Are you saying you welcome current forms of state-led U.S. intervention in your not-actually-sovereign country’s affairs? (If you do, please know that such “help” always comes from the U.S. at the cost of ordinary people, as well as the extraction of resources, money, and many, many pounds of flesh.)
This is not the case, I have seen this argument everywhere and it is enerving.
Art 233 “…When an elected President becomes permanently unavailable to serve prior to his inauguration, a new election by universal suffrage and direct ballot shall be held within 30 consecutive days. Pending election and inauguration of the new President, the President of the National Assembly shall take charge of the Presidency of the Republic.”
In this case, The Presidency in vacant since the 10th January because the election held in May of last year was illegal and immediately repudiated by almost the whole Democratic Governments in the world, there are multiple other reasons, all of them are based on legal and hard facts corroborated by multiple sources, that thing in May last year is the inception of this situation. The NA warn at the time that the void in power was imminent the regime ignored not so the rest of the World nor the people of Venezuela. Guaidó did not self-proclaimed out of the blue on a wimp, He took the responsibilities of the executive by default on an unprecedented situation, but by the letter of the Law.
From context, I assume this is referring to the US constitution but ours:
Art 187 "…shall be the function of the National Assembly… 11. To authorize the operation of Venezuelan military missions abroad or foreign military missions within the country.
In general, I find coherence in his words and share the dread of war as any other person with a forehead measuring 4 fingers. But the issue at hand is not an open war or a violent invasion and the Law is clear.
PS: I know those are not your words Millie but Pat’s brother I just took the opportunity to further clarify that recurrent issue.
I was referring directly to smulder if He wants to help, He is most welcome.
And Again I’m well aware of the consequences of military action in my country. I know what it means to have soldiers with guns on the streets. And I don’t want it. I don’t crave a firefight on my soil. But that is a possibility and I won’t be blind by my fear, if it comes We will deal with it.
New developments on the border with Colombia?
There was a few Military and Police officers that put down their guns and ask for help and refuge. 4 this morning and 4 of 5 more this afternoon. There are other reports with more people but are kinda sketchy got to wait for confirmation from proper officials.
But the downside is that just a couple of trucks came through but some police (faes) and/or para-military (colectivos) not clear yet, assaulted and burn down 3 trucks (it seems not clear on the number of trucks yet) full of food and medicine. One of the trucks was empty by the people and the cargo saved from the fire.
You can see some images here if you are interested.
In general, it was a bust the aid was stopped and or destroyed by the regime. Just a few supplies made it though. Either way is a loss for the regime, it is a crime under international law to destroy Humanitarian Help this is escalation with possibly dire consequences.
The regime has chosen the hard way, it is not a good omen. Tomorrow is rumored to be another try to get them here but no official word yet. Another bad sign is that the Google services are getting hit by the regime to reduce the information circulation (we get most of our live news via YouTube) in my case got to run a VPN to see it.
And Right now the regime forces are firing and launching tear gas into the Colombian side of the border, the local press call it an act of blatant aggression toward Colombia… and Maduro just expelled the Colombians diplomats and severed relations with them, this is a tricky situation due to the fact that Colombia as not recognized Maduro as President so this act does not mean anything and the Diplomats (Like the US diplomats a few week back) are not gonna leave… crazy times.
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Isn’t it also a crime under international law for a foreign government to impose sanctions and out-of-country asset seizures, actions that in their severity helped to create conditions in the first place that need “humanitarian help”? Why should Venezuelans accept so-called humanitarian help from those who helped bring about conditions in which people need humanitarian help?
Perhaps we should listen to another Venezuelan voice on this point, Venezuelan Sociologist Edgardo Lander (also a member of the Citizen’s Platform in Defense of the Constitution) –
This is certainly not some humanitarian aid; it’s a humanitarian intervention.
