So, basically, no actual real sanctions that would hurt debt payment or renegotiation till this year. By your own account. Some individuals 2 years ago. Millitary Sales (very much not relevant to actual bonds) a few years back.
And really, for the love of god… who is calling for “the previous ladrones” to anything? Really, what the bloody hell. Oh, the previous government was bad, this is even worse, but hey, lets stay with it? Really??? It is fucking better for WHO that Venezuelans are victimized by THIS bunch instead for some group that you are supposing is the ONLY other option?
Apparently revolution is fine and dandy when your oppresor is right wing, but the minimal, uncoordinated, not part of any strategy but born out of the anger and humilliation very few cases of violence by “opposition” in Venezuela are to be decried. By the same people that very much consider ANY crackdown against any protest a moral failure in the US or Europe. Meanwhile if you are an actual peaceful protester in Venezuela you have to deal with both the “crackdowns” by the security forces AND the colectivos threatening you. But hey, they are the fascist, they dont understand that a revolutionary thug in a motorcicle shooting at their windows is just what they deserve. Thats not violence, is peace.
Meanwhile somehow Venezuelans have to endure a government that kills them with hunger or lack of medicine or with bullets if they protest the first two and the way they had their democracy stolen with infinite patience. If not, the whole opposition is murderous and “fascists”. But hey, tell me another about Che Guevara and the right, proper revolutionaries! Those were righteous no? They were nice guerrillas!
I dont know what the future of Venezuela may bring. A worse crop of idiots and assholes? Who knows. But defending this bunch is out of the question. There is nothing, NOTHING to justify proping up this bunch of murderers and thieves.
I’m sick and tired of this whole line of idiocy that, somehow, Venezuela has to endure and support a violent, vile, corrupt regime of assholes that has led to levels of poverty never before seen in the country and destroyed any pretensions of democracy, because if not then it is “the US” and “the oligarchy” and some other phantoms that somehow are “worse”. This is just putting your ideological bent above human rights; somehow Venezuelans have to endure what YOU think is the lest of the 2 evils, instead of struggling for a better tomorrow?
What Venezuelans deserve and can get is a proper representative government of people that dont steal from them and dont destroy their democracy. Anybody pretending otherwise because is either this bunch or some CIA-puppet-neoliberal boogeyman of your own invention is just an ally, willing or not, to the ones that are murdering Venezuelans right now. Which is the government and not any “opposition”.
While you try to find ways to make it look like enduring this bunch of crooks is the only option, others have risked death to find a way out. While you paint a picture of some unfocused future-past return to “previous ladrones”, people are actually being robbed of everything, including dignity, today. While you try to find a false equivalence between the systematic and planned violence by the Chavistas using their tools in State and paramilitary colectivos and the opposition, they are just happy they published a new “Constitutional Law about Hate” that basically means anybody they feel is “against peace” as defined by Chavistas is going to be silenced.
What frustrates me about having to discuss this thing over and over again with people is how many of you lot arent capable of understanding that if you think there are reasons enough to protest, say, a Trump, and by God there are more than enough and bad enough to justify even protests on the street, you have absolutely no moral point in not supporting the struggle of the many Venezuelans trying to get rid of Maduro and company. But no, somehow, my (former?) compatriots have to endure all the hunger and corruption and violence they do because their struggle doesnt have the seal of approval of the West “left”.
Just the other day a relative was telling me they got bad news from Venezuela; a friend died of cancer after not getting any treatment - cant find it and if you cant you cant pay for it. Few days later a Venezuelan NGO was showing a video of a woman telling how it has been months without the inmmune depressors she needed for her transplaned kidney; she died the same day. Students that were arrested and judged by a military tribunal (in itself a abuse of law) for peaceful protests (one of those “crackdowns” of yours) spent months in the worst jail possible even with all the paperwork to get them free, just because the security forces dont answer to anybody anymore.
You either stand with the ones looking for a better tomorrow, free of the current bunch and any future possible bunch of “ladrones”, or you stand as a helper of the ones that are tormenting them now, even if it is just with lukewarm excuses and phantasmagoric “enemies” that “may” be worse.
