I originally had a long, beautifully written diary about this topic. Oh it was full of wit and informative graphs and thoughtful quotes...! Cool pictures of protesters facing off w/ riot cops n ish. Very thought provoking, much info, wow.
Then I hit the back button on my mouse.
No draft saved.
Its ok, Dkos has a autosave thing right...?
Nope.
FML.
FML.
FML.
Sigh....whatever, follow me below the....thing.
I'm really pissed/depressed about losing all that work but i really wanna say this so i'm gonna try to salvage things by retyping the bare bones as bullet points:
1 - You know that thing people have been doing lately where they defy armies of police to protest the economy and their government's inability/unwillingness to address their grievances? Apparently Venezuela's been doing that lately.
2 - Venezuela's oil dependent economy is staring into the abyss. Oil ain't what it used to be.
3 - Venezuela's murder rate is already in the abyss. 21,000+ dead? That's more than the U.S and worse than the Mexican Drug War (!!!). Except, Venezuela doesn't have 300 or 120 million citizens...it has 30 million. Smh. Just awful.
4 - Hugo Chavez was obv. a powerful, charismatic figure who did many, MANY great things to help desperately poor people and piss off giant corporations. Any head of state that invests that much in health and education without killing scores of people should be damn near considered for Sainthood imho. However Hugo Chavez also did other bad things which should be anathema to Progressives worried about censorship, wiretapping, and political intimidation. (playing your opponents personal phone calls on the news? the reason you oppose the NSA is to prevent this from happening in America someday) His policies also set the stage for the current economic mess. That said, no he wasn't by any stretch of the imagination the evil murderous MechaHitler™ faux news made him out to be and he is still dearly loved by the masses he helped.
5 - Maduro is, as far as I can tell, a feckless leader with anti-charisma who's been attempting to wiggle out of his rock+hardplace by blaming others in the most lazy and hilarious ways. If there's a power outage, its the work of Snowball. He actually went full Wayne Pierre and blamed steamy telenovelas, violent vidya games, and Spider Man for Venezuela's crime epidemic. Really. Of and of course the latter two were U.S IMPERIALIST PSYOPS OMG. Which brings us to....
6 - The United States of America has interfered with, exploited, bullied, and subsidized massacres in South America for....two centuries now? Sounds about right. We all know this. No Latin American country has been spared. It'll keep happening too. Amurka.
7 - The fact of #6 provides a convenient plausible scapegoat for any Latin American leader with problems. See: Arab leaders & Israel
Which is to say....
I will take any claim of the CIA orchestrating peaceful protests with a big-ass grain of salt when the RT News article titled "Venezuela’s Maduro expels 3 US consular officials, alleging conspiracy" ends with this paragraph:
It's not the first time the socialist leader has expelled American officials from office. Hours before announcing the death of Hugo Chavez in March, Maduro expelled two US diplomats, claiming the United States might have been behind the leader's cancer.
Yeah, no.