If the United States were really interested in democracy—the government, of course, were interested in democracy and human rights and the humanitarian situation of the Venezuelan population, the first thing they will have to do is stop the blockade that’s impacting the Venezuelan people enormously, as the Venezuelan government has extreme difficulties in gaining access to foreign markets. Its trade is made extremely difficult because the whole financial system is, in one way or another, controlled by the United States. And this blockade limits the possibilities of access to trade partners, etc.
On the other hand, enormous amounts of money, billions of dollars in Venezuelan assets, have been taken over by the U.S. government. And it’s absolutely cynical that the U.S. government is claiming to be worried about the humanitarian situation of Venezuelans, offering a few million dollars, when billions of dollars are being kept away from the Venezuelan government’s capacity to respond to the deep crisis that the Venezuelans are facing.
There is this threat of going into Venezuela no matter what. The hawks and the neocons that accompany Trump in these policies are well known. These are people like Abrams or—Elliott, or Bolton, that have had well-known trajectories of military interventions in different places of the world. And obviously there’s no concern whatsoever for the lives of Venezuelan people. The situation is so tense that the 23rd could be the spark that starts a violent, even civil war situation in the country. So, the absolute need to find some sort of solution, some sort of negotiation, that would stop this escalation of violence, is absolutely critical. And this has to be done soon, because Saturday is a very critical day.
There are reasons why there is huge, huge, massive discontent in Venezuela in relation to the Maduro government. The crises that the Venezuelan people are facing are, to a great extent, the responsibility of this government, that has been extremely corrupt, inefficient, and has become increasingly repressive. But that in no way justifies a U.S. military intervention or this attempt to strangle the Venezuelan economy, which is of course doing much [more] harm to the Venezuelan people than to the Venezuelan government.
Source:
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Millie please, can I quote a US citizen Fox News Affiliate on the matter of tax reform and call it a truthful and unbiased opinion with a straight face?
Edgardo Lander is a Chavez apologist, He critics Maduro trying to save “Chavez’s Legacy” as a south American ideology his writing are mostly find in Aporrea a former Chavista outlet fallen from the grace of Maduro’s regime due to internal struggles inside of Chavismo the last 5 years. Aporrea is blocked by the current regime and most Venezuelans as to use VPN time to time to see it, but their situation is not like the regular pro-opposition/independent news outlet, Aporrea was THE fundament online news outlet of Chavismo and the center of their online presence, there were times that the decrees from Chavez office were published there first and in a later time in the Official Gazette. Now they are quasi-traitors and survive like any other media outlet and the covert support of wealthy Chavistas out of the country due to their criticism and discomfort with Maduro’s regime. The myth of the economic war against Venezuela starts with Chavez and the ideologues Mister Lander is one of them. excuse me if I take his remarks with a grain of salt.
Now, that been said. The Sanctions from the Obama years to Trump’s are all directed to individuals. Later in recent years, the NA warn the global markets that the regime was trying to get new debt and sell bonds without the proper authorization by the Legislative. Maduro was trying to govern by decree bypassing the National Assembly (this was before the fraudulent elected Judiciary made of members of the PSUV declared the NA in “contempt” a nonexistent judiciary figure to disable the NA) those sanctions were to avoid the regime get new debt with questionable regimes in black money with no accountability or oversight, and against our law, The US and the EU were instrumental to coordinate and gather evidence of this financial maneuvers. The regime as exploited this is his victimization campaign obviously fooling a lot of people it was quite Easy the US is not the beacon of… anything really but in this case, the Treasury Department and the DEA were doing their jobs under a Democrat and now under Trump.
Take special attention that the regime as NO LIMITATION to buy food and or medicines (the 2 more critical issues in the crisis) and the Chavez’s regime was gifted the biggest monetary influx in earnings in our history (100k Billion US $) at the end of his life. But Now there is no money the discretional spending laws by the previous NA (dominated by Chavismo) are to blame, the financial policies that double the circulating money each week and fuels our hyperinflation too. And the sanction until 2018 did not affect in any way the nation but a group of 50 to 100 people, their assets and no one else.
