When we last checked in on the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington, D.C., on May 2, it was being illegally occupied by the radical leftists of Code Pink, who support the socialist dictatorship of Nicolas Maduro and refuse to accept the legitimacy of Juan Guaidó, recognized by the U.S. and dozens of other countries as the legitimate president of Venezuela. Also in the building are members of other far-left groups such as ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), Popular Resistance, and Black Alliance for Peace. Most if not all of the occupiers are Americans with no apparent connection to Venezuela other than their ideological alliance with the country’s destructive, despotic chavista regime. Their goal, they said, was to keep the embassy from being entered by any of Guaidó’s people or by U.S. officials. To that end, reported the Washington Post, they “padlocked the front entrance and secured other doors with chains.”

Outrageously, these extremists are still occupying the embassy. Meanwhile, hundreds of Venezuelans and Venezuelan-Americans who oppose the embassy takeover – and many of whom have experienced firsthand the dire consequences of so-called Bolivarian rule – have continued to gather outside the embassy day and night, protesting the protesters and doing their best, as one of them told the Post, “to prevent further trespassers from entering our building.” They have also tried to prevent anybody from getting food supplies to the occupiers. There have been scuffles – and an episode or two that rose to the level of dangerous violence – between the occupiers and the protesters outside, and at least one of the Venezuelan demonstrators, Naylet Pacheco, was hospitalized after being attacked without provocation by several men from inside the embassy, one of whom has been arrested.

The evening of May 8 brought a new development: as the sun set over the leafy Georgetown neighborhood, the lights inside the embassy went off. While Code Pink protested that the embassy’s electric bill had been fully paid by the Maduro regime, Pepco, the local power company, replied that it had shut off the juice to the embassy at the request of the U.S.-backed Guaido government. The cutoff not only meant no lights – it also meant that the Code Pink misfits would no longer be able to recharge the computers and cell phones that they’d been using to send out tweets, videos, and the like to the world. Though the protesters outside expressed the hope that this new turn would drive the occupiers out, Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin, who herself left the embassy over a week ago and has been prevented by the protesters outside from re-entering it, vowed that her cohorts were determined to stay. “They’re saying, ‘No matter what happens, you can cut off the electricity, you can cut off the water, we’ll still stay here,’” she told the Post. “Even if they have to be without eating.” Many observers savored the deliciousness of the irony that the embassy occupiers now have at least some idea of what life has been like for people in Venezuela who have lived for months, in some cases years, without adequate meals or reliable power supplies. As one demonstrator, Daniela Bustillos, put it: “They’re getting a little taste of what Venezuela has been experiencing.”

One detail in the Post’s May 9 account seemed puzzling. On the previous evening, according to the report, “police cordoned off 30th Street NW to allow several neon-shirted men down a manhole in the middle of the street. Code Pink said it showed police are taking sides, though a spokeswoman for the Secret Service said the agency is committed to protecting both sides’ “right to protest.” The right to protest is one thing – but are the police and Secret Service actually behaving as if the clowns of Code Pink have a right to occupy an embassy?