Locals protested outside the notorious Sunset Park jail where Venezuela’s president is being held, though few Venezuelans were in attendance.
By JACK DELANEY
“No blood for oil. Hands off Venezuela’s soil!”
On Sunday, January 4, about 80 pro- testers gathered around the corner from the Metropolitan Detention Center — a notorious jail in Sunset Park where Nicolas Maduro, the president of Venezuela, is being held.
“We need to reject this now,” said Taher Dahlel, a Sunset Park resident and an organizer with Palestinian Youth Movement. “We don’t want any more forever wars: not in Venezuela, not in Palestine, not anywhere across our region.”
What Happened?
Tensions between the United States and Venezuela have been rising since September, when the Trump admin- istration began striking alleged “drug boats” in the country’s waters.
But the capture of Maduro and his wife, which occurred last Saturday dur- ing a “large-scale strike” of the capital, Caracas, marks an extraordinary escala- tion in the conflict — the first unilateral kidnapping of a sitting leader by the US since the 1989 invasion of Panama.
On Monday, Venezuelan Vice Presi- dent Delcy Rodriguez was sworn in as interim president, condemning the at- tack — which killed 40 people, includ- ing civilians in a three-story apartment complex and 32 soldiers sent from Cuba — but noting she would work with the US “on an agenda of cooperation.”
In New York, meanwhile, Maduro arrived at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan De- tention Center (MDC) late on Saturday, and was arraigned in Manhattan on Monday.
The MDC, a well-known landing pad for celebrity arrests, has a troubled history. “Inmates at the chronically-un- derstaffed MDC have suffered through an eight-day blackout during a polar vortex,” said State Senator Andrew Gounardes earlier this year, as well as “constant lockdowns, medical mis- treatment and botched cancer diagno- ses, and complaints of maggot-infested food.”
Opened in 1990, the MDC became the only major federal jail in New York City in 2021 when the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Manhat- tan closed — temporarily, officials say — after Jefferey Epstein died while in custody.
The MDC now holds Luigi Man- gione and Sean “Diddy” Combs, among other household names, and was used last summer to jail over 100 immigrants who had been detained by ICE.
“The horrors I witnessed behind those walls will never leave me,” wrote Sean Chaney, a formerly incarcerated artist who spent 15 months in the MDC. “The conditions inside are beyond inhumane — they are deliberately cruel.”
Residents and PSL members rally around the corner from the Metropolitan Detention Center, near Industry City.
What Are People Saying?
Speaking in a press conference shortly after the initial announcement, President Trump said that the US would temporarily “run” Venezuela, though other officials appeared to contradict his statement; he also promised to “get the oil flowing,” with talks reportedly set with industry giant Trafigura on next steps.
“Maduro is a horrible dictator,” said Governor Kathy Hochul on Monday. “He’s a bad, bad person, [but] I also be- lieve in following the Constitution and the rule of law that we have in place.”
For his part, newly-elected Mayor Zohran Mamdani noted at an unrelated event in Greenpoint that he had called Trump to “to register his opposition” to the coup, “based on being opposed to a pursuit of regime change, to the viola- tion of federal international law, and a desire to see that be consistent each and every day.”
The rally outside the MDC in Sun- set Park on Sunday morning, organized by a coalition that includes the Party for Socialism and Liberation, followed a similar theme. “I think the rule of law is really important, even when someone that is not that great gets kidnapped,” said Nadine, a local, who stood at the outskirts of the designated protest area with a homemade sign before eventu- ally joining the throng.
Another recurring beat was a pro- gressive riff on America First. “It’s important to show [that] people aren’t going to tolerate the US meddling in other countries’ affairs, taking their oil, taking their resources,” said Jake, a lifelong Sunset Parker. “Brooklynites don’t want all of their money being put toward in- vasions, or being spent on these things that don’t help our own conditions in our own lives.”
Some protesters mused about why Maduro was brought to New York City, specifically. “It’s not unconnected to the attacks we’ve seen on our immigrant neighbors, many of them Venezuelans, who were driven out of their country after more than 15 years of brutal sanc- tions,” said Dahlel. “Now Brooklyn is being used by the United States to build a further authoritarian system.”
Yet very few Venezuelans, if any, were in attendance. TV crews clumped around an older Latino man waving a Venezuelan flag, taking quotes. But when a correspondent finally asked whether he was from Venezuela, he laughed. “Me? No, I’m Puerto Rican.”
Elsewhere in the city, many Venezuelan New Yorkers celebrated Maduro’s ouster. Venezuelans and Immigrants Aid, a prominent local nonprofit, posted a cartoon of a grandmother crying tears of joy, captioned “For justice and the swift liberation of Venezuela!”
And at Lulla’s, a Venezuelan-owned cafe and bakery in East Williamsburg, the owners told NewsNation’s Marcus Espinoza that they were “rejoicing,” with one patron saying “We have been waiting for this day for decades.”
In Sunset Park, however, the crowd that assembled around the corner from the MDC worried about the precedent this attack might set. “I came out here today because a president of another country was kidnapped and put into federal prison,” said Emmanuel, whose family is Dominican. “I live in Sunset Park, but regardless of where I lived I would’ve been here today to support the cause — because there should be no blood for oil. That’s the number one problem.”
