U.S. Sanctions on Russia Over Ukraine Also Target Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba

SAINT PETERSBURG, Florida—Three of the four U.S.-based defendants in the U.S. government’s case about a conspiracy with Russia to sow social discord spoke out May 10 for the first time since indictments dropped last month.

“It’s important to note where theres’s some troubling aspects of this case, where the federal government is using federal criminal law to stifle dissenting voices,” said Leonard Goodman, attorney for Penny Hess, chair of the African People’s Solidarity Committee. The committee formed in 1976 in Saint Petersburg for white people to organize in the white community for reparations to Africans.

The attorneys of the newly dubbed “Uhuru 3″—Hess, as well as African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) Chairman Omali Yeshitela and Uhuru Solidarity Movement Chair Jesse Nevel—appeared remotely on Zoom, while the defendants stood at a podium in the Uhuru House, one of the party’s properties in Saint Petersburg.

“There’s been a misunderstanding about my connection to Russia because my first and most significant contact I had with Russians was when I was in Berlin, Germany,” said Omali Yeshitela, chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party.

That’s when his attorney, Ade Griffin, intervened. “I ask that you not to get into any specifics about contacts with Russia at this point.”

Yeshitela said he wanted to explain his experience in the U.S. Army dating back to 1961, when he saw the Berlin Wall erected, which split Germany into east and west. “That’s something that’s not been mentioned at all,” he said, adding, “My crime is my absolute belief in free speech.” Yeshitela went on to recount that he has faced charges and abuse at the hands of police, usually for demonstrating on behalf of the right to free speech. “This is no different,” he said. “They kill Black people for talking in this country … If it’s not afforded to us, there can be no free speech for anybody.”

White Defendants Make Their Case

Hess, a white woman who has been part of the movement since 1976, spoke of the wealth stolen from African people.

“The chairman has done what cities and states don’t do,” she said in explaining the work of the party to build institutions that support African people.

“[These charges] are false to an idiotic and laughable extreme,” Nevel of the Uhuru Solidarity Movement told the press, adding later in his address the U.S. government knows Yeshitela is not a Russian agent. “They know who he really is. Just like they knew who Martin Luther King really was. Who Marcus Garvey really was. Who Malcolm X really was. Who Fred Hampton really was. A freedom fighter for his people and for the oppressed peoples of the world. But they can’t openly say that. They can’t openly charge Chairman Omali Yeshitela with being an agent for freedom. So they lie, and charge him as an agent of some foreign power we’re all supposed to be afraid of.”

Similarly, Nevel spoke of his and Hess’ roles as white people.

“They know who we work for: The African liberation movement,” Nevel said. “We speak not for some foreign malign influence, but for millions of other white people out there who refuse to be complicit with our own government’s unceasing state sanctioned violence against African people.”

Nevel then said that despite the U.S. government’s best efforts to scare white people away from liberation movements, “More and more of us are becoming co-conspirators, too.”

Yeshitela told the press the party was forced to start its own radio station because a white-owned station kicked it off the air.

“They’ve never accused us of hurting anybody or stealing from anybody. It’s [about suppressing] free speech.”

Pointing to Colonialism

The APSP opposed U.S. support of Ukraine after Russia intervened in Ukraine in February 2022. They have connected the U.S. position to a longer history of European colonialism. Yeshitela has noted African countries have not supported the Ukraine position en masse, despite U.S. threats, as discussed in this Toward Freedom article.

Yeshitela denounced the press for only relying on the U.S. government’s press release to report on the party. He tied that to the colonial relationship that has dominated the world for more than 500 years, since Christopher Columbus accidentally landed in the Americas after trying to reach India, intent on exploiting the wealth of that land.

“For the longest period of time, white people have been subjects of history and African people have only been the objects of history,” Yeshitela said. “When we begin to speak for ourselves, we don’t tell the same story … It can be disturbing … And you find out to your surprise that the slave doesn’t feel the same way about the slavemaster as the slavemaster feels about himself.”

Next Steps

The party, nor its attorneys, announced during the press conference the next date for a court appearance. If found guilty, the accused face up to 15 years in prison.

The APSP has launched a campaign called “Hands Off Uhuru! Hands Off Africa!” through which it is fundraising to cover the cost of legal fees.

The fourth U.S.-based defendant, Augustus C. Romain, Jr., better known as Gazi Kodzo, faces up to five years in prison. When the indictment dropped, Romain had been in prison on unrelated charges since July. Romain was the APSP’s secretary general until late 2018. They have since gone on to start another group, Black Hammer, which lost many of its young members in the summer of 2021 following the group’s attacks on other political groups. Romain’s attorney, Stacey Flynn, did not reply to Toward Freedom‘s inquiry as of press time.

