Caribbean group urges UN to act

The Assembly of Caribbean People is condemning the actions of the United States in Venezuela last weekend, saying the Americans were acting in contravention of the United Nations (UN) Charter.

During a virtual regional press conference yesterday hosted by the assembly’s Regional Executive Committee, David Abdulah, the regional executive, read from an open letter written to the UN entitled: The United States Is Tearing Up The Charter Of The United Nations – It Must Be Stopped.

It was addressed to Secretary General António Guterres and president of the General Assembly Annalena Baerbock.

“On Saturday, January 3, 2026, members of the armed forces of the US, on the directive of the president of that country, invaded the sovereign state of the Bolivarian republic of Venezuela. The US military bombed a number of locations in Venezuela, targeting civilian and military installations, took action to disable Venezuelan communication systems used for its defence and to cut off electrical power from certain areas. At the same time, military forces landed in Caracas, the capital city of the Bolivarian republic, and kidnapped the President of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, and the First Lady, Cilia Flores, in a violent attack on their residence.

Territorial integrity

“The US military killed some 40 Venezuelan security personnel and 32 Cuban security personnel who were tasked with the protection of the president of Venezuela. A number of Venezuelan civilians were also killed, and homes damaged or destroyed by the violent bombing. The US military then took the kidnapped president of Venezuela and his wife out of the country and into the US, where they were placed in a US jail in Brooklyn, New York,” he said.

Abdulah declared this act was in contravention of UN Charter Article 2(4), which states: “All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.” He added: “The US has gone further as its president, without any concern whatsoever for the UN Charter, has continued to threaten the territorial integrity and political independence of the state of Venezuela, where he publicly announced that the US would now, ‘Run Venezuela, that we are in charge’, and further, that if the vice-president, and now constitutionally installed temporary president of Venezuela, did not behave and do what she is told by Washington, she would suffer a fate worse than President Maduro,” he said.

False premise

As such, he stated, they were urging the UN to use its power and influence to compel the US to reverse its position. Failure to do so, he added, could spell the end of the UN itself.

“Excellencies, the issue before you is simple: What are you going to do to keep the UN from destruction? For this is what is facing you and all member states. If the charter can be so brazenly torn up by the US on the basis that it has enough military and economic power to attack Venezuela and kidnap its president; threaten the constitutional temporary president; state that it is going to run that country and take all of its land, oil and resources; announce that other sovereign states, Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, and their leaders are next and that it will seize Greenland, which is part of the sovereign state of Denmark; bomb Nigeria on the false premise that Christians are being killed; openly tell the people of sovereign Honduras who to vote for or else they will be punished with sanctions and tariffs; and unilaterally impose tariffs on Brazil because it does not agree with the decision of that country’s Supreme Court, then the UN has totally lost its credibility and its life will be at an end.

“This has now been amplified by the outrageous and downright dangerous decision by Trump to pull the US out of some 66 international organisations, of which more than 30 are UN organisations, including the vitally important UN Framework Convention On Climate Change,” Abdulah said.

Abdulah stressed that the US had “thrown down the gauntlet” against the world, where it will do as it pleases and “the devil take the hindmost”.

“We will then return to the law of the jungle, where might is right, gun mode diplomacy rules the world, and life will be poorer, nastier, more brutish and shorter for the vast majority of the nations of the world and their citizens, even as the multi-billionaire class counts their wealth in the trillions.”

(CA)

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