Amid U.S. military boat strikes in the Caribbean and rising tension between President Donald Trump\u2019s administration and Venezuela, UC Berkeley faculty Angela Marino and Ram\u00f3n Grosfoguel hosted an emergency teach-in Thursday to discuss the potential threat of war and its implications.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is arguably one of the most significant kinds of assaults since the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba,\u201d Marino, an associate professor in campus\u2019s theater, dance and performance studies department, said. \u201cIt\u2019s arguably even more potentially significant in the geopolitical framework.\u201d<\/p>\n
An estimated 15,000 troops have mobilized in and around Venezuela, accompanied by fighter jets, a nuclear submarine and missiles pointed directly at the country, according to Marino. More than 70 people have died in strikes targeting boats carrying alleged \u201cnarco-terrorists,\u201d dubbed by U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.<\/p>\n
U.S. officials have not provided any evidence that the ships attacked were smuggling drugs.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe moment you put the word terrorism (in a phrase such as \u2018narcoterrorism\u2019) \u2026 according to the laws created after 9\/11 \u2026 the USA has built itself authorization to invade a country without being attacked by that country,\u201d ethnic studies professor Grosfoguel said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
According to Grosfoguel, the U.S. presence in Venezuela is focused on resource acquisition, as Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Grosfoguel referenced the Iraq war in parallel, describing how the U.S. government developed a narrative of \u201cweapons of mass destruction\u201d in order to convince the American public that the government had plausible justification for invasion.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is an explicit violation of international law. It\u2019s a violation of national sovereignty, it\u2019s a violation of due process and it\u2019s also a violation of the United States interest that they are claiming to uphold,\u201d Marino said. \u201cIt is not in people\u2019s interest to blow boats out of the water with no evidence.\u201d<\/p>\n
In holding the event, Marino hoped to provide perspective and analysis not offered by mainstream media.\u00a0<\/p>\n
UC Berkeley alum Ramon Quintero, who was one of Grosfoguel\u2019s students, said he attended the event to become more informed. Quintero reported feeling a lack of critical voices in the current media.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Local public school teacher and human rights activist Seth Donnelly cited a commitment to learning, as well as concern that \u201cit\u2019s our tax dollars that are paying for these warships.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can go war after war and you\u2019re going to see the same patterns. It\u2019s like a replay of the same story,\u201d Grosfoguel said. \u201c(The U.S. government) always comes out with some fake news and this is always to get the American public on the side of invasion \u2014\u00a0and now they\u2019re doing the same thing with Venezuela.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
From Marino\u2019s perspective, the United States has already passed a potential threshold that could move the country into war.<\/p>\n
She said the UC system has to make a decision in regards to federal funding for weapons research.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have been enabling the United States to far exceed any other nation in the world with trillions of dollars of advancement for weaponry that makes this kind of imperialist aggression the result,\u201d Marino said. \u201cThis is the outcome.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Amid U.S. military boat strikes in the Caribbean and rising tension between President Donald Trump\u2019s administration and Venezuela,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":53184,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[27463,33591,33590,33593,33594,33595,143,145,144,33592,149,9298],"class_list":{"0":"post-53183","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-oakland","8":"tag-american","9":"tag-angela-marino","10":"tag-caribbean","11":"tag-cuban-missile-crisis","12":"tag-defense-secretary-pete-hegseth","13":"tag-iraq","14":"tag-oakland","15":"tag-oakland-headlines","16":"tag-oakland-news","17":"tag-ramn-grosfoguel","18":"tag-uc-berkeley","19":"tag-venezuela"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53183\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}