The way she, and her team, managed to convince venezuelans that the election mattered, and to prepare to gather the evidence of the elections under constant threats from the government, that we all knew they were going to steal, and do it entirely peacefully, was an extremely impressive achievement on its own.
What an impressive act of coordination from MCM
:standing-ovation:
For a lot of horrific events in the world, you will find a bias exposed by the use of active vs passive voice. Compare:
- "100 children died". How?
- "100 children killed". By whom? Why? How?
- "100 children killed in conflict". Between who? How? Why?
' "100 children killed in air strike on refugee camp by X". Oh...
The point is that a lot of people treat what is happening in Venezuela like it's some kind of unavoidable natural disaster like an earthquake. This reinforces the idea that nobody is responsible and, more improtantly, there's nothing we can do.
Venezuelans are being intentionally starved to death by economic sanctions (that's what sactions are). Why? Because Maduro is bad. Sound familiar? It should. Castro was bad. Saddam Hussein was bad (despite being a US puppet for decades).
The actual issue is that these people threaten the interests of Western companies. That's it. That's the only thing that matters.
Whether they were worth removing is another question, but if you could flip a switch and magically replace them with something better (with no cost and a guarantee the replacement would not be a murderous authoritarian) you would of course do it.
The collapse started way earlier than the sanctions. It’s funny, but it’s even insulting that some people cannot comprehend that there is evil beyond their own frontiers. Not everything wrong that happens in the world is because an empire is meddling, we are also capable of being useless by ourselves!
Do you see a pattern here? Like at all?
The key point is that Saddam could drop nerve gas on Iraqi citizens and it still didn't change him being a US ally (and puppet). We don't care about someone being "bad". We never have. Saddam only ceased to become an ally when he invaded Kuwait and threatened our truly regional ally, Saudi Arabia.
All Castro did was overthrow Batisa, another US ally, and nationalize Cuban assets.
Hungary is a member of NATO and a US ally despite Viktor Orban essentially overthrowing democracy and genuinely being bad.
We helped overthrow Basher Al-Asaad. The al-asaads were former US allies too by the way. Why? Because now they were bad. Who is the new Syrian president? A man by the name of Ahmed al-Sharaa. Who is that you might ask? A former al-Qaeda leader, you know the guys were the Big Bad [tm] for 9/11. But that's OK, he (allegedly) cut ties with al-Aqeda in 2016 so all is forgiven. Let's not look too deeply into 15 or the 19 9/11 hijackers being Saudi.
Here's the lesson: whenever the US says someone is being punished, bombed, sanctioned, invaded or whatever because they're "bad" know that it's a lie. I mean they might be bad. But that's never the reason for whatever the latest punitive action is. Always, always, always the reason is become the interests of US foreign policy or Western companies is being threatened.
A petrostate kleptocracy can still trickle down enough scraps for it's people. An empire that controls global markets that sanctions an petrostate kleptocracy into just a kleptocracy, can't. The reality is no amount of competent governance is going to enable a petrostate like VZ to not be a shitshow if it's sanctioned from maintaining extractive infra (techstack controlled by empire) or sell in global markets. It's not about just being useless, but the inability to be useful no matter what you do. Yes, VZ got fucked from oil $100->$40 pre sanctions, but that's still a survivable/pivotable scenario than oil production going from 3 mbd to 400k mbd due to sanctions that prevents reconstitution of production. There's a reason economic freefall stabilized when Cheveron got license in 2022 that brought production back up to 1mbd.
Now you can argue a "competent" government would have conceded to Monroe (like Machado) in the first place, or not pissed off US in backyard. Like, I get it, you're living through the shit, but don't be economically/geopolitically naive, US didn't sanction VZ because muh democracy decline under Muduro when US props up other petro authoritarian MENA states. The only difference is US meddle with those that align with US interests and not, and US meddling is what makes or breaks petro states.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/world/americas/maduro-ven...
Seems he lost the anti imperialist mojo.
Did you not even read the article, like it's 2025, posting NYT article regarding US adversary like VZ and analyzing it naively is useful idiot behavior. That said, Trump is not a LIO woketard and someone Maduro thinks can be negotiated with, the fact is Maduro is fine with operating under US umbrella, provided US didn't do retarded shit like try a muh democracy regime change like under past US admins. Of course US establishment would still prefer a tool like Machado, but there's a chance under Trump that they'll accept Maduro. That's why the article talks about both Machado an and Maduro parallel barginning. This just 101 signalling, dangling Machado for more Maduro concessions - Machado isn't actually an option, because you know, she'll get disappeared if Maduro thinks US can actuall regime change with her. Hence Machado and this sus (granted marginally deserved) Nobel peace prize is good pressure to get Maduro to concede more. The fact that Maduro is making offer is because he knows there's framework for him staying in power, unlike past US admin zero-sum/maximum pressure play with Guaido. He know's a non-democratic VZ like non-democratic MENA petrostate that aligns with US interests is workable under Trump who is moving away from democracy promotion to realist foreign policy especially with recent strategic shift in focusing on South America.
That's not all. Castro also executed thousands creating a terror regime, nationalized American assets, funded and aided guerrillas in Latin America and Africa, aligned himself with the Soviet Union and caused the Missiles Crisis. He replaced a brutal dictatorship with another brutal dictatorship, a communist one, and ran the Cuban economy into the ground.
Most recent examples being "climate change is caused by 100 companies" and "housing prices are caused by BlackRock" which are both entirely fictional.
(There is an obvious rightist equivalent of this which has historically caused a lot more problems.)