Toward Freedom has reported on the FBI’s raid of the APSP’s properties, provided information on Regions Bank ending its 20-year relationship with the party, and covered the U.S. Department of Justice’s announcement of indictments as well as the recent arraignments.

Julie Varughese is editor of Toward Freedom.

BRASILIA, Brazil—Despite hoping for change under the new Brazilian government, Marize Guarani remembers unfulfilled promises from Lula’s first term in office.

“One thing you can be sure of is that over the next four years, we will be on the streets demanding our rights,” said Guarani, a history professor and president of Aldeia Maracanã, an Indigenous collective based in Rio de Janeiro. (In Brazil, Indigenous people take the name of their people as their surname.)

The victory of Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva during the presidential run-off election on October 30 has inspired many sectors of Brazilian society. The sentiment is mirrored internationally, with expectations that Lula’s plan will reverse four years of devastating Amazon deforestation that took place under former President Jair Bolsonaro. According to the Inpe (National Institute for Space Research), during Bolsonaro’s term, the annual average of deforestation was 11,500 square kilometers—or the size of the country of Qatar—in comparison to 7,500 square kilometers under his predecessor.

However, for the first time in Brazilian history, representatives of Indigenous communities have been placed in positions of state power. Brazil will not only have a ministry of Indigenous affairs, but that government body will be led by an Indigenous leader, Sonia Guajajara.

“Today, the Indigenous protagonism within Lula’s government is completely different to his first term in office,” said Elaine Moreira, anthropologist professor and coordinator of the Observatory of Indigenist Rights and Politics project at the University of Brasilia. “Today, it is not possible to govern the country without [Indigenous peoples].”

Joy on Inauguration Day

Among the thousands of people who traveled hundreds of kilometers to support Lula during his January 1 inauguration were Indigenous leaders and representatives of communities from all over the country. Hundreds of tents were pitched on December 31 in the Mané Garrincha Stadium in Brasilia, where they celebrated New Year’s Eve. The following day, an estimated 160,000 people mostly dressed in red shirts—the color of Lula’s Workers’ Party—attended the Festival do Futuro (Future Festival). The event was organized to commemorate the shift in power.

“For me, it is priceless to be here,” Vice-Chief Sarapó told Toward Freedom. His name means “Defender of Nature.”

During the celebration, people watched on screens as Lula took the helm. Thousands of Lula supporters danced as a variety of Brazilian artists performed on stage.

“After so much persecution of President Lula, we won the election. That is why Lula is like our Indigenous brother,” added Sarapó, who represented more than 5,000 Pankararú people, who live in the northeastern state of Pernambuco.

In 2017, Lula was convicted of corruption charges and spent 18 months in prison before a Supreme Court judge annulled the charges, clearing him to run for office.

After Bolsonaro fled the country in what many have seen as an attempt to avoid prosecution for violations during his term, 77-year-old Lula received the inaugural sash from a group of people representing the diversity of Brazilian society. Environmental activist and Indigenous leader Raoni Metuktire of the Kayapo people walked by his side during the symbolic act. Raoni is internationally known for his life-long defense of the Amazon, as well as for his distinctive yellow feather headdress and lip plate. He is one of the last members of his community to use the lip accessory.

Restructuring Institutions with the Participation of Indigenous Peoples

On January 3, Indigenous leaders and government representatives took part in a symbolic takeover of the Foundation of Indigenous Peoples (Funai). For the first time since the body was created in 1967, an Indigenous person will serve as its president. The Funai’s main responsibilities are defending Indigenous rights, demarcating their territories and protecting the environment within Indigenous lands.

Guajajara, plus Joenia Wapichana as president of the Funai, Célia Xakriabá as federal deputy for the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais and Weibe Tapeba as head of the Special Secretariat for Indigenous Health (SESAI) said they constitute a solid bloc to defend the rights of Indigenous peoples.

“We three seated at this table, occupying strategic places in the institutional politics of the Brazilian state, represent the unity within the Indigenous movement,” Tapeda said at the event.

The room filled with mixed emotion as Indigenous leaders took turns speaking. At times, people hugged and celebrated a hopeful future. At other moments, they shed tears over what they see as four years of anti-Indigenous policy that led to the suffering and deaths of their peoples.

Some, including Lula, have accused Bolsonaro of genocide against the Yanomami people, who are experiencing a malnutrition and malaria crisis that has been linked to the former president’s pro-mining policy and a lack of healthcare.

“We had never suffered as much persecution as in the last four years,” Guajajara said during the event. “A persecution that, on top of everything, came from the same institution that was supposed to protect us.”

Ensuring Environmental Protection

Lula’s government will face many obstacles with a congress in which the opposition is in the majority. Agribusiness and mining are key industries in Brazil and remain an important lobby in Congress.

