Guaido's Promises to Pence on Defection Not As Projected; Pence Pissed Off - Polidicks

https://www.lapoliticaonline.com/nota/117905-exclusivo-pence-cruzo-reproches-con-guaido-en-la-cumbre-de-bogota/ TL;DR for those who can't speak Argentinian so well: Guaido promised Pence that if the leaders of the free world backed him, this would somehow cause half the armed forces to defect and join his side. Pence believes him. This has not happened in spite of extensive support worldwide. Around 0.1% of the armed force has defected to Guaido and Maduro still has their loyalty by and large. Pence is not happy, and there are fears that Guaido and the opposition as a whole is losing steam.

Why does that picture make them look like they have Vitiligo?

This guy pretty much immediately turned out to be just another corporatist, didn't he? Making deals and promises about Venezeula's oil reserves before he even had control of them. Venezeula needs change and this guy is surely better than nothing but it's hard to see him as the ideal outcome.

Pretty much any first pick by the US for replacing a head of state that is unfavourable to the interests of the US and its corporations will be guaranteed to be one. They're dime a dozen too, so if Guaido fails they'll just get another one that is ever so slightly more appealing until they get their victory.

He said if he ousted Maduro he’d hold elections for a new president. He shouldn’t even be making such large changes to the economy if he’s not even been officially elected.

Hate Maduro, but he is turning out to be the lesser of evils in this shitstorm.

Guido, despite his potentially shitty policies, has not intentionally denied food and medicine to people that desperately need it nor have death squads go out and murder vocal opposition supporters.

Silly thing to say, Guide may turn out the same if given power, at the moment he only has the strong arm of the international community. Maduro has a proven track record of committing crimes against his people.

To be fair, that's because he has no such power to do any of that. There's no telling what he'd do if tomorrow he somehow wound up as the president. Then again, one can safely assume that Maduro's shittiness hasn't yet shown itself to the fullest extent.

gee its almost like the military which is paid for by the state owned corporations that they embezzle from might be opposed to change....

It has a lot to do with how corruption and Cuba. The GNB doesn't care about Venezuelans.

Sounds like someone hasnt a fucking clue about what's going on in Venezuela.

Strangely enough, I have not found any other sources that mention what LPO says, much less in English.(People check your sources carefully to try to avoid misinformation since many aren't very "sincere" over Venezuela Either it's not very netrual or is "biased.") and the way the news is written and the only ones I've found are pro-left or Government websites which makes it difficult for me to trust its truthfulness very much at least that Argentine FP can validate that this page is reliable, It's still unreliable to me. Still, Guaido made the mistake trusting that everyone would support him (including the armed forces themselves). when in fact he didn't think himself it was another, although it's no lie that there are some military against maduro, the rest are still "loyal" since maduro knew how to control them between giving him too much benefits (cars, houses, lots of money), powers (control in ministries, refineries, even in the police force) and some are "untouchable". and those who oppose it are discovered and either thrown out of the armed forces and suffering tons of shit or arrested for "traitors." prefer to either shut up and stay "loyal" to maduro both for their families or benefits until they decided to leave voluntarily. or suffering brutal tortures

Guaido's planned policies are logical, and at this point quite necessary to ensure the sure survival of PDVSA and by extension Venezuela's economy. The two are intertwined, as the oil company provides 90 percent of the hard currency inflows to the country. It's loss would deal a tremendous blow to Venezuela. But PDVSA is on a death spiral right now, and even these actions could be too little too late. The company has been irredeemably mismanaged ever since Chavez took power. To get a high-level understanding of the performance of the company, you need to look at two metrics: production rate, which shows how many barrels are extracted per day depletion rate, which shows whether changes in production are caused by the reduction of reserves or not (see the chart for explanation) https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2Fstevehanke%2Ffiles%2F2017%2F03%2FTotal-Production-1200x872.jpg As you can see, output rate is the decreasing (it is now the lowest in 30 years) while the depletion rate has also dropped extremely, which means the company is just sitting on its huge oil reserves, making them worthless. Human capital flight due to the mass firings of professionals in 2002 have already taken their toll. Chavez's idea to directly siphon off revenue to fund social programs (with questionable success) is one thing, doing it at such a rate that during the mid 2000s oil boom there was no remaining funding to even maintain steady production is another. Shortsighted and fatal. Just imagine yourself as a Venezuelan, already seeing shortages of things like milk in the mid 2000s, while oil prices are seemingly skyrocketing. Why the hell is the state not profiting off this? Because it couldn't due to the previously mentioned policy. Right now the most pressing issue is that due to massively reduced capital expenditures, necessary equipment is getting shut down which is making certain reserves practically unrecoverable in the future. The company has been generating negative cash flows for years, piling up debt, and needs funding as soon as possible to recover. But the Venezuelan state is already on the brink of collapse and quite powerless to step in: https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2Fstevehanke%2Ffiles%2F2017%2F03%2FDebt-1200x872.jpg Somehow trying to encourage foreign investment remains the only viable path right now. In fact, Chavez and Maduro has been doing for years. Joint ventures with varying amount of Chinese and Russian shares, and more importantly, loans. China has given roughly $50 billion in oil backed loans to Venezuela, and roughly half the debt still remains outstanding. You know, China, which is known to happily give huge loans to shitty debtors, and politically strongarm them when they default (see: Montenegro or Africa). All this paranoia regarding the US getting a foothold in the country, while no one actually cared that China is already balls deep in a more dangerous way... Also Guaido's plan specifically mentions the following: The ownership of hydrocarbon deposits must be reserved for the Venezuelan state" "Allow private capital as majority shareholder in joint projects" (not the company itself!) The above point is basically how the company operated before 2003. Was Venezuela a US client state back then? Norway is also an economy greatly dependent on petroleum export, has it become any more dependent on the US after Statoil was partially privatized in 2006? Where was the outrage then? Then there was this post in the last thread, which I would just skip as usual ignorance, but since most people agreed with it I have to address it: Agreed, before when the PDVSA owned the oil fields the people were getting a meager 100% of the revenue. With privatization they will get none of the revenue and multi-national corporations with no interest in the people will get it all! What is neo-colonialism? Foreign investment is neo-colonialism huh? Then I guess everyone who agrees with this statement must be staunchly anti-EU as the fourth freedom of the union is "Free movement of capital" Revenues have been dwindling massively ever since Chavez took power as shown above. It greatly offsets any surplus made by previous repurchasing of shares in joint ventures. No, 100% of the revenue isn't ending back at "the people". The company extracts roughly 1.8 million barrels/day. Of these 400 thousand is consumed on the heavily subsidized domestic market. 500 thousand is used to repay debts mostly to China, Russia and others. 50 thousand is supplied basically freely to Cuba (even now, lol). Only less than half of the production actually generates revenue (even less after necessary light oil imports).

Iirc one of our Venezuelan FPer's explained that a lot of Venezuela's oil workers were persecuted and left, and the place is so poor now they don't have the money to run the oil industry, hence bringing in outside oil companies to supply the cash and workforce.