Claudia Sheinbaum, I Love You!

I have a crush on Claudia Sheinbaum, who has been president of Mexico since October 2024. Foreign leaders usually strike me as more intelligent and accomplished than the ones we produce in the US. President Sheinbaum, a climate change scientist with a doctorate in energy engineering, is no exception. I wish we had someone like her in the White House.

Contrast President Donald Trump. Trump finished his undergraduate degree at the Wharton School of Business and Finance at the University of Pennsylvania. One of Trump’s professors there, the late Dr. William T. Kelley, called Trump “the dumbest goddamn student I ever had.”

Now there’s a new reason to fall for President Sheinbaum. She has offered Mexico’s services in mediating between Venezuela and the US in order to forestall war between the two countries. The Trump Administration has yet to say whether it will take up President Sheinbaum’s offer. My guess is that the Administration won’t respond. What Trump wants from Venezuela is plunder, not peace.

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For months, the US has conducted a naval blockade of Venezuela (never mind that blockades are ordinarily violations of international law). Trump said on December 16 on Truth Social that the blockade will continue in force until Venezuela “return[s] to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.” Trump was referring to Venezuela’s past nationalization of the property of US corporations.

The Trump Administration has taken several additional steps to force Venezuela’s compliance:

+ The US has seized two oil tankers in international waters off Venezuela.

+ Trump has authorized lethal covert CIA operations in Venezuela.

+ At the end of November Trump announced that Venezuela’s airspace was closed.

+ Since September, President Trump has promised a ground strike on Venezuela “soon.” (Still waiting on this one.)

What all these actions combine to do is to increasingly place Venezuela’s economy under a US stranglehold; this is a favorite US strategy for dealing with left-wing governments in the global South. When democratic socialist Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile in 1970, US president Richard Nixon instructed the CIA to “make [Chile’s] economy scream.” Within three years, Allende was killed in a fascist coup. Democracy would not return to Chile for seventeen years.

Trump says the reason he is putting pressure on Venezuela is in order to disrupt the flow of fentanyl from Venezuela to the US. Should we believe him? Trump calls Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro a narco-terrorist and has said that it would be “smart” for Maduro to step down as president.

The New York Times, however, declares that “the fentanyl used illegally in the United States does not come from Venezuela.” Most fentanyl is produced in Mexico from precursor chemicals supplied by China and India. According to NBC News, “experts say” that “drug boats from Venezuela are mainly moving cocaine to Europe—not Fentanyl to the U.S.”[1]

Trump has designated Venezuela a Foreign Terrorist Organization and fentanyl a Weapon of Mass Destruction. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists calls this an “eerie echo” of how the George W. Bush Administration lied the US into war in Iraq with bogus claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Sink First and Ask Questions Never

Since September 2, the US has sent 30 boats with 105 people aboard to the bottom of the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. The Trump Administration claims, without offering evidence, that these were boats from Venezuela which were transporting fentanyl and cocaine to the US.

The first strike, on September 2, was a double tap strike. The initial strike killed nine people and left two survivors in the water—but not for long. They were deliberately killed—murdered—in a second strike.

According to the Washington Post, Admiral Frank Bradley, who heads the US Special Operations Command and who ordered the second strike, was acting pursuant to a verbal command from Secretary of Defense—excuse me, Secretary of War—Pete Hegseth.[2] Secretary Hegseth denies issuing the order.

Had any of the 105 victims been convicted of a crime? We don’t know. But it doesn’t matter. They may have been smuggling drugs, but smuggling drugs is not a capital offense. Moreover, the deliberate killing of persons rendered hors de combat is a war crime.

We have already alluded to President Trump’s December 16 ultimatum that Venezuela must return “oil” and other assets to the US. Other Republicans have put US war aims even more bluntly. Florida Congresswoman Maria Salazar told Fox Business delightedly that “Venezuela for the American oil companies will be a field day.” (Someone check Representative Salazar’s stock portfolio.)

Sheinbaum’s mediation offer does not mean that she or Mexico is neutral. Sheinbaum supports Venezuela. She opposes US intervention in Latin American affairs. Latin Americans know all about US imperialism. Trump has talked more than once about the possibility of a US “soft invasion” to obliterate Mexico’s drug cartels. That’s not happening on Sheinbaum’s watch. She has made it abundantly clear that she is absolutely opposed to US troops on Mexican soil. And she knows that the countries of the global South need to stick together.

Donald Trump may finally have met his match.  Let’s hope so.

Notes.

[1]  Incidentally, if you’re shopping for cocaine, skip Venezuela and head to Honduras. On December 1, Trump pardoned former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who had begun a 45-year prison sentence in West Virginia for trafficking 400 tons of cocaine. Tell me again how concerned Trump is over drug trafficking.

[2]  Washington Post coverage of the incident declared that “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. ‘The order was to kill everybody,’ one of them said.”

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