The Colombia/Ecuador/Venezuela Mess or Let's Place Bets on How Long Before the U.S. Backs a Colombian War With Venezuela

Any reliable commentary on what's going on there? Because all I'm seeing in most places is competing ideologies. I know my history and I don't doubt that the US would like to see the govt go but the Counterpunch left's assumption that all the opposition are fascists and any journalist who criticises Maduro is a CIA shill is embarrassing.

Ignacio Portes on Twitter is always very good but I'm having trouble finding longform pieces by him.

This is the only unbiased piece I've found so far.

venezuelablog.tumblr.com/post/76591076425/who-was-responsible-for-yesterdays-violence-in

Portes seems reliable. Thanks ShariVari. I do think the left has a blind spot when it comes to acknowledging Chavez/Maduro's failings, as if to criticise the govt at all would be playing into the hands of conservatives who want a coup.

Maduro's a thug

I can't look at this with anything other than sadness, the degeneration from leftist savior to aparatus of political oppression being so predictable

A lot of friends on the left seem to think it will do the cause harm if they acknowledge the chavismos' crimes and fuck-ups. I think the risk lies in not doing so.

Nuance is hard to come by in these situations. If most of the professional journalists writing about Venezuela, Ukraine or Syria only have a very superficial understanding of the situations there, it's unlikely many other people, unless they have been following them closely for a number of years, are going to have the kind of depth of insight that you need to take a balanced view. It's also a reflection of the move towards news outlets being competing echo chambers - readers can simply select news sources that agree with them. Even papers like The Guardian have blurred the lines between comment and reporting to such a degree that 'balance' seems to be sought through having five journalists take one highly ideological stance and one or two take the completely opposite one.

That said, i can sympathise with the desire to push back when the mainstream media is so overwhelmingly backing one narrow viewpoint. If you think that this is a right-wing coup against a democratically-elected leftist government, and most papers of note are telling you it's not - ignoring any facts that don't fit their narrative, the temptation to do more or less the same is always going to be there.

OTM but it doesn't create a satisfying dialogue and it's depressing to see the left ignore, for example, Venezuela's massive rape problem. Even if unsavoury characters like Lopez are hijacking the student protests for their own ends, it doesn't mean that the students' objections, or those of other citizens, should be brushed aside. It feels like as long as the US and the shady Venezuelan right want Maduro out then the left can only mention the country's real problems in a handwaving "Of course… but…" way.

I need to read more about the likelihood of an actual coup because obvs there's a difference between protesters wanting a leader to step down and a full-scale Pinochet-style armed coup, eg in Ukraine there's either been a revolution or a coup depending on who you speak to.

I've been trying to discuss this on Twitter and boy do people not give a shit, so thanks ILX

I can't listen to it at work but there's an interview / podcast with Ignacio Portes here:

http://www.r1.co.nz/podcasts/Olivier%20-%20Ignacio%20Portes.mp3

I'm not sure Chavez or Maduro were ever saviors

I don't know much about this, but after catching a couple of news reports full of rich kids with nice clothes, fancy tents, and smart phones trying their best to look put-upon and oppressed, the protests looked awfully stage directed to me, and the hijacking of the vocabulary of revolution was pretty infuriating. Kind of hard to muster sympathy for the "poor little rich boy"

and yeah, the whole scene screamed "CIA"

Probably deserves a new thread, but Venezuela is looking really bad right now.

Looting On the Rise As Venezuela Runs Out of Food, Electricity

On Wednesday, the Venezuelan Chamber of Food (Cavidea) said in a statement that most companies only have 15 days worth of stocked food.

According to the union, the production of food will continue to dwindle because raw materials as well as local and foreign inputs are depleted.

In the statement, Cavidea reported that they are 300 days overdue on payments to suppliers and it’s been 200 days since the national government last authorized the purchase of dollars under the foreign currency control system.

Not headline worthy yet, I guess:

Hungry Venezuelans Hunt Dogs, Cats, Pigeons as Food Runs Out

The population’s desperation has begun to show, with looting and robberies for food increasing all the time. This Sunday, May 1, six Venezuelan military officials were arrested for stealing goats to ease their hunger, as there was no food at the Fort Manaure military base. The week before, various regions of the country saw widespread looting of shopping malls, pharmacies, supermarkets and food trucks, all while people chanted “we are hungry.”

