By Richard Schulman
With the wisdom of hindsight, we think the US made a big mistake in leaving Nicolás Maduro in power in Venezuela, faced only with economic sanctions that almost never bring about the downfall of a dictatorship, just more deprivation to powerless citizens.
Chile, Colombia uprisings
The leftist-instigated arson and urban uprisings in Chile, labor strikes in Colombia, leftist unrest in Ecuador against its moderate president, and the fraudulent election and attempted comeback of Bolivia’s ousted Evo Morales are the fruits, we believe, of failing to oust Maduro.
Mary Anastasia O’Grady, the Wall Street Journal’s Latin American correspondent, writing on Chilean events, says that
To chalk up [the violence] to spontaneity requires the suspension of disbelief. As one intelligence official in the region told me Friday: “It takes a lot of money to move this number of people and to engage them in this level of violence.” The explosive devices used, he said, were “far more sophisticated than Molotov cocktails.” Foreign subversives are suspected of playing a key role, with Cuba and Venezuela at the top of the list.
The Washington Post reports that
Michael Kozak, the State Department’s acting assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere affairs, appeared to blame the Russians, telling the EFE news service that ‘we have identified on social networks false accounts that emanate from Russia, which are people who pretend to be Chilean, but in reality all the [messaging] they are doing is trying to undermine all Chilean institutions and society.’
The socialist governments of Venezuela and Cuba, with financial and intelligence support from Russia, Iran, and China, are funding and instigating the violent uprisings and property damage underway in multiple Latin American countries. They are doing so by mobilizing the powerful Left networks that have existed for decades in Latin America – the Allendists in Chile, the FARC in Colombia, and related narco networks in Ecuador and Bolivia. The ruling regimes in these five countries have significant intelligence and financial networks in the continent and strong motives to undermine the thriving market-oriented democratic governments there.
The malign actors just named would have concluded that Maduro’s Venezuelan failed state could not survive in the face of criticism by word and example from Chile, Colombia, and other Latin American relative success stories. Their strategy therefore became one of saving Maduro by mobilizing the Latin American Left against the neighboring democracies.
Until a few months ago, free markets and elected center-right governments in Latin America were on the upswing. Maduro faced world-wide criticism for granting himself a second term following an election widely regarded as fraudulent. Venezuela’s Congress insisted that Juan Guaidó was Venezuela’s lawful leader, not Maduro. President Trump applied strong economic measures against Maduro’s regime but refused to intervene militarily. Maduro prepared to leave but his Cuban and Russian minders pressured him to stay. From that point on, the momentum favoring Maduro’s ouster began to ebb and demoralization set in. Months later, Maduro and his foreign supporters had recovered sufficiently to go on the offensive against their successful neighbors.
Three powerful reasons likely operated in dissuading President Trump and his advisers to not oust Maduro by military means:
- Fear by Latin American leaders of associating themselves with a US military effort;
- The isolationism of President Trump’s political base and his campaign commitment to that perspective, and
- The embittered opposition to his administration by a Latin-Left-loving US Democratic Party already verging on civil war against the president.
Progressive commentators in the US media are refusing to recognize the instigating role that US enemies are playing in the Latin American unrest. Rather, echoing the Democratic Party presidential candidates, they have trotted out their round-the-clock explanation for all political unrest. They write that, yes, progress in Chile and Colombia has been wonderful. Poverty has decreased, employment is up, a middle class has developed. But it’s marred by all the inequality that neo-liberalism has unleashed. What’s needed now is to switch to building welfare states — free education and health care, minimum wages, all that good stuff.
That explanation conveniently reinforces the Democratic Party’s campaign message that inequality is worsening in the US under the Trump administration. In point of fact, inequality has been decreasing both in Chile under its center-right administration and also in the US under Trump.
For the survival of democracy and economic development in Latin America, the US and its allies in Latin America need to reverse the current Leftist wave in Latin America. Military measures need to be activated against Cuba if it doesn’t withdraw its advisers from Venezuela. Our allies in Latin America need to join with the US in preparing military measures against Venezuela if they value their own survival. Venezuela is the key sanctuary for FARC and the Latin American narco cartels.
In the early months of this year there were hopes that Latin America was putting behind itself a century or more of stagnation and counterproductive leftist economics. When Maduro was allowed to survive beyond spring of this year, all that hope and momentum began waning. Now the momentum is in the other direction, back to the failures and instability of the 20th century – unless the US and its Latin American allies quickly act to reverse this adverse wave. This should have been done earlier in the year, when the momentum was favorable to the ouster of Maduro and the return of Venezuela to democracy. In the words that Shakespeare put in the mouth of Brutus in Julius Caesar,
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves
Or lose our ventures.
It’s past time to make the Monroe Doctrine great again. The locks need to be changed so that Vladimir Putin’s key to Caracas no longer works.
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