Whatever else the US attack on Venezuela is ostensibly about – oil, drugs, communism – it’s not about the freedom of the Venezuelan people.

If Trump cared about that, he would not have lifted the temporary protective status of the roughly 600,000 Venezuelan refugees in the US, the very people fleeing the tyranny and economic instability he is now supposedly liberating them from.

He would not have deported 238 Venezuelan nationals – only six of whom had been convicted of violent crimes and none of whose names were on international lists of 1,400 suspected Venezuelan gang members – to El Salvador’s Cecot torture chambers. If he cared about Venezuelans’ – or anyone else’s – safety, he would not have imposed heightened restrictions or total bans on travelers from 39 countries, 24 of which Freedom House categorizes as “not free”. These include Venezuela and Iran, whose oppressed people Trump is threatening to rescue by military force next.

What if any of those Venezuelans object to the takeover of their country? Resistance is inevitable, experts say, whether by paramilitaries, disgruntled but not defeated Maduro supporters, or puppets of China, Iran or Russia. Will the colonial viceroys crack down?

Amnesty International released a statement on Saturday expressing concern about potential “escalation of human rights violations … stemming either from additional US operations or from the Venezuelan government’s responses to the US attacks”. Trump says he’s “

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