, he suggested, causes cancer. Former Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, he mused, may be the secret son of Fidel Castro.

Dictators wallow in kitsch. Kitsch requires zero intellectual investment. It glorifies the state and the cult leader. It celebrates a fantasy world of virtuous rulers, a happy, adoring population and idealized portraits of the citizens. In the case of Trump, this means white citizens. It glitters and sparkles, like the garish gold trophies and vases lined up on the mantelpiece in the Oval Office that have been matched by equally tasteless gold coasters with Trump’s name on them. It snuffs out culture. The National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center now opens all its performances with the national anthem. Trump, who appointed himself the new chairman of the center, posted, “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA.”

This year’s season at the Kennedy Center, where the name Donald J. Trump has been etched into the marble of the Hall of States, opened with “The Sound of Music.” The Trump-appointed interim president of the Kennedy Center, Richard Grenell, hopes to make the center’s programming more “like Paula Abdul.”

Milan Kundera described kitsch as an aesthetic, “in which shit is denied, and everyone acts as though it does not exist,” adding that it is “a folding screen set up to curtain off death.”

Trujillo raped the wives of his associates, ministers and generals, along with courtesans and young girls. Trump, who was a close friend of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, has been accused of rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment by at least two dozen women.

Julie Brown, in her book “Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story,” writes that an anonymous woman, using the pseudonym “Kate Johnson,” filed a civil complaint in federal court in California in 2016, alleging she was raped by Trump and Epstein — when she was 13 — over a four-month period from June to September 1994.

“I loudly pleaded with Defendant Trump to stop,” she said in the lawsuit. “Trump responded to my pleas by violently striking me in the face with his open hand and screaming that he could do whatever he wanted.”

Johnson said she met Trump at one of Epstein’s “underage sex parties” at his New York mansion. She says she was forced to have sex with Trump several times, including once with another girl — 12 years old — whom she labeled “Marie Doe.”

Trump demanded oral sex and afterward “pushed both minors away while angrily berating them for the ‘poor’ quality of their sexual performance,” according to the lawsuit, filed in April 26, 2016, in the U.S. District Court in the Central District of California.

When Epstein learned Trump had taken Johnson’s virginity, he allegedly “attempted to strike her about the head with his closed fists,” furious that he had lost the opportunity.

Trump, she said, did not take part in Epstein’s orgies. He liked to watch while 13-year-old “Kate Johnson” gave him a hand job.

Johnson said Epstein and Trump threatened to harm her and her family if she spoke of their encounters.

The lawsuit was dropped, most probably by way of a lucrative settlement. She has since disappeared.

Dictators are not content with silencing their critics and opponents. They take sadistic delight in humiliating, ridiculing and destroying them.

“For my friends everything, for my enemies the law,” Óscar R. Benavides, the authoritarian president of Peru said, summing up the credo of all dictators. The law is weaponized as an instrument of revenge. Innocence and guilt are irrelevant.

The Justice Department’s indictment of former Trump adviser John Bolton, New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI director James Comey, and the subpoenas served to former CIA director John Brennan, former FBI special agent Peter Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, send the core message of all dictatorships — collaborate or be persecuted.

This culture of vengeance calcifies civic and political life.

Dictators vainly seek what they cannot achieve: immortality. They flood their countries with images of themselves to ward off death. Trujillo had the capital Santo Domingo, renamed Ciudad Trujillo and the island’s highest mountain — Pico Duarte — renamed Pico Trujillo.

Trump wants the proposed Washington Commanders $3.7 billion stadium to be named after himself. The Treasury Department has released draft designs for a commemorative one dollar coin — featuring Trump’s face on both sides — to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary. There are plans to name the Kennedy Center’s opera house after the first lady. The $40 million that Amazon paid for the rights to film a documentary about Melania Trump, will no doubt replicate the fawning coverage given to Elena Ceaușescu — known as “the Mother of the Nation” — on Romanian state television during the reign of her husband, Nicolae Ceaușescu.

Huge, expensive banners with El Presidente Trump’s face adorn the exterior of federal buildings in the capital. This, along with the various Trump Towers throughout the world, is just the beginning. Flood the world with Trump portraits, emblazon his name on buildings and public squares, pay ceaseless homage to his divinity and genius, and death is held at bay.

