I'm not going to defend, or praise Maduro. What I'm not going to do though, is fall for the trap that somehow supporting regime change in Venezuela will bring democracy to the country, and that the United States is a benevolent actor who cares about the well being of the Venezuelan people.
So I have to thank national security adviser, and the devil-Lorax (further down you'll see why he's the devil) John Bolton for his honesty:
2020 presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard posted a tweet on Bolton's comments:
The reality is that we didn't need Bolton's comments to know that our intentions in Venezuela were nefarious by looking and seeing who we had as allies in this, and know that our intentions had nothing to do with the people of Venezuela, but rather a Venezuelan version of the "Shock Doctrine."
One of our allies is Brazil, who is lead by a corrupt-fascist regime, but journalist Glenn Greenwald is reporting that a new scandal is "engulfing" Jair Bolsonaro's presidency.
The scandal has the Bolsonaro regime "currently paralyzed," and it caused Bolsonaro and top officials to skip out on a scheduled press conference at Davos.
The scandal involves Bolsonaro's oldest son, Flavio, who was a state deputy but was elected to the Federal Senate in the most recent elections.
The scandal first looked like money laundering and breaking banking laws turned into to something "much more ominous and terrifying," says Greenwald.
Greenwald explains:
"Earlier this week, Rio de Janeiro police arrested five members of Brazil’s most dangerous militia, one linked to the 2018 assassination of City Council Member Marielle Franco of the left-wing PSOL party. As it turned out, Flávio Bolsonaro formally praised two of the leading members of that militia; gave an award to the militia’s chief; and, most astonishingly of all, kept the mother and the daughter of the militia chief on his payroll for the last 10 years. That the Bolsonaro family has been discovered to have such close and intimate ties with militias, including the one involved in Franco’s brutal assassination, stunned the country."
"Then, on Thursday," writes Greenwald, "Brazil’s only LGBT member of Congress, the longtime leftist critic of Bolsonaro, Jean Wyllys, who just won a third term in the November election, announced that he has fled the country and will not assume his office due to serious threats to his life."
"In explaining why he fears for his life," continues Greenwald, "Wyllys specifically cited these new revelations that the Bolsonaro family is linked to the militia blamed for the death of Franco, who was in the same party as Wyllys (my husband, David Miranda, is a Rio de Janeiro city council member in that same party and, as the alternate behind Wyllys, will now assume Wyllys’s seat in Congress, becoming the only LGBT member of the lower house)."
I'm not saying that you should support Maduro, that you shouldn't feel sorry for the people of Venezuela. But Bolton and the American empire use your sympathy for special interests. In having sympathy and empathy for the people of Venezuela, you need to oppose U.S. intervention in a region in which America has a legacy of supporting brutal regimes.
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