In addition to dogs and cats, people are also killing pigeons to stave off hunger (El Nacional)

they should probably the kill the pigeons first and eat the cats and dogs afterwards if necessary

bread + circuses work but the bread part is non-negotiable

pigeons are better than bread

http://az723720.vo.msecnd.net/media/img27928.475x317.jpg

bread + circuses work but the bread part is non-negotiable

'We want food!', Venezuelans cry at protest near presidency

we're kinda studiously ignoring this bc politically inconvenient yes?

I don't know, there hasn't been that much talk of the right-wing coup in Brazil either? I guess because it's really hard to pin on Hillary...

But, really, the left's love of Venezuela was always going to backfire. Oil cronyism is bad whether the leaders are right or left-wing.

when your economy is based on oil, it suffers when oil prices collapse.

that def a big piece of it but the currency + price controls don't work so well either. the oil collapse sparked the crisis but the economic system exacerbated it.

The Chavez years had an economic stability that hadn't been seen since the 70s iirc, largely by virtue of high oil prices. The social and development programmes he implemented came at a price that wasn't sustainable in a crash and, having come in on the back of twenty years of disaster, there wasn't much chance to build up reserves that would allow them to ride it out.

http://www.npr.org/2016/06/08/481225008/bust-times-in-oil-rich-venezuela-the-banks-dont-have-money-to-give-out

Terry Gross interviews NYT reporter Nicholas Casey about Venezuela

CASEY: Well, yeah. A lot of people are looking at who or what is to blame. There's a lot of things going on right now. One of them is the legacy in the years and aftermath after Hugo Chavez. There was a huge amount of hope throughout the left in Latin America when Chavez came to power.

He was saying many things that no one else was saying and talking about inequality in terms that hadn't been heard in Latin America for years. Unfortunately, what followed was years of mismanagement on every level - a lot of corruption, misunderstandings of how the economy worked or how to fix it.

You know, I'll give you one example that you see a lot. It is causing a lot of the problems in Venezuela - is price controls. During those years, they brought the price of selling something lower than what it cost to make it. So if you wanted to get milk, it was at a very inexpensive price, which was great if you were poor.

The problem was if you were a farmer or, you know, owned an operation that was producing milk. And you couldn't produce it for the price that it was going to be sold for. So what happened next? Well, you just didn't produce it anymore.

So you started to see this huge collapse of production throughout the country. People stopped making beans. People stopped making rice. Venezuela went from being an exporter of meat to importing it. And one by one, all of these things stopped being made in the country.

Well, it wasn't the end of the world then, because there was so much money from the oil that you could just buy it. You could buy it for dollars. And the response was - well, we'll just import it. We can bring all these things in. It's a rich country. Well, this continued for years.

But the problem next came when the price of oil collapsed. And there wasn't any money to buy the imports. And there was no way to make them. So just what happened was - everything started to disappear. So that's part of the reason why Venezuela is where it is. That said, called the proximate cause - is years of mismanagement from these policies, dating back to Hugo Chavez.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/20/world/americas/venezuelans-ransack-stores-as-hunger-stalks-crumbling-nation.html

A staggering 87 percent of Venezuelans say they do not have money to buy enough food, the most recent assessment of living standards by Simón Bolívar University found.

About 72 percent of monthly wages are being spent just to buy food, according to the Center for Documentation and Social Analysis, a research group associated with the Venezuelan Teachers Federation.

In April, it found that a family would need the equivalent of 16 minimum-wage salaries to properly feed itself.

Ask people in this city when they last ate a meal, and many will respond that it was not today.

fuk

Not binding and is unlikely to derail the whole process but...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/02/colombia-referendum-rejects-peace-deal-with-farc

"No one is so foolish as to prefer war to peace". In your face, Herodotus! The modern era has sure proved that wrong.

Has anyone heard what the agreement would have done with the right-wing paramilitary groups under the agreement? Were they to lay down arms, would they not get amnesty also?

I may be wrong but i think the demobilisation of the right-wing paramilitary groups more or less happened in the mid-2000s, with lots being granted amnesty / immunity outside of a conventional 'truth and reconciliation' process.

The main successor groups are seen, officially at least, as criminal gangs divorced from the political process. Some have requested that they be allowed to participate in the peace process - essentially with a view to wiping the slate clean of all post-demobilisation crimes - but this hasn't been accepted.