Mario Vargas Llosa writes in “The Feast of the Goat” how dictatorships turn everyone into accomplices:

The rich too, if they wanted to go on being rich, had to ally themselves with the Chief, sell him part of their businesses or buy part of his, and contribute in this way to his greatness and power. With half-closed eyes, lulled by the gentle sound of the sea, he thought of what a perverse system Trujillo created, one in which all Dominicans sooner or later took part as accomplices, a system which only exiles (not always) and the dead could escape. In this country, in one way or another, everyone had been, was, or would be part of the regime. “The worst thing that can happen to a Dominican is to be intelligent or competent,” he had once heard Agustín Cabral say (“A very intelligent and competent Dominican,” he told himself) and the words had been etched in his mind: “Because sooner or later Trujillo will call upon him to serve the regime, or his person, and when he calls, one is not permitted to say no.” He was proof of this truth. It never occurred to him to put up the slightest resistance to his appointments. As Estrella Sadhalá always said, the Goat had taken from people the sacred attribute given to them by God: their free will.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief.

17 November 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Vijay Prashad

Backed by foreign powers, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and Rapid Support Forces (RSF) are locked in a bloody war with devastating consequences for the Sudanese people.

13 Nov 2025 – In early November, United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres addressed the ‘horrifying crisis in Sudan, which is spiralling out of control’. He urged the warring parties to ‘bring an end to this nightmare of violence – now’. There is a path to end the war, but there is simply no political will to enforce it. In May 2025, we wrote about the history of the conflict. In 2019, we explained the uprising that took place that year as well as its aftermath. Now, from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, the International Peoples’ Assembly, and Pan Africanism Today, comes red alert no. 21 on the need for peace in Sudan.

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.

Though Sudan has produced its share of poets who sing of pain and suffering, let us end on a different note. In 1961, the communist poet Taj el-Sir el-Hassan (1935–2013) wrote ‘An Afro-Asian Song’, which begins by commemorating the Kosti massacre at Joudeh in 1956, when 194 striking peasants were suffocated to death while in police custody. But it is to the end of the song that we turn, the voice of the poet ringing above the gunfire:

In the heart of Africa I stand in the vanguard,
and as far as Bandung my sky is spreading.
The olive sapling is my shade and courtyard,
O my comrades:
O vanguard comrades, leading my people to glory,
your candles are soaking my heart in green light.
I’ll sing the closing stanza,
to my beloved land;
to my fellows in Asia;
to the Malaya,
and the vibrant Bandung.

To the people of El Fasher, to those in Khartoum, to my comrades in Port Sudan: walk toward peace.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter.

17 November 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Kathy Kelly

10 Nov 2025 – On Saturday, 8 Nov 2025, Dan Perry wrote in The Jerusalem Post about Israel’s projected lifting of the media blockade on Gaza. Perry laments that Israeli censorship has left all reporting of the atrocity in the hands of Palestinians, who refuse to be silent. To date, Israel has assassinated over 240 Palestinian journalists.

Perry writes: “The High Court ruled last week that the government must consider allowing foreign journalists into Gaza but also granted a one-month extension due to the still-unclear situation in the Strip.” He asserts that Israel had and has no motive for excluding foreign journalists save concern for their own protection.

He makes two appeals: first, the duplicitous demand that Israel should use the one-month reprieve to cover up the evidence of atrocities: “Soon, journalists and photographers will enter Gaza… They will find terrible sights. Hence, Israel’s urgent task: to document retrospectively, to finally prepare explanations, to show … that Hamas operated from hospitals, schools, and refugee camps.” In other words, bury the truth with the bodies.

Secondly, that since in this conflict Israel did absolutely nothing that it could have wished to hide, it should learn not to impose absolute media blackouts so likely to arouse suspicion.

I sense a cold, hard winter within the souls of people in league with Dan Perry’s perspective.

Now, a cold, hard winter approaches Gaza. What do Palestinians in Gaza face, as temperatures drop and winter storms arrive?

Turkish news agency “Anadolu Ajansi” reports “Palestinians in the Gaza Strip continue to endure hunger under a new starvation policy engineered by Israel, which allows only non-essential goods to enter the enclave while blocking essential food and medical supplies. …shelves stacked with non-essential consumer goods disguise a suffocating humanitarian crisis deliberately engineered by Israel to starve Palestinians.”

