Weird that no one in the media — either the mainstream or the left — ever mentions the rather obvious involvement of the Bush Administration in the earlier failed coup against Hugo Chavez. The CIA apparently supplied a plane to fly Chavez out of the country, and when the coup leaders went too far (among other things, disbanding the Venezuelan Supreme Court) and the coup failed, the coup leader was allowed to fly to Jeb Bush’s Florida. This was a bit suspicious since Chavez himself had been denied travel to the US due to his own involvement in a coup attempt before he was elected president of Venezuela.
As near as I can tell, the government (including Obama and Hillary’s State Department) has been working with wealthy white Venezuelans ever since in destabilizing Venezuela. While Maduro may be an asshole, many of his “anti democratic” actions are likely a direct result of dealing with an external attack facilitated by internal treason. Not only does Venezuela have oil (that it nationalized under Chavez), but it’s a member of OPEC, where Chavez was a vocal critic of other OPEC nations failing to sell their oil in a way that would maximize the member nations’ profit and control of their own resources.
I admit I have not been following things in Venezuela as closely as I did before Maduro was president, or know where he stands on any number of subjects; but Venezuela under Chavez committed the ultimate crime against the big oil companies. As George H.W. Bush once declared, we won’t allow anyone to compromise “the American standard of living.”
One thing I read today in the Commoner Call may be true: Chavez had the support of Putin (and so one assumes, so does Maduro), and under Chavez, Venezuela purchased a whole lot of modern weaponry from Russia. A ground war (and/or a civil war) there would tend to get ugly and one would not want to bet on Eric Prince being able to depose Maduro with only 5,000 mercenaries.
It’s sort of amazing that our reporting from the mainstream and liberal press is so bad at telling us what’s really happening and the history behind it…or maybe it’s the bell weather that tells us that even the lefty press is full of shit.
William Rowe
Madison, WI