Valero has been a leading supplier of jet fuel to the Israeli military for years—and is hustling to rack up more contracts to fuel Israel’s war.
An hours-long blockade at the company HQ on Monday shows that a growing number of people opposed to Palestinian genocide have taken notice.
Words: James Courtney | Images: Greg Harman
On Monday morning, activists caused traffic delays in San Antonio when they shut down entrances to Valero Energy’s headquarters—both off the Loop 1604 access road and at UTSA Boulevard—as a part of the A15 international day of action for Palestine. The demonstrators joined thousands of others around the United States in an effort “to coordinate a multi-city economic blockade… in solidarity with Palestine.” Other actions included shutting down the Golden-Gate Bridge and delaying traffic at O’Hare International Airport.
“Hey, Valero! You can’t hide! You’re supporting genocide!” rang out as a small team chained together laid in the street, blocking entry to the headquarters off of the interstate for several hours.
Valero is a well-known climate offender that has fought federal climate action while continuing to poison communities living around their refineries from Texas to California. According to the American Friends Service Committee the company is profiting off of the war on Hamas as the main supplier of military-grade jet fuel (JP-8) to the Israeli military, sending tankers from the Bill Greehey refineries in Corpus Christi, Texas, to Israel regularly since 2020.
Oil Change International found that there have been three shipments of JP-8 to Israel since that nation launched its war on Hamas—all originating from Valero’s Corpus refinery. Recent estimates suggest Israel has killed more than 32,000 Palestinians, including 13,800 children, since the Hamas attack in October that left more than 1,100 Israelis dead.
Valero has been “aggressively trying to get more involved in the mass murder of Palestinians,” an organizer and part of an off-site legal support team for Monday’s action told Deceleration. Company execs have been pursuing Israeli defense contracts at a rate that makes it look “desperate to strengthen this connection with Israel.”
This comes as the Israeli offensive against Hamas—an offensive widely seen as using mass violence against civilians in Palestine as a tactic—continues and tensions in the region worsen.
The organizer said that an examination of Israeli defense contract applications reveals that most “all of the contracts are won by British Petroleum, but right behind them [in the bidding] is usually Valero.”
Related: Climate Activists Supporting Ceasefire (and More) in Palestine—In Their Own Words
Despite its horrific environmental and climate record, Valero continued to be listed as a sponsor of the San Antonio Monarch Festival and Pollinator Festival, for instance, until last year—after a petition campaign supported by Deceleration highlighted the hypocrisy of their involvement.
Jules Vaquera, an Air Force veteran and member of About Face Veterans Against the War participated Monday as a legal observer. Vaquera was not involved in the choice of location for this action, but she was not disappointed in it, opining that:
“Valero is an evil fucking corporation that cares very little for humans and a lot for profits.”
Vaquera also pointed to the important connection between climate justice and anti-war causes, noting that “militarism is one of the top contributors to the climate crisis.”
This made the Valero campus—a nexus where the twin blights of war for profit and environmental degradation intersect—an especially relevant target.
Vaquera’s military experience in the early 2000s opened their eyes to the horrors of war and left her suffering with moral injury, “which basically means that by following the orders of my superiors while I was in the military, I really violated some of my own actual moral values,” she said.
For her, “trying to create a world where war doesn’t exist,” the calling that led her to take part in Monday’s action, is one of the best ways to combat the impact of moral injury.
In general, Vaquera speaks of anti-war advocacy in the spirit of atonement or balancing the moral scales. It was the recent self-immolation by Aaron Bushnell, the San Antonio-affiliated active duty airman whose final decisive act was in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, that ultimately inspired her to be more active in advocating for Palestine specifically.
Vaquera came away from Monday’s action with a sense of success in the present and hope for the future.
“I feel like we did more than a symbolic action—I feel like we really disrupted,” she said of the protest’s impact in terms of the global strategy of A15.
She was quick to add, however, that nothing should diminish the importance of symbolic actions as both stand-alones and stepping stones to more tactical, economically disruptive efforts.
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For her part, the legal support organizer echoed Vaquera’s hopeful sentiment.
“What makes this action successful, is what makes the movement more successful,” she said. “[It’s] the opportunity for us to build trust with one another, to try something that hasn’t been tried in San Antonio in recent memory (if ever), and to foster relationships within the regional community.”
Related: Why Environmentalists Must Speak Up On Palestine
Roshni Ahmed is an Austin-based organizer who came to town for the event with other activists rather than staging one in the state’s capitol. In the planning stages, coordinators from both cities felt that it would be more effective to have a large collective action rather than two separate, smaller ones.
She said that she is happy that activists are embracing “effective strategic actions that target economic powerhouses” as it is one of the most effective tools since “we know that the people in power are often bought and sold by these special interests.”
“Of course the symbolic gestures are important,” Ahmed said. “But clearly they have just not been able to be effective.”
Blockades, such as those that distupted airports she called an example of “necessary escalation.”
Ahmed said that even if Valero wasn’t “literally profiting from Palestinian genocide,” the company still would have been an ideal target as a huge player in “the capitalist machine.”
Indeed, if there was one common thread emerging from Deceleration’s interviews concerning yesterday’s action, aside from the dire need to end the Palestinian genocide, it was the notion that some of the biggest crises in today’s world, no matter how seemingly disparate, are increasingly the work of a handful of bad actors and their political attachés.
As such, these activists suggest that the fight against environmental injustice, against settler-colonialism, and against the unfettered inequities and warped values of capitalism need to be thought of as one.
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