“I haven’t found eggs, chicken, or cheese since food supplies started entering the Gaza Strip,” Aya Abu Qamar, a mother of three from Gaza City, told Anadolu. “All I see are chocolate, snacks, and instant coffee. These aren’t our daily needs,” she added. “We’re looking for something to keep our children alive.”

On November 5th 2025 the Norwegian Refugee Council sounded this alarm about Israeli restrictions cruelly holding back winter supplies. NRC’s director for the region, Angelita Caredda, insists: “More than three weeks into the ceasefire, Gaza should be receiving a surge of shelter materials, but only a fraction of what is needed has entered.”

The report states: ”Millions of shelter and non-food items are stuck in Jordan, Egypt, and Israel awaiting approvals, leaving around 260,000 Palestinian families, equal to nearly 1.5 million people, exposed to worsening conditions. Since the ceasefire took effect on 10 October, Israeli authorities have rejected twenty-three requests from nine aid agencies to bring in urgently needed shelter supplies such as tents, sealing and framing kits, bedding, kitchen sets, and blankets, amounting to nearly 4,000 pallets. Humanitarian organisations warn that the window to scale up winterisation assistance is closing rapidly.”

The report notes how, despite the ceasefire, Israel has continued its mechanized slaughter and its chokehold on aid.

In Israel’s +972 Magazine, Muhammad Shehada reports: “With the so-called ‘Yellow Line,’ Israel has divided the Strip in two: West Gaza, encompassing 42 percent of the enclave, where Hamas remains in control and over 2 million people are crammed in; and East Gaza, encompassing 58 percent of the territory, which has been fully depopulated of civilians and is controlled by the Israeli army and four proxy gangs.” This last, a reference to four IDF-backed militias put forward by Israel as Hamas’ legitimate replacement.

If ever tallied, the number of corpses buried under Gaza’s flattened buildings may raise the death toll of this genocide into six figures.

The UN estimates that the amount of rubble in Gaza could build 13 Giza pyramids.

“The sheer scale of the challenge is staggering,” writes Paul Adams for the BBC: “The UN estimates the cost of damage at £53bn ($70bn). Almost 300,000 houses and apartments have been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN’s satellite centre Unosat…The Gaza Strip is littered with 60 million tonnes of rubble, mixed in with dangerous unexploded bombs and dead bodies.”

No one knows how many corpses are rotting beneath the rubble. These mountains of rubble loom over Israelis working, in advance of global journalism’s return, to create their counternarratives, but also over surviving Gazans who, amidst unrelenting misery, struggle to provide for their surviving loved ones.

Living in close, unhygienic quarters, sleeping without bedding under torn plastic sheeting, and having scarce access to water, thousands of people are in dire need of supplies to help winterize their living space and spare themselves the dread that their children or they themselves could die of hypothermia. The easiest and most obvious solution to their predicament stands enticingly near: the homes held by their genocidal oppressors.

In affluent countries, observers like Dan Perry may tremble for Israel’s reputation, eager to rush in and conceal Israel’s crimes, clothing them in self-righteous justifications. These are of course our crimes as well.

Our own hearts cannot escape the howling winter unless we take, far more seriously, the hell of winter and despair to which we continue to subject Palestinians living in Gaza.

There is no peace in Gaza. May there be no peace for us until we fix that.

Kathy Kelly is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, board president of World BEYOND War, an American peace activist, pacifist and author, one of the founding members of Voices in the Wilderness, and currently a co-coordinator Voices for Creative Nonviolence.

17 November 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Sarah Petz

TRANSCEND Media Service Board Member, Falk says he and his wife, on the way to a conference on Palestine, were held and interrogated for some 4 hours in Toronto on 13 Nov, his 95th birthday.

15 Nov 2025 – A prominent academic and former UN special rapporteur says he was detained by customs agents in Toronto while on his way to speak at a conference on human rights violations against Palestinians.

Richard Falk, a retired Princeton University professor who was a special rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, was on his way to Ottawa to speak at the Palestine Tribunal on Canadian Responsibility on Friday and Saturday.

Dubbed a “people’s tribunal,” the event was organized as a forum to analyze and document “Canada’s complicity in the genocide and dispossession of Palestinians, including over the last two years in Gaza,” says a news release from its organizers.

