The Trump intervention in Venezuela is nothing new. The United States has intervened 41 times in Latin America to change regimes. Most often, the interventions involved the overthrow of democratically elected left-wing governments and their replacement with military or right-wing dictatorships. The results of these interventions have typically been the preservation of extensive poverty in the victim country by shoring up longstanding elites, economic exploitation by major U.S. corporations, mass killings of opponents of the change, and consequently emigration to other countries, often the United States itself.

The claim that this intervention is about drug trafficking is a ruse. Venezuela has never been high on the list of drug exporting countries, and right-wing regimes acting in concert with the CIA have used drug exportation to raise money either to enrich the leaders of the regime or to promote oppression of the population. Trump recently pardoned a right-wing leader of Honduras who was convicted of drug trafficking.

Another ruse is the claim that these interventions promote democracy. The United States is allied with numerous dictatorships throughout the world and has suppressed democracy whenever some party the United States does not like wins an election, such as when we fostered the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile when Richard Nixon was president.

This intervention is not a courageous act, but the act of a bully against a nation that poses no threat to the American people. We certainly cannot say that Maduro is worse than Putin, whom the United States has supported in various ways since the demise of Gorbachev.

Finally, this would not have happened if Venezuela did not have the biggest oil reserve in the world. Prior to the intervention, Trump notified the oil companies who are already positioning for a stake in Venezuela. This is yet another reason, in addition to the environmental one, why we need to move away from an oil-based energy policy.

I stand firmly against interventions of this kind. We have a crisis of affordability in this country. We should be focused on that, not overseas adventures.