This is a guest essay submitted by Andreína Chávez from Caracas, Venezuela.
The Caribbean Sea holds the memories of countless African and Indigenous lives brutally killed by imperial power. From the terrible Transatlantic Slave Trade to today’s US bombings of civilian vessels, executing dozens of Caribbean people. Though separated by centuries, the underlying motives remain the same: profit-driven colonial domination.
This year, Latin America and the Caribbean honor the memory of the victims of the “Zong Massacre” on its 244th anniversary and its lasting impact on the fight against colonialism.
In 1781, the British slave ship Zong left Accra in Ghana with 442 Africans on board, which was more than twice its capacity. The captives were destined for Jamaica, where they would be sold for an average price of £36 each to work on sugar plantations. However, the British enslavers ran low on supplies after navigating off course miles from the island and decided to mass murder captives to collect insurance money of £30 per person.
On November 29, 54 women and children were thrown into the Caribbean Sea. A further 78 men were tossed overboard in the following days, while 10 enslaved people jumped into the water in an act of revolutionary resistance. Another 62 Africans had already died on board from malnutrition and disease. The story is only known because of court documents, which were filed after the insurance company sued the ship’s crew to avoid paying.
The “Zong Massacre” reminds us of the horrors of colonialism and serves as a warning against today’s Western imperialist efforts to repeat history through different methods, exploiting the labour and resources of indigenous and black nations.
The Caribbean massacre
Centuries ago, the bodies of thousands of Africans were either left to drown or to be eaten by sharks. The same is happening now, with more than 80 people having been killed since September, mostly in Caribbean waters just a few miles from the Venezuelan coast, but also in the Eastern Pacific, by US military forces. Their mangled bodies have been left to sink to the bottom of the sea or wash up on the shores of nearby countries such as Trinidad and Tobago, as happened soon after the US attacked the first vessel, killing 11.
Trinidadian villagers said that the two corpses that washed ashore had burned marks on their faces, making them unrecognizable, and that they were missing limbs, as if they had been blown up. Rather than acknowledging these deaths as likely victims of US terrorism, the New York Times, which first reported the story, described the bodies’ mutilated appearance as a “mystery.”
The victims of recent US bombings hail from Venezuela, Colombia and Trinidad and Tobago, all territories with a centuries-long legacy of Indigenous and African anti-colonial resistance. Fishing communities have reported friends and relatives missing in the past three months, believing US forces likely bombed them. The Trump administration claims the boats were trafficking narcotics, but it has never presented any supporting evidence.
United Nations officials and experts have classified the strikes as “extrajudicial killings,” a term that essentially means murder. Even if the allegations were true, the US government does not have the authority to kill people in the Caribbean on the colonial basis that their lives are worth less than American lives, as the British slavers on the Zong did to Africans.
“Every boat we knock out, we save 25,000 American lives,” said convicted felon and US President Donald Trump. Not only is this argument entirely false, but deeply racist.
US lies and terrorism
Washington has dubbed its maritime terrorizing campaign “Operation Southern Spear.” With a self-declared anti-narcotics mission, the US has stationed thousands of troops, dozens of tactical aircraft, and destroyer ships in the Caribbean since mid-August. This excessive force includes the USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, and its strike group.
In addition, the Pentagon is rehabilitating its former Roosevelt Roads Naval Station in Ceiba, Puerto Rico, where US Marines are conducting amphibious landing drills. Meanwhile, the US 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, specialized in attacks in foreign countries, has held two joint exercises since October with forces from Trinidad and Tobago, only about seven miles off the coast of Venezuela.
Two Caribbean nations — one under US colonial rule since 1898, and another, a former European colony until 1962, which shares indigenous roots with Venezuela — are being used as staging grounds for US militarism in the region, and to terrorize Venezuela’s 26-year-old anti-colonial Bolivarian Revolution, which is under threat of invasion.
The main objective has never been to stop drug smuggling into the US. This is an evil that US officials have historically welcomed because it is profitable. After all, it was American pharmaceutical companies that created the US opioid crisis by aggressively marketing addictive pain medication that kills thousands yearly, while politicians turn a blind eye.
The real objective is to prevent Venezuela’s revolutionary project. This involves halting the flow of Venezuelan oil to allies, such as Cuba and China, under sovereign agreements. The intention is to force Venezuela back to a time when US oil companies could exploit the country without restriction and the Venezuelan people were denied sovereignty.
History has taught us that every US regime change effort is preceded by false narratives to justify intervention. In this case, Washington has accused Caracas of playing a major role in international drug trafficking, a claim disproven by both the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in their yearly reports. Venezuela does not produce drugs and is an insignificant transit country in the global narcotics trade.
Around 90 per cent of the cocaine from South America reaches the US via Pacific routes and US-allied Central American nations. Deadly fentanyl primarily enters the US through official ports of entry on the southern border, mostly smuggled in by US citizens.
Despite all the evidence pointing to the opposite, in 2020 the US Department of Justice brought “narcoterrorism” charges against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and other senior officials, tying them to the non-existent “Cartel de los Soles.” A USD $50 million bounty has been placed on Maduro’s head as well.
No international court, UN body, or independent investigation has ever found the existence of a real, organized “Cartel de los Soles” entrenched in the Venezuelan state. The term was coined by Venezuelan media to refer to CIA assets within the military who were involved in drug smuggling in the 1990s. This label was later adopted by Washington and corporate media as a political tool to smear revolutionary leader Hugo Chávez and, later, his successor, President Maduro.
Washington does not care how infallible its narratives are, because its aim is to render revolutionary projects toxic and terrorize the people carrying them forward. The current military threats against Venezuela follow years of coercive economic sanctions that have killed tens of thousands of people, failed mercenary invasions, attacks on critical infrastructure and the imposition of a parallel US-backed government.
Holding on to the future
The lies evolve into increasingly ridiculous ones and the strategies for regime change vary, but at the heart of it all is the same racist US empire, built on stolen indigenous land and African slavery, which is attempting to recolonise South America. Venezuela is the obvious target because it is at the forefront of the struggle against this imposition, and is a living example that it is possible to resist and thrive despite imperialist aggression.
Under Chávez, Venezuela nationalized its oil and gas industry in 2007, bringing the world’s largest oil reserves and fourth-largest gas reserves under domestic control, with revenue funding free healthcare and education for the people. The country began to advance a new model of social relations based on community and a better life. This can be seen today in the country’s assembly-driven and self-governed communes, which are reimagining a future of life over profit, popular power and solidarity, despite the constant wars waged by the US.
Omali Yeshitela, longtime leader of the Uhuru Movement and founder of the African People’s Socialist Party, perfectly identified the current struggle as one between the colonial past that the US decadent empire is trying to “lock us in” and the fledgling new world. The 1781 “Zong Massacre” and today’s US atrocities in the Caribbean are mirrors of this struggle.
“What is happening between the US and Venezuela is an attempt to hold back history,” he said during an online Venezuela solidarity event on November 13. “To prevent the future from occurring. A future of liberation, free from the past of slavery and colonialism.”
The Uhuru leader issued a timely warning that those trying to hold us back would stop at nothing to achieve their goal, from killing fishermen on small vessels to invading Venezuela to loot its resources and to stop the example set by the Bolivarian Revolution.
“The revolution will not be terrorized,” said Yeshitela. This statement conveys more than we realize. Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution cannot be terrorized into submission, nor can it be defeated, because it has already shown the world what our collective future holds.
