That was over Russian nukes in Cuba. There has almost always been Russian troops, planes and ships in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Chavist Venezuela.
The mind boggles. Literally, I am sitting here boggling. There’s just this reload animation swooping around in circle after circle inside my brain.
The initial protest were over the USSR SAM missile site in Cuba, the nukes were the proverbial last straw, but mere presence of Russian troop has pretty much always provoked US diplomatic protests.
Bro.5
Given the sabre rattling over Venezuela and Iran, this is worrying:
https://www.politico.eu/article/mike-pompeo-cancels-berlin-visit/
Trust me, the people of Latin America keep a detailed list of all the times we have ‘helped’ them. I’m guessing it’s a better, more accurate and reflective-of-reality list than ours.
“ignore the hundreds of times the US military has been sent in to help US corporations”
This and the military thread see some posters with a naive view on how the world views the US.
“greeted as liberators”
Some truth to this. More truth is that fall of many strongmen in the Middle East has led to a huge surge of refugees mainly to Europe.
I’m strongly in the non-intervention camp of Venezuela but not sure of path forward. Especially if Russia continues to intervene heavily. Socialism kills and has crushed that country. I’m worried about Venezuela refugees destabilizing more of South America as all of their surrounding neighbors have a border crisis.
Options for a peaceful resolution seem limited as the OAS has never been a powerful body and Venezuela can muddle along with Chinese/Russia dollars to keep them afloat in a sea of misery.
" Venezuela is located on the Caribbean Sea on the northern coast of South America, sharing borders with Guyana, Brazil, and Colombia. With a total area of about 912,050 square kilometers (352,144 square miles), the country is slightly more than twice the size of California.
Coastline: 2,800 kilometers (1,740 miles)"
You’re not blockading the coast, you’re blockading the seaports, and realistically, the large container ports. Black market trade can’t replace imports in the modern day—either you’re trying to run the blockade in a huge container ship, which you would have to be insane to try, or you aren’t importing an economically meaningful supply of anything.
The real problem with the plan is that Venezuela is dirt poor and internationally isolated already. Imports for 2018 were $9 billion USD, down from around $60 billion in 2012. That’s already much more effective than the Union blockade of the Confederacy was during the Civil War.
If the objective is to crush the government, then you probably just need to prevent them from exporting any oil. No need to interfere with any goods coming into a country already in a humanitarian crisis, just cutoff the cash keeping the top guys liquid.
I’m finding it difficult to come by import and export statistics for Venezuela broken down by category, so this is uninformed speculation, but I’d expect the end result to be the same in that case. Cutting off oil imports cuts off cashflow to the bigwigs, but also cuts off Venezuela’s (here’s the uninformed part) main supply of foreign currency with which the state can import food.
It would be trivially easy to prove me wrong, or at least show that it’s more complicated than that, given the right statistics, though.
Agree, I am mostly speculating, as it’s hard to see any official numbers especially since early 2000s. Most of their exports aside from food, are oil, and a handful of mined raw materials, but no clarity about current production, export, or who is buying.
Some spectacularly stupid fellow in the administration must really be bored this week.
I wondered if it wasnt US shenanigans that knocked out Venezuelas only tv and broadband satellite the other day
This is fucking insane.
Wow, i came across the headline in the German press but figured that it must have been nothing more than a small speedboat that rammed the cruise ship, which is not exactly large either. But this is hardly a tiny boat:
The whole thing sounds a little weird. Why is a ship made specifically for polar cruises (with a reinforced hull made for ice-breaking) idling off the coast of near-equatorial Venezuela?
I’m not saying that the Venezuelans were justified in attacking an unarmed vessel in international waters (and it turned out comically badly for them), but I can imagine all sorts of other sides to this story.