By proper standards – and improper
old ones – Maduro should go

Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution was democratically elected to power in 1998 with that country’s voters choosing a rebel army officer, Hugo Chávez, to lead them. The US Southern Command immediately declared its government’s hostility, arguing that no country in Latin America – especially one with all that oil – would be allowed to leave the globalized economic order set up by the United State and some of its allies at the behest of multinational corporations.

Always in the face of US opposition, with his share of triumphs and mistakes, Chávez was re-elected again and again, legitimately so. In the end cancer took him out of the game, with Nicolás Maduro his designated successor.

Blame it on whomevery you want, but Maduro has not been able to retain the support of the Venezuelan people. He has clung to power by various machinations while millionis of his country’s citizens – men, women and children –have fled to wherever they can. This exodus has destabilized the whole region, most of all Colombia, where gangster with the roots in the old AUC right-wing death squads have taken over the principal migration route, through Colombia and then Panama’s Darien province and beyond. A lot of other Venezuelans have made their ways down the Andes, through Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Chile. A lot of them made their way through the Amazon
Basin into Brazil, where they were met by a generally welcoming federal tgovernment and some often very hostile locals.

Washington has been like the boy who kept crying “WOLF!” about Venezuelan elections, and first bet on the old oligarchy whose abuses led to Chávez’s rise, then to this tawdry pretender, a Mr. Guaidó. It’s easy enough, but wrong, to say that the Americans are making bogus accusations again.

Not so. The Venezuelan electorate is fed up and massively demonstrated this in recent elections. The truth of the matter is that Maduro got crushed in a landslide. As Brazil’s leftist president Lula da Silva puts it, Maduro owes the world an explanation.

The Washington-based OAS? None of the key players in the Americas consider it to be a useful or desirable intermediary. An imposed by the USA resolution to the Venezuela crisis is not much wanted below the Rio Grande and would be unlikely to work.

The United States could do some useful and appreciated things about the problem, but it should be a matter of Washington supporting those closest to and most affected by the problem. First of all, by supporting the Venezuelans not with some Washington-drawn road map that calls for new elections but by recognizing that elections have taken place and that the chosen man, Edmundo González Urrutia, should replace Nicolás Maduro and run Venezuela without any foreign overlords.

Perhaps best situated to make this happen, other than the crowds in Venezuela, are Brazil, with its powerful friends in the BRICS alliance whose starting point is a rejection of US hegemony, and Colombia, the closest and most affected neighbor. The Biden administration should be asking them what to do rather than issuing any imperial decrees.

Actually, he’s not. Graphic from Raúl Pineda’s Facebook page.

Gangland PRD

There have been rumors and accusations for years, but the infamous summary proof rule has barred any investigation of PRD legislator Raúl Pineda, one of the top party bosses who until recently was head of the Credentials Committee that could and did bar many another corruption investigation.

Now the deputy’s son, Abraham Rico Pineda, is in jail awaiting trial on charges of running a vast drug smuggling and money laundering ring. The courts won’t allow cops and prosecuitors ot ask about any role the father might have played in that, or about any of the government contracts that the son’s companies got with the former PRD administration.

Everyone is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty. Let’s not ditch that bedrock legal principle. The legislator has not even been credibly accused in the son’s case. But let’s restore the just as important notion of equal justice, that all are accountable before the law.

Bear in mind…

Peace is not just the absence of mass destruction, but a positive internal and external condition in which people are free so that they can grow to their full potential.

Petra Kelly

Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so.

Bertrand Russell

I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.

Confucius

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