Venezuelans are free (or should be free) to take the help of anybody they wish, in this case, the regime narrative was there is no crisis, the migrants are CIA actors, ok there is a bit of a crisis but we want Russian help, so we got Russian help (the Russians say: we haven’t sent any help), err well the help we got was here from a few months ago… and a long etc with the chase theme from Monty Python’s
I predicted you would do an ad hominem attack on him. You’ve become predictable.
Citation needed.
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Take note that the nationwide sanctions are from a month ago and the financial protections are from last year, the crisis is now in the 5th year.
https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/programs/pages/venezuela.aspx
https://www.state.gov/e/eb/tfs/spi/venezuela/
I’m not trying to convince anybody, I’m leaving here information for others to contrast against the commonplace assumptions among liberals in the US that the regime is the victim and the 3 million people leaving on foot the 100k kill each year by firearms and the 50k a year dead for preventable medical conditions are somehow an intricate plot by the CIA to discredit a widely popular totally democratic government loved by their people but revolutionary and the cherry on top; socialist, not forgetting that we here are ignoring a bunch of stuff that someone that has no idea of even what we look totally knows upside and down.
Please forgive my… let’s say bitterness I’m not getting pumped by this, I find this kind of exchange a way to drain and/or to serve in some fashion a service to my country actual situation.
I have read Lander’s book and I know his position, he is brilliant but not an unbias person in this regard. I’m not attacking him, I stated facts that I was sure you are not aware of, or maybe you are but don’t care… either way: I take his opinion with a grain of salt, that’s all.
That time the U.S. rejected Venezuelan humanitarian aid. Had they declared Bush an illegitimate leader, would they have been right that he should have been overthrown?
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if they’d been able to get people to refer to him as a “regime” first, that would have helped
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That time Chavez rejected US Aid in 1999 in the aftermath of the Tragedy of Vargas, was Solicited by Chavez’s Defence Minister and accepted by Chavez at first, Former President Clinton call personally and talk to Chavez (through an interpreter) but following the “advice” from a “trusted voice in the Caribean” (castro) a few days later it was sent back, the boat was midway in the Caribbean.
30k people died and many more without a home including a teen Juan Guaidó a survivor of that tragedy, Many parts of Vargas are still in ruins, Chavez did not rebuild even with the Oil bonanza in the thousand of billions Vargas and it’s Capital La Guaira is a shadow of what it was 20 years ago, poverty and a tourist industry in collapse. The impoverished little state is, in a nutshell, the legacy of Chavez’s government, the Maduro Regime, and Chavismo in general. Many other nations and US but not directly the US government helped and that time the humanitarian help was accepted.
Also in the middle of the so call blockade and the crippling sanctions (of what I haven’t heard back from you) The Maduro regime donated $500k to Trump inauguration, using Citgo (now under The NA and Guaidó control) so that money was an olive branch? a preemptive measure? Humanitarian help maybe?
Tell me more.
To pave the way for dialogue, Guaidó and his followers must completely and unequivocally renounce violence, back away from the warpath, sever ties with their overlords in Washington and fully embrace mediation efforts offered by Mexico and other neutral parties to the conflict. Above all, it is time for them to recognize that their coup attempt has failed and join the government, the Chavista base, the moderate opposition and, indeed, the vast majority of the Venezuelan people in accepting dialogue as the only solution to overcome the impasse. Regrettably, however, the possibility remains that Guaidó and his followers will, in their desperation, opt to up the ante rather than accept defeat. As it stands, they have deployed every tool in the regime change toolbox short of US military intervention, which nonetheless remains “on the table,” according to President Trump. Now, with all other options having been exhausted, just two choices remain: dialogue or war.
Choosing the latter would be disastrous. Venezuela is about twice the size of Iraq geographically and has a roughly equal population. But unlike that other oil-rich nation, it has a large and well-trained military that is heavily-armed with sophisticated weaponry purchased from Russia and other non-Western allies. Furthermore, pro-Bolivarian militias and Collectivos , whose membership numbers in the millions, would undoubtedly circle the wagons in defense of the homeland and fight back against foreign incursion. If the “military option” is chosen, the Guaidó camp and the Trump administration, along with their minions in the mainstream corporate-owned press, surely would claim that this time things are different, that this time they have noble motives, that this time the intervention will be a success. But as history has shown again and again, it is always the same playbook, the same cynical self-serving motives, and the same mismanaged disaster in the bloody aftermath of war. As historian George Santayana famously said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
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Gosh, why does that sound so familiar? 