But upon arriving at customs at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport on Thursday with his wife, he says border agents took their passports and led them to an interview room.

He said border agents told him they needed to determine whether he and his wife were a national security threat to Canada.

“That never happened to me in my long life,” said Falk. Thursday also happened to be his 95th birthday, he said.

Falk said they were asked a series of questions about his participation in the conference, his involvement in the Israel-Palestine conflict and his position on Israel. After about four hours, Falk said he and wife were eventually released and allowed to enter Canada.

CBSA declines to comment
Asked about the incident, a Canada Border Services Agency spokesperson said they could not comment on specific cases, citing privacy legislation, but went on to say that all travellers entering Canada are subject to “secondary inspection.”

“This is a normal part of the cross-border process and should not be viewed as any indication of wrongdoing,” the spokesperson said.

“There are many reasons why a border services officer may determine that an individual, or the goods they are carrying, require further processing or inspection.”

But based on the questions he was asked, Falk said he suspects he was detained because of his participation in the event. Falk was there to speak about the relevance of international law in the Israel-Gaza conflict.

“It’s disappointing that Canada — after having acknowledged Palestinian statehood — would take such a hostile attitude toward a very forthright conference that really explained to a public, that hasn’t been so well-informed, the nature of the objections to what Israel has been doing,” he said.

“One expects Canada to be a model of free speech and liberal democracy and it’s not as bad as the U.S., but it’s not as good as I would hope.”

WATCH | Concerns over the flow of aid into Gaza:
[https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.6979242]

Israel reopened the Zikim crossing in northern Gaza to allow more supplies into the territory this week, but aid groups say the aid that has come through isn’t adequate as winter and the rainy season approaches.
Conference organizer outraged
Azeezah Kanji, chair of the Palestine Tribunal on Canadian Responsibility, said the conference’s organizers found out Falk was detained by border officials when they received a panicked phone call from his wife.

Kanji said that prompted them to reach out to different high-ranking officials in an attempt to get Falk and his wife released.

“We can’t reveal the particulars about what was done, but the degree of disturbance about this was extreme and universal across the board,” she said.

“It’s outrageous that this could have happened.”

Sen. Yuen Pau Woo said he was contacted by the tribunal’s organizers about the incident on Thursday evening, which prompted him to contact the minister for public safety’s office.

“I am shocked that two eminent experts on international law would be treated in this way, on Dr. Falk’s 95th birthday no less,” Woo said in an email.

In response to a CBC News request for comment, the Ministry of Public Safety said the CBSA was better suited to respond.

Sarah Petz is a reporter with CBC Toronto. Her career has taken her across three provinces and includes a stint in East Africa.

17 November 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Ben Norton

13 Nov 2025 – María Corina Machado is a far-right Venezuelan coup leader who has been funded by the US government since at least 2003.

The Donald Trump administration is waging war on Venezuela, and if it can succeed in overthrowing the leftist government of President Nicolás Maduro, Machado would help to lead the new pro-US regime in Caracas.

Machado won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, despite the fact that she openly supports Trump’s war on her country. She has for years called for a US military intervention to violently topple President Maduro.

If Trump and his powerful Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio can manage to put Machado in power, she has pledged to sell off her country’s assets to US corporations.

Machado proudly told a group of US corporate executives in Miami, Florida that she is planning a “massive privatization program”, offering “a $1.7 trillion opportunity” to exploit Venezuela’s oil, natural gas, infrastructure, gold, and other minerals.

[https://twitter.com/BenjaminNorton/status/1988937942933598578]

The far-right Venezuelan opposition leader made these remarks in a virtual speech at the America Business Forum on 5 November.

Machado spoke before Donald Trump appeared on stage at the same event. She was interviewed by the Republican mayor of Miami, Florida, Francis Suarez, a loyal right-wing ally of Trump and Rubio. (He is also the son of Xavier Suarez, who previously served as Miami’s mayor.)

The following is a partial transcript of Machado’s comments (all emphasis added):

And this is amazing, super exciting for me: We will open Venezuela for foreign investment.

I am talking about a $1.7 trillion opportunity, not only in oil and gas, which is huge, and you know that there are opportunities, because we will open all, upstream, midstream, downstream, to all companies; but also in mining, in gold, in infrastructure, power.

