By Emily Greene and Yoav Elinevsky – May 17, 2020
Saturday, a group of activists from the Latin America Solidarity Coalition of WMASS, Green Rainbow Party Pioneer Valley Chapter, Western Massachusetts Codepink, and Massachusetts Peace Action demonstrated on the Coolidge Bridge in Northampton calling for an end to US the sanctions against Venezuela, and an end to US-sponsored coup d’états and mercenaries attacks of Venezuela in an attempt to assassinate President Maduro.
In a statement to the press the organizers of the demonstration said:
On May 3, 2020, more than 100 heavily armed mercenaries employed by an American contractor, a US Green Berets veteran, landed in several locations on the Venezuelan coast. The mercenaries arrived in heavily armed boats from Colombia where they had been training for the past five months. They planned to kidnap the Venezuelan president, fly him to the US, and collect the $15 million dollar award promised by the US government to anyone who could achieve this objective.
How would we feel if Venezuelan mercenaries came from a neighboring country to the US to kidnap our president and fly him to Venezuela to collect $15 million dollars awarded by the Venezuelan government for carrying out this unprovoked and illegal aggression against our country?
The US government has spent at least $1 billion in the past twenty years on numerous subversive activities to bring down the president of Venezuela because his government is dedicated to supporting the needs of the poor who constitute the vast majority of the population. We demand an end to these policies and the expenditure of our tax dollars to destroy the Venezuelan revolution and gain control of Venezuela’s vast natural resources.
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Furthermore, we demand that our government respect international law by ending the sanctions on Venezuela, stopping all activities to change the government in Venezuela through the use of force, returning stolen Venezuelan assets such as CITGO to Venezuela, and establishing friendly relations between our two countries.
A local news outlet Channel 22 of Springfield reported on the demonstration:
https://www.wwlp.com/news/loca