As part of the peace process (which now may not go ahead) there was going to be a commission to look into ties between paramilitaries and politicians, though i don't think new amnesties were planned.

Ok. Yeah, from a quick scan it seemed that the political ties were brought to light in the 00's. I would have hoped the gangs were included in the peace deal, though, that they were forced to lay down arms as well. I have no love for FARC, but not a lot of trust that new conservative massacres couldn't easily happen in the areas they used to dominate.

I mean, whatever legitimacy farc had as a revolutionary movement is long gone. It reminds me of the ira problem - they fund themselves by trafficking guns, drugs etc., and then they choose leaders who are better at doing that in order to in erase funding, and before you know it they're just a mafia, a cartel, a criminal gang. I do think that farc had a period of legitimacy, though.

Erase = increase

oh this is where we're discussing this

http://crookedtimber.org/2016/10/04/notes-from-colombia/

did anyone read that amazing piece about FARC that NYT ran serendipitously earlier this year?
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/19/world/americas/colombia-farc-rebels.html?_r=0

In a move that Venezuela’s opposition decried as a “coup,” Venezuela’s Supreme Court effectively shut down congress, saying it would assume all legislative functions amid its contention that legislators are operating outside of the law.

The decision will undoubtedly increase tensions in the South American nation where the opposition-controlled congress was seen as a last bastion of dissent. The move is also a slap to the international community, which just this week was pressing the socialist administration to respect the role of the legislature and to hold new elections.

On Thursday, Peru broke off diplomatic relations with Venezuela, calling it a “flagrant breach of democratic order” in the country.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/venezuela/article141655519.html#storylink=cpy

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/venezuela/article141655519.html

so...

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/leftist-lenin-moreno-declared-winner-ecuador-s-presidential-election-n741866

Where all the Lenin joeks at?

what the hell

Venezuela crisis: Helicopter launches attack on Supreme Court

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/interrogation/2017/08/venezuela_is_collapsing_and_no_one_seems_to_care.html

interesting piece.

what a damn mess. hard to see how things improve from here

i don't think there's anything that gets me madder than sophemoric, "anti-imperialist" boilerplate takes on Venezuela (pollyannaish pro-opposition takes suck too)

Otm. That and anti-imperialist boilerplate takes on the Yugoslav civil war. Those two things are the worst for me.

agreed. although of course milosevic was not guilty of all charges and was killed in jail by nato ...

Feeling the anti-imperialism everyday tbh

The outcome that is satisfactory is for the reforms that have benefitted the majority of the people over the years to be built upon.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/02/labour-concerns-on-venezuela-raise-pressure-on-jeremy-corbyn-to-speak-out

I hate the concern-trolling from MPs.

Do you agree to reject by all means in accordance with the law, the line fraudulently interposed by the 1899 Paris Arbitration Award, which seeks to deprive us of our Guayana Esequiba?

Choice Votes %
Referendum passed Yes ' 97.83
No 2.17

Do you agree with the creation of the Guayana Esequiba state and the development of an accelerated plan for comprehensive care for the current and future population of that territory, which includes, among others, the granting of citizenship and identity card? Venezuela, in accordance with the Geneva Agreement and International Law, consequently incorporating said state on the map of Venezuelan territory?
Choice Votes %
Referendum passed Yes ' 95.93
No 4.07

There were some weird wikipedia screenshots earlier today on twitter which showed similar numbers but with exact totals the same for every question. But on wikipedia itself no such results were present, in fact no results were present at all

But now results are on wikipedia for real

Don't know anything about this referendum tbh but you've got to be suspicious of any vote that ends up with percentages like that

Essequibo is larger than Greece and rich in minerals. It also gives access to an area of the Atlantic where energy giant ExxonMobil discovered oil in commercial quantities in 2015, drawing the attention of Maduro’s government.

well there we go.

Love the wording on those questions, especially the first: Do you agree to reject by all means in accordance with the law, the line fraudulently interposed by the 1899 Paris Arbitration Award, which seeks to deprive us of our Guayana Esequiba?…or are you some kind of sissy?

