Join The Resistance Center for Peace and Justice at UMass for a forum on the crisis in Venezuela today, Tuesday 3/26, at 6:30pm at UMass in ILC Building Rm 151.
As Venezuela confronts a grave economic crisis, the Trump administration has responded by imposing harsh sanctions, threatening war, and supporting a right-wing coup attempt. Venezuelan American activist Héctor Figarella and economist Mark Weisbrot will discuss the roots of the Venezuelan crisis, the impacts of U.S. intervention, and how we can influence U.S. government policy.
Héctor Figarella is a Venezuelan American activist and EMT. He started organizing around food justice issues while working at the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts and continued his work in Holyoke, MA through efforts to connect community gardens to schools. He has taught bilingual Worker Rights Trainings at the Pioneer Valley Workers Center and has done environmental justice work with Neighbor to Neighbor around the now closed coal plant in Holyoke. Héctor is on the Board of Directors for the Markham-Nathan Fund for Social Justice and is a member of the Venezuela Solidarity Coalition.
Mark Weisbrot is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. He is author of the book (Oxford University Press, 2015), co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social Security: The Phony Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2000), and has written numerous research papers on economic policy. His opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and almost every major U.S. newspaper, as well as in Brazil’s largest newspaper, . He appears regularly on national and local television and radio programs. He is also president of . Weisbrot for his expertise on regime change through sanctions.
This event is co-sponsored by UMass’s Afro-American Studies, the Association of Latin American and Caribbean Students, the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies, Communications, History, Philosophy, the Political Economy Research Institute, Social Thought and Political Economy, the Venezuela Solidarity Coalition, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
