SIGN your support for the Venezuelan Embassy Protectors, deliver their message to US State Department Offices and US Embassies world wide. We will also deliver all signed statements to US State Department.
The International Action Center and No War On Venezuela are circulating the following statement from the Embassy Protection Collective currently defending the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington, D.C. They are facing increasing attacks both from right-wing coup supporters and U.S. police agencies. Please sign and circulate this urgent appeal for solidarity.
We are asking our allies to surround the embassy with love and resistance to quell the hatred and violence coming from occupying right-wing extremists. Bring supplies for the protectors such as coffee, food, hygiene and cleaning products, socks and T shirts.
We are asking everyone to contact your member of Congress to demand that they:
- Respect the Vienna Convention of 1961 and protect the integrity of the embassy.
- Obey DC law by not evicting us from the premises without due process.
- Recognize that the elected and legitimate government of Venezuela is the administration of Nicolas Maduro as have the United Nations and over 140 countries.
The Embassy Protection Collective, a group of organizations and individuals, is residing and working in the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington, DC at the invitation of the elected Venezuelan government as an interim protectorate. We have taken on the responsibility for maintaining, cleaning, and caring for the building until a permanent protectorate for the embassy, in the form of a mutual formal agreement to find third-party host countries to safeguard the Venezuelan and U.S. embassies in Washington and Caracas, respectively is established. We have received innumerable messages of support and love from around the world. We are safe in the building, and our will is strong.
The right-wing group occupying the exterior of the building is violently harassing and attacking individuals who are outside protesting U.S. intervention. They are also blocking entrances to the building, and have caused extensive damage to the building’s exterior—including destroying security cameras, drilling into doors and hitting the garage door with a sledgehammer.
Many of the members of this group of Pan-American Trump supporters outside the building are white supremacists, shouting the most vulgar racist, misogynistic and homophobic insults and death threats imaginable at Embassy Protectors and our supporters. Numerous videotaped examples of this behavior have been published online.
The Secret Service has witnessed the violence of this right wing hate group against Embassy Protectors and our supporters and against the Embassy building, and has done nothing to discourage them. While the right-wing protestors have perpetrated numerous acts of violence against us, we have maintained a consistently disciplined and peaceful presence. Nonetheless, in all but one particularly egregious case of battery, the Secret Service has only detained individuals protesting U.S. intervention in Venezuela. Examples of charges leveled against us include “Tossing Missiles”—the offense listed on Ariel Gold’s arrest warrant for trying to throw lettuce to Embassy Protectors, as the right-wing group has been blocking people and supplies from coming in the building.
Allowing unelected, failed Venezuelan coup mongers—who are taking their orders from war criminal and genocide abettor Elliott Abrams and others in the Trump administration—to take the embassy would be an escalation of international aggression. It would also be a violation of Article 22 of the 1961 Vienna Conventions, on Diplomatic Relations, which is explicit that foreign embassies should be protected by the host government and their space should not be violated even when countries are at war or have severed diplomatic relations. Specifically, international law requires:
The premises of the mission shall be inviolable. The agents of the receiving State may not enter them, except with the consent of the head of the mission.
The receiving State is under a special duty to take all appropriate steps to protect the premises of the mission against any intrusion or damage and to prevent any disturbance of the peace of the mission or impairment of its dignity.
The premises of the mission, their furnishings and other property thereon and the means of transport of the mission shall be immune from search, requisition, attachment or execution. https://bit.ly/304M2B1