We have, our grid right now has a 17 gigawatt opportunity of energy potential that needs to be rehabbed, certainly for technology and AI.

And tourism, you know, Venezuela has 2800km of pristine Caribbean coastline ready to be developed.

So this is going to be huge. We will bring rule of law. We will open markets. We will have security for foreign investment, and a transparent, massive privatization program that is waiting for you.

This was not the first time that Machado had made this promise.

Machado also spoke virtually at the Fortune Global Forum in Saudi Arabia in October, where she offered a “business opportunity, of more than $1.7 trillion”.

“Venezuela will be the single biggest economic opportunity for decades to come in this region”, vowed the US government-funded Venezuelan coup leader.

Machado presented her ultra-right-wing economic program at an event in June hosted by AS/COA, a corporate lobby group funded by a Who’s Who of large US companies.

US companies “are going to make a lot of money”, promised Venezuelan coup leader María Corina Machado
In an interview with Donald Trump Jr. in February, Machado again promised to sell off her country’s assets to US corporations.

“We are going to privatize all our industry”, she said, stressing that US companies “are going to make a lot of money”.

These were her comments:

Forget about Saudi Arabia; forget about the Saudis. I mean, we have more oil, I mean, infinite potential.

And we’re going to open markets. We’re going to kick [out] the government from the oil sector. We’re going to privatize all our industry.

Venezuela has huge resources: oil, gas, minerals, land, technology. And, as you said before, we have a strategic location, you know, hours from the United States.

So we’re going to do this right. We know what we have to do.

…

And American companies are in, you know, a super strategic position to invest.

…

This country, Venezuela, is going to be the brightest opportunity for investment of American companies, of good people that are going to make a lot of money.

[https://twitter.com/BenjaminNorton/status/1978107961986703613]

María Corina Machado boasts that she is being supported by Marco Rubio and other US government officials
Machado has boasted of the fact that she and her coup-plotting movement in Venezuela are receiving support from numerous US government officials, including Marco Rubio, the second-most powerful person in the administration after Trump himself.

In an interview with Bloomberg reporter Mishal Husain in October, Machado revealed, “I have been in contact not only with several officials in the US government, but also in other countries — in Canada, in Latin America, in the Caribbean, and certainly Europe as well”.

Husain asked if Machado has specifically been in touch with Rubio. The Venezuelan coup leader confirmed that she has.

“I have been in touch with [Rubio], of course, and with his team”, Machado divulged. “And I have to say, even further in Congress, both aisles, you know, in both parties, we have really good friends and champions of our cause”.

In her virtual remarks at the America Business Forum on 5 November, Machado also thanked more US government officials for supporting the coup attempt in Venezuela.

This is what she said:

I’m so grateful to the Secretary of State Marco Rubio, that has been, you know, the champion of the cause of freedom and democracy in the Americas.

I want to thank Governor DeSantis.

I want to thank my friend, Senator Rick Scott, that has always trusted us.

And now Senator Ashley Moody.

And of course, I have to say, and I want to make a special mention to our three amigos, our three friends, [Congress members] María Elvira Salazar, Mario Díaz-Balart, and Carlos Giménez, who have been so, so, so close, and always supporting us.

Machado likewise expressed gratitude to the Miami mayor, Francis Suarez, who was interviewing her at the America Business Forum, just two hours before Trump spoke at the same event.

“You have been a great friend, Francis, of our cause. I am so grateful to you”, she said.

The Miami mayor noted that he and Machado had a friendly conversation before the interview.

“We spoke yesterday on the phone, and you invited me to a free Venezuela, and I look forward to that day, where I can go with my wife, who is in the audience, to visit you in the presidential palace, one day”, Suarez said.

This was a clear sign that US government officials hope to put Machado in power in Caracas. They are confident that the longtime US government-funded coup leader would obediently serve US interests in Latin America.

Machado stressed that, if Trump and Rubio can help her overthrow Maduro, she would cut Venezuela’s ties with China, Russia, and Iran, and their next plan would be to work with Washington to topple the leftist governments in Nicaragua and Cuba.

Benjamin Norton is an investigative journalist, analyst, writer and filmmaker.

17 November 2025

Source: transcend.org