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

uh, why is it so hard to believe chavez wd have close ties with the farc? he is a sleazebag of the first order, a provocateur, and has it out for u.s. foreign policy in south america (and rightfully by the way, things are a dirty fucking shame w/r/t the minimal aid we offer in exchange for a huge and heavy hand in the politics –- legitimately –– and an even larger CIA presence waging whatever kind of illicit war they have been supporting since the middle '60s?

close parenthetical

It's not impossible that he has ties, I just smell bullshit in this whole unfolding of events, especially since yesterday's story claimed FARC planned to make a dirty bomb.

Venezuela contends the texts are lies and fabrications.

If so, they are expertly done.

I love this. It reminds me of Strange Brew, where the bad guy is in court and he's like "I'd like to point out that these tapes have not been faked, or altered in any way. In fact they have time coding, which is very hard to fake."

they probably wouldn't bother, given the efficacy of their kidnapping as a guiding in national politics

What else would Venezuela say? "Oh, oops" ?

In a document dated Feb. 9, Marquez passes along Chavez's thanks for a $150,000 gift when he was imprisoned from 1992-94 for leading a failed coup — and indicates Chavez's desire to smear Uribe.

In it, Marquez says Venezuela wants documentation of damage by Colombia's military to "the civilian population, also images of bombardments in the jungle and its devastation — to use as a denunciation before the world."

"smear"

ehh, i still have a lot of faith in uribe. not to suggest he is totally above-board, but at least during his first term he was relatively effective on the fundraising fronts, and talks with w/ AUC/FARC at least became (briefly) effective.

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/08/chavez-russian.html

lol

maybe this will make dumb americans notice the large clusterfucked continent to the immediate south

if it hadn't been for carter signing into law the ban on assassinations for heads-of-state, i would have a perfect solution. 'cuz it's obvious uribe doesn't know how to handle his shit w/o CIA involvement in his sketchyass AUC politix

If it's that new destroyer that can't defend against anything, then they might have a chance

Exocet missiles to thread. etc.

http://exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=8319&IBLOCK_ID=35&phrase_id=12028

Smuggling chicken parts???

Report: Launch of CIA ‘cocaine coup’ turned on Romney win

For more than a year the CIA has been trafficking 300 kilos of cocaine a month from Ecuador to Chile for export on to Europe, according to recent credible media reports from Santiago, the Chilean capital.

Proceeds from the 300 kilo-a-month business have been used to create a war-chest to finance a Cocaine Coup in Ecuador that was scheduled to be “green-lighted” after the expected win in the just-concluded U.S. Presidential election—expected, at least, by some Agency officials—of Mitt Romney.

It's a CIA “Ay, there’s the rub” moment.

He's a leftist. Isn't that enough?

The machinations were part of a plan to topple current Ecuador President Rafael Correa, who is unpopular in Washington.

An unexpected side effect of the revelation of the plan, which has received little publicity, has been to focus an observer's attention on what's going on in the drug trade in Ecuador lately. The country's history in the drug business, almost as rich as Switzerland's with banks, goes back a long way.

http://caracaschronicles.com/2014/02/20/the-game-changed/

I've got a former lover and a couple of frightened students trying to find a place with power. This is depressing:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/02/20/voices-latin-america/5644541/

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?

Good piece.

https://www.apollo-magazine.com/colombia-statues-conquistadores-toppling/

Bulletin #12 (5:05PM) with 97.06% of tables counted: pic.twitter.com/FVAcWYoy8l

— Kawsachun News (@KawsachunNews) June 19, 2022

love to see it

Venezuela and Colombia have left-wing leadership, and Ecuador has had a week's worth of strikes ✅✅✅

Felcitades Senor President, socialista!

— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) June 19, 2022

I kept hearing earlier how the fascist guy was a "political outsider" from bbc coverage - that old chestnut. With this result and Macron losing his parliamentary majority it's not a bad night at all. Time to savour some sour grapes.

The Colombian embassy is on the same street as my local bookstore; the streets have closed for every primary or whatever in the last year. They hate the left wing guy.

I wouldn't doubt that the privileged diplomatic ranks were all rooting for the Trump guy, even if it was *reluctantly* as the lesser evil etc etc

Colombia seems to be embroiled in a war right now between parents and children. 64 percent of the population is under 40; half is under 30. All the old fucks voted for Hernández. And to some degree I get it; Petro is ex-FARC. He's killed people. But ultimately this is about young people being pissed off that old people have bankrupted their future.

that seems a very simplistic take - within all age demographics there will also be significant ethnic minority and class groups of voters who have no self interest in voting right.

did he actually kill people?

Petro isn't ex-FARC.

My mistake; he was part of a smaller guerrilla group, M-19.

While the M-19 was less brutal than other rebel groups, it did orchestrate what is considered one of the bloodiest acts in the country’s recent history: the 1985 siege of Colombia’s national judicial building that led to a battle with the police and the military, leaving 94 people dead.

I think he could be very good for Colombia. Certainly better than Hernández, who's a complete fucking asshole.

but he was in prison when that event happened, according to the article you're quoting: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/19/world/americas/who-is-gustavo-petro.html

Don't care what he did then, it's what he does now that counts.

It wouldn't even get mentioned if he was Irish and an ex-IRA man.

Good thread here.

