Image by Joel Rivera-Camacho.

Washington is targeting the Venezuelan people in an escalating regime-change offensive, combining open military violence with an economic siege that has quietly claimed far more lives.

Most of the world looks on in disbelief at the now-routine murders on the high seas off Venezuela’s coast – serial killings that the newly minted War Department calls Operation Southern Spear.

On October 31, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk condemned the attacks, saying that the “mounting human costs are unacceptable.” The People’s Social Summit in Colombia (November 8-9) excoriated Washington. Four days later in Caracas, a meeting of jurists from 35 countries denounced the “homicidal rampage.” The Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild charged “egregious war crimes and violations of international human rights, maritime, and military law.”

Even The New York Times, an outlet that is not squeamish about US atrocities, described Washington’s flimsy drug-interdiction rationale as being “at odds with reality.”

The notion that the US – the world’s leading consumer of illegal narcotics, the major launderer of trafficking profits, and the cartels’ favored gun runner – is concerned about the drug plague is

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