The Trump administration’s abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife on January 3 was met with widespread condemnation in the labor movement, including from PSC members. “We join the international labor community in condemning President Trump’s unconstitutional actions in Venezuela,” the AFL-CIO said on Twitter.
Many PSC members are old enough to remember the Second Iraq War, waged during the fervor of the 9/11 aftermath and considered by many a quest for oil. The Trump administration has made no secret that it wants to control the resources of oil-rich Venezuela. Maduro has been charged in Manhattan with running a criminal drug enterprise as a part of the administration’s war on drugs coming into the country. That’s a pretty absurd situation given that the president pardoned former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted on serious drug charges.
Citing a long history of US racism and imperialist intervention in Latin America, the PSC Delegate Assembly in December adopted a resolution opposing any US intervention in Venezuela. “Be it resolved, that the PSC opposes any U.S. military intervention, coercive action, or aggression against Venezuela and any regional expansion of the conflict,” it said. “Be it further resolved, that the PSC will bring this resolution forward for consideration by our state affiliate NYSUT, and our national affiliate the AFT, in order to help build a broad labor movement that opposes US intervention in Venezuela and supports sovereignty, peace, and international law in the Americas.”
The resolution was drafted by the union’s International Committee. For many in the PSC, the intervention in Venezuela is a part of Trump’s broader campaign against immigrants and flouting of international law to undermine other left-leaning governments in Latin America like Colombia and Mexico.
“For the PSC and the US labor movement at large to mobilize against the U.S. attack on Venezuela and the abduction of Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores is a crucial expression of basic working-class solidarity, the heart of genuine labor unionism. US piracy in the Caribbean today is an attack on all of Latin America,” said Sándor John, a PSC delegate from Hunter College. “Defending Venezuela – and the other countries in the crosshairs from Cuba to Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador and elsewhere – against aggression by ‘our own’ imperialist rulers is an urgent duty for US labor. It is closely connected to defending the rights of workers and students here ‘at home,’ including the organizing our union is undertaking against the escalating campaign of ICE/Border Patrol kidnappings and deportations.”
John, who is also a leader in the union’s Immigrant Solidarity Working Group, said “As a Latin American history teacher at CUNY, current events evoke Marines general Smedley Butler’s famous 1935 description of his career as a ‘muscle man for Wall Street’ and ‘gangster for capitalism’ in Latin America.”
For John, the actions in Venezuela are part of long history of US intervention in Latin America, saying it brings up memories of the the US seizure of half of Mexico to the ‘Big Stick,’ JFK’s Bay of Pigs, Chile 1973 and savage wars of US-armed counterinsurgency under Carter and Reagan.”
Maduro is being held in Brooklyn at the federal Metropolitan Detention Center while he awaits trial. The International Committee said in a statement: “The PSC/CUNY International Committee opposes the United States’ unprovoked violation of the United Nations Charter and the criminal arrest and kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro. We call on the US government to desist from military aggression against Venezuela and the immediate release of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro from detention.”
John said that the American labor movement “is faced again today with the classic and inescapable question – ‘Which side are you on?’ – and it’s vital that working people in Latin America see that we stand with them. That means the workers’ movement bringing its own independent, collective power into the struggle, which is key to building that power to face life-and-death challenges confronting labor here and throughout the hemisphere.”
Published: January 13, 2026 | Last Modified: January 15, 2026
