Protesters seek international intervention to help Venezuela
When David Mendez had to use covered trucks and foreign currency to deliver 5,000 kilograms of food to starving people in Venezuela, he felt like a drug trafficker. With money raised through a GoFundMe page set up in Canada in 2017 by his brother, Luis, the 35-year-old Windsor man was able to purchase large amounts of flour and beans to distribute to people on the streets, in orphanages, and in retirement homes there. But anyone possessing too much food in Venezuela could be accused by law enforcement of hoarding it for speculation, so he had to operate in secrecy. That meant buying from foreign grocers in the cover of night with e-transfers of U.S. money through offshore bank accounts. “As I was leaving my house, I would see people eating out of my garbage,” said Mendez, who worked as a school teacher in Venezuela from 2012-17. While he earned an international salary teaching children from some of the nation’s wealthiest families, hyperinflation meant locals around him were making about $1 each day and going hungry.
“My wife and I started making breakfasts and lunches and bringing it down to these people,” he said.
In response to an international movement called Hands Off Venezuela, whose supporters held a protest in Windsor on Feb. 23, Mendez and his brother held their own protest on Saturday. Hands Off Venezuela protesters spoke out against Canada’s denouncement of president Nicolas Maduro and support for self-declared president and opposition leader Juan Guaido, calling it an attack on Venezuela’s sovereignty. But Mendez and other members of Windsor’s Venezuelan community rallied in favour of foreign intervention.
“We don’t want to make this an ideological battle,” said Mendez. His jacket and hat were yellow, blue and red, the colours on Venezuela’s flag.
“We’re essentially a country that’s been kidnapped. To tell the world, ‘Hands Off Venezuela,’ is essentially to tell a person who’s been kidnapped to save themselves. Some of the 50 protesters standing with Mendez at Ouellette Avenue and Tecumseh Road waved signs that read, “Out With Maduro” and “Intervention Now!” They wore white T-shirts emblazoned with a map of the country, captioned with “Hands On Venezuela.” A dozen demonstrators waved the country’s flag.
“We don’t have a government. We have a group of criminals who have kidnapped the country and are using the country’s wealth for their own benefit — I saw it for five years,” said Mendez. International governments have called on Maduro to let aid into the country, which has dwindling food supplies and medicine shortages. Maduro insists there is no crisis in Venezuela.
Military officials there blocked an opposition-backed effort to bring food into the country on trucks from Brazil and Columbia on Feb. 23, leaving the trucks in flames and at least two people dead.
In the last 10 years, more than three million people have fled the country.
“We don’t want invasion from any country,” said Luis Mendez. “We just want support.
“The average Venezuelan will make a month’s salary, if they can, and not even be able to buy a couple days’ worth of groceries,” he said. He has more than 20 family members — aunts, uncles, cousins, and a grandmother — still living in Venezuela. The two brothers and their parents send money each week.