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Brasil de Fato – The United States has been threatening Venezuela for quite some time. Sanctions have been in place for more than eight years and have become increasingly harsh over time. In addition to attacks on ships near the Venezuelan coast, Trump has spoken about authorizing the CIA to conduct covert operations on Venezuelan soil. Is this linked to the idea of deposing the president and taking Venezuelan oil?

João Pedro Stédile – The situation in Venezuela and the tension it has been experiencing from the US government goes back a long way, since Hugo Chávez was elected. When they realized that this was a revolutionary process of the Bolivarian project, the United States immediately activated its hybrid warfare methods.

For 25 years, the United States has been using a different tactic, trying to overthrow the [Nicolás] Maduro government now, and Chávez before that. They even staged a coup in 2002, arrested Chávez, and almost shot him. The then cardinal in Caracas [Ignacio Velasco], who went to prison to give him last rites, was involved in the coup and was at the Miraflores Palace in 2002, already with a coup leader beloved by the United States, María Corina [Machado, the main opposition leader in Venezuela].

The process was accelerated by the Trump administration, a mixture of madness and fascism. He thinks that, with brute force, he can overthrow the Maduro government and hand it over to María Corina on a silver platter. Part of this tactic was awarding her the Nobel Prize.

Even the stones know that, in recent years and decades, the Nobel Peace Prize, which has a specific council in Norway, unlike the scientific prizes for Chemistry, Economics, and Literature, has been manipulated by the interests of the United States. The prize no longer comes from the stamp collection or dynamite of Mr. Alfred Nobel and his heirs, but from American oil companies. These facts paint a true picture of what is happening in Venezuela.

Brasil de Fato - The Venezuelan government has said it does not want war. Even with the anti-imperialist sentiment among the population, is there a real risk of confrontation with the United States and the potential for a major disaster?

Stédile - The United States is making a tragic mistake because it is basing its actions solely on information from the extreme right. It is as if the Trump administration, in its relations with Brazil, were basing its actions solely on reports from [federal deputy] Eduardo Bolsonaro. Everyone knows that he is a fascist, a liar, and a manipulator.

The same scenario is happening with María Corina. She has been telling the Trump administration: “Just kill Maduro and the masses will rise up and we will take power.” In addition, for more than ten years, the United States has no longer had an embassy in Caracas, which makes it difficult for CIA informants to produce reports that are more reliable and reflect reality.

The Maduro government did the right thing. They remained transparent throughout, explaining what was happening to the population and mobilizing them. Today, 5.5 million adult workers are willing to take up arms to defend their territory. The government, together with the Armed Forces, has every right to do so and is conducting defense exercises for the population every Saturday and Sunday.

The Maduro government is not afraid of an American invasion, even if it costs a lot of sacrifice and lives. I was there a week ago and saw how calm the population is. Never before has the Maduro government had so much popular support. During election periods, which are more tense, he reached 60%; 10 to 15% supported the extreme right, and a large portion remained outside the political dispute. The latest polls show that the Maduro government has 90% support from the population and María Corina's 10% remains unchanged.

I think the United States will suffer a historic defeat, just as it did in Afghanistan and Vietnam. It looks very much like that. A ground incursion into Venezuela would certainly be very costly for the United States.

Brasil de Fato - The Brazilian government was slow to take a position. Lula initially said he would not comment, then advocated maintaining channels of dialogue with Venezuela and addressed the issue at the UN. What should the Brazilian government do?

Stédile - The diplomatic corps of Itamaraty and the historical experience of the Lula administration in its other terms do not prepare us for situations of conflict and heightened tension. We, with our Brazilian cultural idiocrasy, have never experienced a period of war, so we always opt for calm and peace, and this is reflected in a lukewarm discourse.

I think the Brazilian government is not realizing the gravity of the situation, because if the United States invades Venezuela and makes this mistake, it will end up involving Colombia, since the Armed Forces there are divided and it is not unlikely that, if a ground invasion of Venezuela breaks out, some pro-American forces in Colombia will end up getting involved in the conflict. This means that we would have an expanded conflict in that region, with all the consequences we can imagine.

It is time for the Lula administration to take more decisive action and express more active solidarity with Venezuela. If it does not want to expose itself alone, it can coordinate a joint statement with Mexico and Colombia because they have already spoken out individually and very forcefully against the United States' aggression. Another step is to publicly announce that they will not attend the Summit of the Americas in the Dominican Republic, scheduled for early December.

The Dominican Republic has been a colony of the United States since the coup they staged in 1965 with the participation of the Brazilian Army. Since then, it has been a small Puerto Rico, where the United States does whatever it wants: turning the Dominican Republic into nothing more than a tourist destination. The next Summit of the Americas will be in Santo Domingo, and they, due to risk, have prevented Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua from participating.

Those who had a little dignity, such as the Mexican and Colombian governments, have already stated that they will not attend. Bolivia and Honduras will probably not attend either. The next Summit of the Americas will, in fact, be the summit of North Americans. Brazil needs to speak out on this.

If the United States is exerting all this military pressure to try to recover Venezuela's oil, and María Corina's statements yesterday on CNN in the United States, in good English, announced that if she comes to power after the invasion, her first act will be to privatize PDVSA [Petróleos de Venezuela] and hand over other Venezuelan resources—I imagine iron, aluminum, gold, which they have a lot of—to American companies for exploitation.

This little fascist is eager to commit this absurdity, but I am absolutely certain: regardless of the Maduro government, the Venezuelan people will not allow this level of surrender to happen there.

However, the aggressions that Venezuela, Colombia, and Cuba have been suffering have exceeded the level of common sense and would require more forceful measures from the Brazilian government, even if only from the point of view of discourse and rhetoric, as Lula personally did in the case of Palestine because it was evident and unacceptable to the eyes of all humanity what the fascist government of Israel was committing in the Palestinian genocide.

Brasil de Fato - How can popular movements in Latin America act more concretely in solidarity with the country?

Stédile - At this event, which I attended in Venezuela, at the World Congress in Defense of Mother Earth, there were delegations from 65 countries and 3,000 delegates from Venezuela itself. At that meeting, we agreed, and I even put it to a vote in the Congress Assembly, that we, the movements of Latin America, will hold meetings and are already consulting with each other to organize, as soon as possible, internationalist brigades of activists from each of our countries to go to Venezuela and place ourselves at the disposal of the Venezuelan government and people.

We want to repeat that historic epic that the world's left wing carried out during the Spanish Civil War of 1936, when thousands of militants from around the world went to Spain to defend the Republic and the Spanish people. Unfortunately, they were defeated. The person who coordinated the Brazilian Internationalist Brigade at that time was Apolônio de Carvalho, perhaps the most internationalist militant of the Brazilian left we have ever had in our entire history.

Inspired by the legacy of Apolônio de Carvalho, we are now driven to organize brigades of militants to go to Venezuela. If what we are going to do there is engage in combat: of course not! We have no military training for that, nor should we. The Venezuelan people know how to defend themselves, but we, with the presence of militants, can do a thousand and one things, from planting beans and cooking food for the soldiers to standing alongside the people if there is a military invasion by the United States.