#hugo-carvajal

#hugo-carvajal

In the summer of 2020, I was working as a paralegal in Austin, Texas, remotely filling out asylum applications for migrants who were trapped in a dangerous limbo. A landmark policy of the first Trump administration-euphemistically called the "Migrant Protection Protocols," or MPP-was keeping tens of thousands of immigrants stateless and often homeless in Mexico's border regions while their asylum cases were adjudicated in U.S. border courts.

Infamously, the former Florida senator even posted a series of photos of slain deposed leaders, including a bloodied former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, as tensions with the US and Maduro's government spiked in 2019. But it wasn't until the second administration of US President Donald Trump that Rubio's vision of a hardline approach to Latin America and his longtime pressure campaign against leftist leaders was realised culminating on Saturday with the illegal abduction of longtime Venezuelan leader Maduro.

It accuses the captured Venezuelan leader of running a state-sponsored drug terror network for years. Maduro, it says, collaborated with the Venezuelan criminal gang Tren de Aragua, which now operates throughout Latin America, as well as with the Colombian FARC guerrilla group and the Mexican Sinaloa cartel, to smuggle cocaine into the US and enrich himself personally. The indictment described Venezuela as being systematically developed into a hub for international cocaine trafficking, with state aircraft and even the presidential hangar being used to transport cocaine.

The superseding indictment alleges that Maduro and other top Venezuelan public officials have, for the past two decades, worked closely with international drug trafficking organizations to ship illicit drugs into the US while enriching themselves. The validity of the US complaint against Maduro and wife Cilia Flores is likely to be challenged in federal court in the New York on Monday over whether, as a foreign head of state, he can be put on trial in the US.

The United States of America is a rogue nation, run by a violent criminal who operates outside the rule of law. The bombing of Venezuela and kidnapping of its president, Nicolás Maduro, so that he can stand for a show trial in New York, is a flagrant violation of international law. It is proof positive that the United States, under Trump, is the biggest "bad guy" on the international stage and should be treated accordingly.