Yet, Lula’s promises to center impacted people in his cabinet already have born fruit in the form of a social budget for 2023 that amounts to 145 billion reais ($27.9 billion). This would enable the government to comply with programs, such as subsidies for the most vulnerable sectors of society, increasing the minimum wage, and improving education and the healthcare system. However, questions have arisen about guaranteeing sufficient resources for all departments. Brazil’s economy faces high inflation and interest rates.

Lula’s government has planned to move toward a zero-deforestation economy.

“A solution to climate change does not exist without understanding the contribution that we Indigenous peoples make,” Xakriabá told Toward Freedom.

The Ministry of Environment has agreed to create trans-institutional mechanisms that communicate with the Ministry of Indigenous Affairs and all sectors.

“The fact that we have today a Ministry of Indigenous Affairs will affect directly the Ministry of Environment,” said anthropologist Moreira. “Especially in connection to recovering degraded lands invaded by illegal logging, but particularly by illegal mining.”

Gold mining increased 3,350 percent in the last four years, according to “Yanomami Under Attack,” a report that social services organization Hutukara Associação Yanomami released. That spike has been attributed to Bolsonaro’s decree to stimulate gold mining in the Amazon.

Bolsonaro also dismantled and militarized the Funai and other institutions that protected Indigenous communities and the environment. For example, he promoted deforestation to benefit agribusiness. In December, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon was 150 percent higher than the previous year, according to the national space research agency, INPE. According to a report that environmental-news portal Mongabay cited, 250,000 hectares (620,000 acres) have been lost to private companies. Plus, Bolsonaro stopped Indigenous land demarcation.

However, under Lula, decrees that allowed “artisanal” gold mining on Indigenous land as well as the sale of Indigenous lands farmers had invaded, already have been revoked. The federal police and the Brazilian Institute of Environment (Ibama) will remove illegal gold miners from the Yanomami territories in the Amazonian region, Guajajara was quoted as saying to the journal, Estadão.

Confidence in Lula

Chief Merong Kamacã Mongoió, who made a 12-hour journey from the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais to commemorate Lula’s inauguration, said he is confident the Ministry of Indigenous Affairs will defend the interest of Indigenous communities over big industries.

“We also contribute to the country. We have family agriculture and agroforestry plantations,” said Chief Merong, whose community is in a land dispute with the mining giant, Vale. “What we do not want is mining, soya expansion, or transgenic plantations in our country.”

Indigenous leaders see land titling as the basis for ending the environmental crisis.

“The struggle to defend Mother Earth is the mother of all struggles,” Tapeda said during the event at the Funai. “We need to restart territorial demarcation now.”

Chief Junior of the Xuhurú people traveled from the state of Pernambuco, almost 2,000 kilometers from the capital. Like many others, he camped out.

“The most important matter at the moment for Indigenous peoples in Brazil is the need for land demarcation. To end logging and mining in our territories, and to expel the settlers that are there today usurping our land and washing it with Indigenous blood.”

Wapichana, Funai’s new president, asked in an interview with Toward Freedom for the public to be patient as the new group of Indigenous officials reorganize the institution.

“Through this union, we will demonstrate how it is to administer from an Indigenous vision.”

Editor’s Note: The following article contains terminology that may allude readers. However, Toward Freedom published this piece because it provides a different dimension to the struggle against U.S. imperialism. The Qiao Collective, of which the writer is a member, is comprised of members of the Chinese diaspora who seek to explain U.S. imperialism’s impact on China.

On May 26, 2021, President Joe Biden ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to produce “analysis of the origins of COVID-19” within 90 days. This move followed weeks of speculation surrounding the claim that the virus had escaped from a Chinese laboratory, usually identified as the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Having rightly rejected this claim for more than a year as a Trumpian conspiracy theory, centrist and liberal commentators in the West have breathed new life into the “lab leak” hypothesis, taking cues from allegations and claims made by U.S. state leaders and corporate media. Meanwhile, Facebook and other social media giants reversed their censorship of lab-leak disinformation almost overnight, impelled by a tawdry mix of insinuations from unnamed U.S. intelligence sources and vague allegations of impropriety relating to the World Health Organization’s investigation into the origins of the pandemic earlier this year.

Right on schedule, the nation’s finest intelligence analysts delivered their report to the White House on August 24 and released an unclassified summary three days later. The once hotly anticipated story landed like a damp squib and was buried by the regular news cycle in less than a day. In part, this was due to the inconclusive nature of the findings: four intelligence community (IC) elements and the National Intelligence Council assessed “with low confidence” that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from “natural exposure,” another IC element leaned “with moderate confidence” toward lab leak, and three others did not commit either way, though they naturally all agreed that “Beijing… continues to hinder the global investigation, resist sharing information and blame other countries, including the United States.” But what really doomed the report to oblivion was a signal failure of U.S. intelligence—and the entire imperial apparatus—on a far grander scale: the utter rout of the United States’ puppet regime in Afghanistan by the Taliban, who in 10 days captured every provincial capital (save one), including Kabul.

