In the Washington Post Francisco Toro remarks on the most recent spate of demonstrations in Venezuela:
Opponents of the regime have launched demonstrations across Venezuela for the first time in months. Fear of repression and a mass exodus of young people amid severe food and medicine shortages had paralyzed the movement against Maduro as he made moves to consolidate power.
The mass migration of, by some counts, 3 million Venezuelans who have set off for neighboring countries is top-heavy with the protest generation that led the insurrections of 2017, and 2014 before them. Rather than lobbing molotov cocktails at the security services, they are now waiting tables in Colombia, staffing call centers in Peru or working construction jobs in Ecuador. At recent protest rallies in Venezuela, it has been impossible to miss the proliferation of graying heads: It’s the parents of the stone-throwing protesters of yesteryear who are on the front lines now. Their fight, now, is to build a country that their children might want to move back to.
On Monday and Tuesday night, though, the focus of protests shifted from the impoverished parents of better-educated migrants to Venezuela’s now desperate working class. After a small attempted rebellion by a couple of dozen of National Guard troops failed, nighttime pot-banging protests began to break out all over Caracas, and small groups of protesters spilled out onto street corners, setting piles of garbage on fire and manning makeshift barricades.
The immediate question that will occur to American politicians and pundits is what should the U. S. role be with respect to Venezuela? In my view the correct answer is “None”. The president shouldn’t make statements of support for the demonstrators and there should be no Congressional resolutions in favor of the demonstrators. Pundits should just hold their peace. Venezuela’s neighbors are more than capable of dealing with anything that may occur in Venezuela, they have substantial motivation, and we don’t want to expose the demonstrators up to the criticism that they’re just U. S. pawns. We are not precisely popular in that part of the world. Sometimes the right thing to do is nothing.
Totally agree.
Steve
I don’t. Not one bit.
The Maduro regime, aside from brutalizing and starving its people has been heavily involved with people like Hezbollah, Iran (who are still in an officially declared state of war with America circa 1979 and whose government was directly complicit in 9/11) and the Chinese, who aren’t enemies necessarily but are hardly friends.
Helping the Maduro regime out the door makes as much tactical sense as our driving the Cuban commies out of Grenada.
You know what? The Grenadians love it for us. To this day, they celebrate Thanksgiving every year on October 25 to celebrate the day of troops knocked the Cubans for a loop and pushed them the hell off the Island in 1983. Talk to anybody who served there. The Grenadians heard from the American soldiers still stationed stationed in Grenada the following month about their upcoming Thanksgiving holiday.
You know what? To show their own gratitude, the people of Grenada actually surprised our guys with a festival Thanksgiving meal , complete with turkey and all the trimmings.
That’s how glad they were that our guys took out the commies and their scummy little puppet Maurice Bishop.
James Monroe had exactly the right idea. You don’t allow thugs and enemies to settle down in your neighborhood.
That wasn’t what Monroe thought. He was opposed to foreign (i.e. European) thugs and enemies settling down in the neighborhood. I don’t think you will find any advocacy in his writings of overthrowing neighboring governments and setting up governments more to your liking.
If the Chinese government were to send troops to prop up the Maduro government, I might respond by sinking every Chinese ship in the Western hemisphere. I would not, however, send American troops to take the Maduro government out. Venezuela’s neighbors are quite capable of doing that without our assistance and the Americas would be the better for it if they did.