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sigh… counterpunch, really?
There have been numerous attempts to reach a solution via dialogue. Since 2016 the regime as violated each and every one of them Using it instead to delay the crisis, even Monseñor Pietro Parolin (the Vatican Secretary of State) as declared, in a very diplomatic way, that there is no good faith or way to trust the regime in a negotiating table, and add that the only way out is to have free elections held by a new and unbias authority.
There was no Coup.
Guaidó IS the moderate opposition, there are people (libertarians they call themselves) here that are piss at the coalition for not pushing harder for military intervention since LAST YEAR.
This just cracked me up! millions of colectivos? this is precious, even the Military in the whole country did not 500k. Los Colectivos a few thousand in total and of those, a few hundred are “well” trained, they are Brownshirts, glorified mercenaries. And the Milicias are just regular people with no training many forced to join to get the food and “bonuses” that the regime uses as mass control onto the poorest of the poor.
We want Free elections held by a transitional government period. Ask any Venezuelan.
The U.S. effort to distribute tons of food and medicine to needy Venezuelans is more than just a humanitarian mission. The operation is also designed to foment regime change in Venezuela — which is why much of the international aid community wants nothing to do with it. Humanitarian operations are supposed to be neutral.
That’s why the International Committee of the Red Cross, United Nations agencies and other relief organizations have refused to collaborate with the U.S. and its allies in the Venezuelan opposition who are trying to force President Nicolás Maduro from power.
“Humanitarian action needs to be independent of political, military or any other objectives,” Stéphane Dujarric, the U.N. spokesman, told a press briefing last week in New York. “The needs of the people should lead in terms of when and how humanitarian assistance is used.”
In fact, no neutral observer of international aid thinks Bolton and Abrams’ convoy is anything but a mechanism to foment civil war and regime change. We know this because high-level administration officials and their allies on the right keep telling us that’s the case. As the New York Post recently proclaimed, “U.S. delivers aid to town bordering Venezuela to undermine President Nicolas Maduro.”
Donald Trump delivered a long and rambling speech in Miami last week and didn’t once mention human rights, instead railing against the evils of socialism. Former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe reflects in his new book that Trump has openly fantasized about overthrowing Maduro, something he has discussed in White House meetings. “That’s the country we should be going to war with,” Trump said, according to McCabe. “They have all that oil, and they’re right on our back door.”
Determined to maintain U.S. hegemony and control over the world’s largest-known oil reserves, the Trump officials plotting this latest coup aren’t even bothering to take its humanitarian pretext seriously. Why, then, are purportedly centrist and liberal media outlets?
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I’m not a big fan of Rubio, I find his ways and public interventions counterproductive and very misleading.
The Truthdig article has valid points but an overall misconception of the situation, the root of the crisis is the regime. Any variation on that is not factual and unequivocally looking for a justification that somehow finds the regime as the victim a peek example of victim blaming and invisibilization of the real victim.
The topic of this thread is U.S. intervention, not “the regime.”
So if the “topic” was Climate Change; Human generated CO2 emissions can’t be discussed or mention because it is somehow inconvenient?
Is the potential intervention happening in a vacuum?
It’s there not a possibility that the whole thing is related and should be pertinent to debate, I’m sure that is way more convenient not to have any other voice than the ones that agree with one’s opinion… but I like to consider the Regime and what it does and what it has done. So please pardon me.
UPDATE: More Crippling sanctions affecting… 4 rich Chavistas Governors has been implemented today, in a matter of hours several Chavista apologists are gonna blame the recent decline in our economy and healthcare system to the financial loss of this 4 poor public servants.
