 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. The entire world is struggling with the fallout of COVID-19, but for the US administration, the priorities seem very clear. Today, the Justice Department in the Attorney General in the United States initiated an indictment to Venezuela and President Nicolas Maduro and a lot of the top officials in the country on charges of narco terrorism. To talk more about this, we have with us Vijay Prashad. Vijay, thank you so much for joining us. So, as we've talked about there's been a huge debate about the fact that the sanctions are causing so much problems to the people of Venezuela. It's criminal. It's almost a war crime. And at this point, we have the top officials, the US Justice Department coming out with a story which seems straight out to the pages of fiction. It's so fantastical. And so, what's your response to this? I mean, look, let's say, let's be frank, that this is a global pandemic that the world is dealing with COVID-19. There are cases now inside Venezuela. Of course, Iran has been hit very hard by COVID-19. The International Court of Justice has asked the United States to suspend sanctions on Iran. There is indeed a global campaign against the sanctions regime by the United States, unilateral sanctions against both Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and 48 other countries. In the middle of this, of course, comes this very bizarre indictment of Mr. Maduro and some leaders in the Venezuelan government. But let's take a broader look at it. I mean, this Trump administration has actually tried to, in material terms, destabilize the government of Nicolas Maduro from January of 2019. They put up the pretender, president Mr. Guaido. They've made moves to further prevent Venezuela from doing business. They've essentially blockaded Venezuela from accessing shipping. They've worked with the Colombian government to amass troops on the Colombia-Venezuela border and threatened Venezuela. The government of Canada has led a group called the Lima Group, which has again tried to destabilize and isolate Venezuela diplomatically in the region and so on. So they've been doing all these things and yet haven't succeeded in overthrowing the government of Nicolas Maduro and the Bolivarian Revolution. They haven't succeeded. On the contrary, in fact, it seems strengthened the political legitimacy of Mr. Maduro and his government inside Venezuela. So out of all this failure in the midst of an international humanitarian tragedy, and I'm talking now of a global pandemic, the United States government decides on a very bizarre indictment. You know, I just want to say that it's on the one side, as you quite rightly said, bizarre and so on. On the other side is chilling because the script for this was written in 1989 when the United States government started against Manuel Noriega of Panama by saying that he was involved in NACO terrorism and so on. And essentially by putting a bounty on the head of an elected leader of a government, you're essentially calling for assassination. You're calling for gangsters to go out there and attempt to kill somebody. This is essentially a public call for assassination. And I hope very much that countries around the world take cognizance of the fact that today in March 2020, when the world is struggling with COVID-19, the United States government essentially put out a hit against the head of a government. And the other key question, of course, is the fact that the charge is that for decades together now, the top leadership of Venezuela, people who are very much a part of the institutional structure have been trying to destabilize the society of the United States by smuggling and cooking. And this also ignores a lot of the local and regional politics there because for some reason, Colombia, which is under Uribe, for instance, was very much involved in all this, is being described as an ally of the United States. Yeah, it's a curious matter. You know, when the FARC, which is the left-wing guerrilla movement inside Colombia, opened a peace process with the government of Colombia. The government of Colombia at the time was quite sympathetic to this process, but the ruling elites in Colombia, the United States government and so on, very much opposed to the peace process. In fact, they didn't want it. They wanted to prosecute this war, you know, let's call it Sri Lankan style, you know, where the Sri Lankan government basically prosecuted their war against the Tamil Tigers to the very end. This was, in a sense, what they wanted to do in Colombia, but it didn't work out that way. And there is a kind of peace process in place now in Colombia. Just this last month, you know, about 20 leaders of social movements have been assassinated in Colombia. Not a word about that from the United States government about these assassinations, this destabilization of the peace process. So there's been this long-standing charge about narco trafficking and the blame has been pointed at FARC, which is again this left-wing insurgency inside Colombia. Not much of a blame placed on the right-wing paramilitaries for whom there has been open evidence of narco trafficking and so on. There is an indictment against the president of Honduras, the US ally, for his role in narco trafficking. I don't see any big press conference about that. This is not about narco trafficking. The United States government is merely using the discourse of narco trafficking, using this anxiety in the US about drugs coming in and flooding the market and so on, to further destabilize the image of the Venezuelan government and the government itself. I think this is important that people see both things are on the table. They're destabilizing the image. They're trying to portray Nicolas Maduro as a narco trafficker and they're destabilizing the government because as I said, they put a hit now against the head of a government. This is a very serious situation that a country like Venezuela finds itself in and even more I think people who are sensitive people who are interested in human rights need to really stand up now and condemn the way in which the country of Venezuela has been treated by the Trump administration. And especially like you mentioned, there was also a reference in the press conference to the fact that if Maduro travels outside, some of these indictments might be applicable. There was a hint given that basically an invitation to external authorities to sort of work with the United States on this. This is very disturbing. I mean what they're doing is by say first removing the country of Venezuela from the Organization of American States, when the International Monetary Fund last week announced a $1 trillion corpus saying that the IMF would provide any assistance to member countries that are suffering from the COVID-19 economic and medical disaster, Venezuela in good faith applied for a tranche out of this $1 trillion. It's amazing. Normally, the IMF takes weeks to respond. In this case, within 24 hours, the IMF denied Venezuela's request. And when I talked to people at the IMF, they said the reason is because the government of Mr. Maduro is not internationally recognized. Now they didn't say that he's not internationally recognized either. That's because the member states in the IMF are divided. Nonetheless, on the IMF website itself, it names the finance minister of Mr. Maduro's government as the legitimate finance minister of Venezuela. So you know that it's not the IMF that refused the money to Venezuela. It was the US Treasury Department that informed the IMF that they could not make this disbursement of cash to the Venezuelan government. This kind of pressure against Venezuela coming at a time when the world is struggling with a pandemic in the United States itself, in New York City, the hospital in Elmhurst under immense pressure. Why should the US government not concentrate and focus its attention on saving its own people from COVID-19 rather than prosecuting this ridiculous war against Venezuela? Right. And it's crazy because William Barr actually said that this was a good time to do this because the government of Maduro was preventing aid from entering Venezuela, which is a total falsehood. The government of Venezuela is not preventing aid. In fact, aid did come in from the Russian government. What the Venezuelan government wants to do is to access the money that is its own, which has been seized by the Bank of London in the United Kingdom, seized by American banks, its own assets, the SICO assets in the US. It wants to be able to access this so it can buy medical equipment. It doesn't need aid. And let's put this directly at the table. The World Health Organization was applying medical supplies into Iran. These medical supplies were in the United Arab Emirates. Because of US pressure, airlines did not want to carry medical supplies from the WHO into Iran and even the United Arab Emirates government, which has problems with the Iranian government, nonetheless, allowed its military planes to fly into Tehran to carry those supplies. So let's not allow ourselves to accept Mr. Barr's comment that Venezuela is denying aid or that Iran is denying aid. These countries are open to buying material. They are open to receiving material. It's the United States and its unilateral sanctions that are preventing it from doing what is its right. But thank you so much for talking to us.