One underexplored throughline linking both events is Biden’s fraught though largely earnest attempts to restore the traditionally multilateral basis of the U.S. empire, drawing a sharp distinction with his predecessor Donald Trump. While Trump dramatically withdrew the United States from the WHO at the height of a global pandemic in 2020, alleging an entirely illusory pro-China bias, one of Biden’s first acts in office was to rejoin the organization. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus duly celebrated the restoration of U.S. funding by contradicting the WHO mission’s own assessment, as part of a joint study with China, that “introduction through a laboratory incident was considered to be an extremely unlikely pathway.”

Biden’s penchant for pursuing the new cold war through multilateral channels has continued in his engagement with the G7 and NATO. Trump famously denigrated both forums and delighted in alienating the United States’ sub-imperial vassals. Biden has, meanwhile, used these summits to great effect as ostensibly internationalist window dressing for the military encirclement of China. In June, a NATO Brussels Summit Communiqué for the first time identified “China’s stated ambitions and assertive behaviour” as “systemic challenges to the rules-based international order and to areas relevant to Alliance security.” In the months since, Britain, France, and even Germany have launched performative naval incursions into the South China Sea—almost the antipodal opposite of the alliance’s ostensible remit in the North Atlantic.

Biden and the Democrats’ response to the domestic surge in anti-Asian racism, effectively delinking it rhetorically from their imperial aggression against China, has followed a similar logic. Gone are the days of presidential bombast over the “China virus” and the “Kung Flu.” Instead, after the Atlanta spa shootings of March 16, the Democrats worked overtime to identify Trump and his loyalists as the unique locus of violent anti-Asian animus. They extended the promise of full inclusion into American society and protection from isolated acts of vigilante terror—a promise somehow underwritten by a violently racist policing system and conditioned on mawkish displays of loyalty to the imperial project. The United States’ selective incorporation of the Asian and particularly Chinese diaspora, in exchange for Asian Americans’ active collusion in the relentless demonization by the United States of their countries of origin, has ample historical precedent. That Biden signed the (predictably hyper-carceral) COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act on May 20, 2021, mere days before ordering his intelligence apparatus to fan the flames of sinophobic hate by promoting the lab-leak myth, is testament to the inestimable hypocrisy of liberal “anti-racism.”

No figure in the Biden administration so thoroughly embodies the hollowness of such politics as Kamala Harris, an infamously vindictive ex-prosecutor now feted as the first Black and Asian vice president. Coincidentally or not, she too found herself playing an awkwardly timed bit part in the hybrid war on China as her government’s imperial designs in Afghanistan hurtled to their ignoble denouement. While the humbled U.S. military shambolically evacuated the one remaining piece of Afghan territory it controlled after a 20-year war—making sure to commit some parting war crimes for long-suffering civilians to remember it by—Harris was tasked with enlisting Singapore and Vietnam into the United States’ machinations in the South China Sea. Vietnam at least did not take the bait, instead reaffirming its historic ties to the People’s Republic of China as a fellow socialist state.

All that said, the most spectacular failure of the United States’ return to traditional alliance structures is undoubtedly the Afghanistan withdrawal itself. The irony is inescapable: Joe Biden, who staked so much on multilateralism and a clean reputational break with his predecessor, has infuriated his “coalition partners” by honoring Trump’s unilateral commitment to end 20 years of brutal military occupation. Extraordinarily, the United States has arm-twisted its Western allies into accepting the unmitigated defeat of a common imperial project, which it initiated, gravely harming its relations with its allies in the process.

Already, of course, the U.S. and its allies are undermining the prospects for lasting peace by threatening the new Afghan government with debilitating sanctions and fearmongering about a new “Taliban-Pakistan-China” axis. This confluence of events has not gone unnoticed in China, where Foreign Minister Wang Yi pointedly urged the U.S. to “work with the international community to provide Afghanistan with urgently-needed economic, livelihood, and humanitarian assistance” while condemning “the so-called investigation report on COVID-19 origins produced by the U.S. intelligence community” on a call with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

In the fevered imaginations of U.S. war planners and their media sycophants, the empire’s greatest ideological, civilizational, and racial enemies of the last century—communism, Islamist jihadism, and a rising China—seem to be fusing into one. Hopefully, recent events have taught the United States’ prospective partners to think twice before following them once more unto the breach.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Charles Xu is a member of the Qiao Collective and of the No Cold War collective.