In victory speech, Petro said that the opposition didn’t have to worry about them eliminating capitalism because Colombia still needs to eliminate feudalism. He also reimagined left-wing Latin American developmentalism and regional integration in ecological/anti-extractive terms.

— Daniel Denvir (@DanielDenvir) June 20, 2022

Francia Márquez has survived an assassination attempt, fled her home twice, and been subjected to countless death threats for her activism. Now @FranciaMarquezM will be the first Black vice president of Colombia. https://t.co/N9KESUUW0Q

— The Nation (@thenation) June 19, 2022

People in Ecuador have been protesting inflation and rising fuel costs for 10 days.

This should be much bigger news. pic.twitter.com/0vRYUG1UPf

— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) June 23, 2022

This is one of the shittiest, most cynical pieces I've read in quite a while. Even for Politico, it's something special.

In the past 14 national elections in Latin America, the government-backed candidate has lost 13 times. The sole exception is Nicaragua’s artlessly rigged vote in favor of re-installing its dictator. In no competitive electoral system has the government won. The wave has swept away criminally corrupt governments and adequately competent ones alike. Remember, government performance has little to do with voting choices when the lean cow years come.

And the problem is not simply that incumbents and incumbent-backed candidates always lose, the issue is who they lose to.

The generation of leaders finding their ways to the second round of Latin American presidential elections in the 2020s is a sorry cast. It includes the hard-right populist daughter of Peru’s multi-decade dictator, a small-town TikTok obsessed Colombian millionaire mayor with a long record of abusing his staff, a former Brazilian air force colonel who has spent decades arguing for a return to military dictatorship, a hard-left former guerrilla cadre whose nom de guerre, “Aureliano,” was cribbed from the fiction of Gabriel García Márquez, the hard-right brother of a Pinochet Cabinet minister, and a son of a rural schoolteacher turned hard-left party leader. Some of them won, some lost, but none bear any resemblance to the sober men-in-gray-suits who took care of party politics a generation or two ago (and often failed to deliver as well).

The common thread is not that all these new contenders are Marxists or communists, nor is it that they’re all Trumpists or authoritarians. It’s that they’re all far, far outside what would have been considered mainstream even five or six years ago. They all pitch themselves as radical outsiders with determined proposals to shake up the country. Few have any government experience at all, and many espouse ideas that could kindly be described as “unorthodox.”

More and more often, elections in the region consist of a choice between these kinds of contrasting extremists of highly dubious allegiance to democracy. Some will use the tactics of populism, polarization and post-truth to try to establish themselves in power as elected autocrats. Others will try to work within existing channels, but they will most often fail, because of those lean cows.

Either way, the success or failure of these newcomers in office will have little to do with their own skill, and much to do with what happens to next year’s price of soybeans. Or sardines. Or lithium. Or oil. Or cotton. Or copper — or whichever commodity your particular country specializes in.

For their part, many Latin Americans voters have indeed noticed that whom they vote for doesn’t much seem to matter for how their lives progress. This has turned a shocking number of them against the whole concept of democracy. In its 2020 report — i.e., pre-pandemic — the respected consultancy Latinbarómetro found 10 countries in the region where democracy no longer enjoyed majority support. Heartbreakingly, among the countries where support for democracy is highest is my own Venezuela, where it has been wholly extinguished.

Few of the newcomers seem up to the monumental tasks that await them. When they fail — and most of them will fail — voters will be tempted to back even more extreme candidates. Some will fall to outright authoritarians, as Nicaragua and Venezuela already have, while others will continue to cycle through disposable presidents at breathtaking speed, an art perfected by the Peruvians.

For their part, many Latin Americans voters have indeed noticed that whom they vote for doesn’t much seem to matter for how their lives progress. This has turned a shocking number of them against the whole concept of democracy.

Fixed it.

Seriously.

It's not only boring Politicos, it's the concern trolling over killers and terrorists who are politicians (Petro), which unperson also engaged in further up the thread, that is part of the problematic response.

Ah. Here's the follow up. Good on Tapper. I saw some mention he's probably talking about Haiti for one https://t.co/tvBJaferb2

— Sarah Horrocks🎪 (@mercurialblonde) July 12, 2022

Just got round to this piece on Petro and the gigantic task that faces his government.

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/petros-premonition?pc=1454

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/10/ecuador-presidential-candidate-fernando-villavicencio-killed

Horrible.

From this tweet he wasn't going to win.

🇪🇨 Ecuador voter intention averages (@CELAGeopolitica's compilation of recent polls)

1. Luisa Gonzalez 39.4%
2. Otto Sonnenholzner 14.5%
3. Yaku Perez 14.1%
4. Fernando Villavicencio 11.7%
5. Jan Topic 7.9% pic.twitter.com/JQDwfNYBqy

— Camila (@camilapress) August 10, 2023

The name Otto Sonnenholzner kinda sets off alarm bells.

Feels like not a day goes by here without friends from Ecuador talking about the violence there.

Colombian nationals. This was make for very interesting discussions tonight.

Cofan Indigenous activist Eduardo Mendúa has been assassinated in his village, Dureno, The Amazon, Ecuador. Eduardo fought oil companies like Chevron, which extract from and destroy their water & land. pic.twitter.com/PGotXdwl8D

— Scream of The Butterfly (@odetomedusa) August 11, 2023

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/7/colombians-held-over-ecuador-presidential-candidates-murder-slain-in-jail

So about this Esequiba referendum on Sunday

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