So what does this actually mean? What happens next? I still don't really understand the purpose of this referendum

Brazil seem to be taking it seriously enough to send troops to the border region, as presumably any operation would have to traverse Brazilian territory given the terrain. Or is all just bluster ahead of next years election? But what does a referendum with no subsequent action achieve

Ordené de manera inmediata publicar y a llevar a todas las escuelas, liceos, Consejos Comunales, establecimientos públicos, universidades y en todos los hogares del país el nuevo Mapa de Venezuela con nuestra Guayana Esequiba. ¡Este es nuestro mapa amado! pic.twitter.com/qliW31Lyb9

— Nicolás Maduro (@NicolasMaduro) December 6, 2023

New Venezuela map just dropped

I realize there's a lot of focus on this at the moment, but I remembered this from a few years ago about the upcoming situation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCLZMW6gbAY

3 different perspectives on the situation, including a Cambridge Analytica whistleblower

After a lot of attention on this earlier, now seems to have gone quiet. I'm not sure what happens next, Venezuelan elections aren't until the second half of 2024

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/venezuela-guyana-presidents-meet-amid-territorial-dispute-2023-12-14/

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01-09/ecuador-under-emergency-as-drug-lord-fito-escapes-jail/103298002

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/09/ecuador-gangs-wave-terror-state-of-emergency

Insane situation.

Second time he has escaped!

ugh

This footage is gnarlsberg:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/09/ecuador-gangs-wave-terror-state-of-emergency

An election in a Latin American country is taking place tomorrow. Guess who is interfering.

BREAKING 🇪🇨 The United States escalates its intervention in Ecuador’s presidential election — deeming incumbent candidate Daniel Noboa “better for US interests” in a leaked intelligence report. International observers on high alert. pic.twitter.com/LUVpKjb8RA

— Progressive International (@ProgIntl) April 12, 2025

article doesn’t mention any interference, just the intelligence assessment.

Let's see.

Erik Prince, founder of the notorious private mercenary contractor Blackwater (now Academi), is campaigning for Ecuadorian President Noboa's reelection. Many suspect Noboa, son of the country’s richest man, is leveraging Prince to orchestrate a coup if his opponent Luisa Gonzalez… pic.twitter.com/xFCCIAD0RY

— BreakThrough News (@BTnewsroom) April 7, 2025

Good thread on the outcome and reasons for the opposition's defeat.

W/ 67% counted in Ecuador:

Noboa - 56%
González - 43%

I expect CNE to call it for Noboa within the next couple hours.

Here's my preliminary analysis of why Noboa is outperforming expectations & González badly underperforming... pic.twitter.com/hmyWCUXgii

— Will Freeman (@WillGFreeman) April 14, 2025

so

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/venezuela-suggests-video-boat-apparently-carrying-drugs-ai/

R.S.A. Garcia (BUY THE NIGHTWARD)‬
✧@rsagar✧✧✧.b✧✧✧.soc✧✧✧‬
· 2h
I think it's important to note that Venezuela is saying this didn't happen.

They've recovered no debris, and they contend the video appears to be a deep fake. Yet crucially, the US media is mostly avoiding reporting this, or examining the video.

Venezuela needs to release a deepfake of the pee tape in retaliation

well here we are

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-new-military-operation-venezuela-southern-spear-hegseth-11044979

I guess they are just trying to skip the "backs Colombia" part now?

It appears the bombing of Caracas has begun

https://www.reddit.com/r/venezuela/comments/1q2nbak/bombing_near_fuerte_tiuna_military_installation/
https://www.reddit.com/r/vzla/comments/1q2na6z/megathread_bombardeo_en_fuerte_tiuna/

More video
https://www.reddit.com/r/venezuela/comments/1q2nj3n/explosions_reported_in_la_guaira_and_caracas/
https://www.reddit.com/r/venezuela/comments/1q2nn27/se_prendió_esta_mierda/

"The Pentagon did not immediately respond to request for comment."

Big bets on Polymarket within the past 24 hours on regime change and US forces in Venezuela before Jan 31
https://polymarket.com/@0x31a56e9E690c621eD21De08Cb559e9524Cdb8eD9-1766730765984

Full thread on the insider trader who bet big on Venezuela action
https://bsky.app/profile/bluser12.bsky.social/post/3mbiwc7s2yk2k

They were apparently going to bomb the sites on Christmas Day but decided to go after some fields in Nigeria instead, so this has been signed-off for at least a week.

"The Pentagon did not immediately respond to request for comment."

hegseth too hammered