Venezuelan-Brazil border closed to prevent aid coming in, Colombia maybe next - Polidicks

While I agree with that point, I have seen it used as a rebuttal to criticisms of the Maduro government. The idea being that the interventionism displayed by the Trump administration is proof of the vast conspiracy responsible for all of the problems the country is facing, and that Maduro's actions are justified resistance against capitalist plotting. I know people personally who pull up Venezuelan state media to contradict the lived experiences of actual Venezuelans. It's the kind of empty headedness I'd expect from boomers on facebook. I don't see why it's so difficult for people to both acknowledge that Republicans are scum and also that this rhetoric is ludicrous.

Another Venezuelan military deserter and warned that Maduro order is to massacre the people, to take out the goons (collectivos) and the prisoners to use it https://twitter.com/NTN24ve/status/1099458639012814849

all hail maduro, the king of corpses

As a Chilean. Someone that has gone to the Museo de la Memoria (Memory Museum) in which the dictatorship scar still lives on in our lives. I gotta say: Do you really think we latinoamericanos are as oblivious as before? You really think we don't know what it means to let the US act in our politics? Yes, yes we do. Stop thinking we are a bunch of unculture banana third world countries that can't shit properly if daddy US doesn't hold us from our neck. We know the humanitarian aid has ties to Donald and other parties interested on the power, but what about the people? Have you thought how they feel? The hunger? The desperation? Have you done SOMETHING to help those people at least? A guy I know cheered when he heard about the burning of the trucks. He is a cunt. I have seen the scars of dictatorship to this very day. But at the same time, I have seen what good we chileans have done. How we mobilize or at least TRY to change the situation we are on. I firmly believe venezuelans will do even better than us, try to not let the outside western powers fuck them in the eye as they did with us. If some nation can is them . Stop patronizing Latinoamérica. Stop thinking we Latinos are a bunch of neanderthals. No somos los mismos idiotas de la década de los veinte. On this very moment, there's a cunt with power that is actively fucking the people of "his" country. Burning aid. Being a complete and unprecedented cunt in western history. The people are suffering.

a good way to help the venezuelan people would be to lift the sanctions that are strangling their economy and preventing them from getting medicine imo

The sanctions are literally only targeting government elites embellishing funds in Venezuela though, it does not affect the citizens in the slightest. People aren't listening to "the US state department" this is coming from Venezuelans who live or used to live there(in this very forum even), as well as independent journalists across the world, and has been known about for a few years already.

Don't kid yourself Sanctions or not, the average joe would still be in shit. They're only effecting the top dogs within the Government.

Nobody critisising international "aid" is doing so to patronise Latinos, they're trying to inform the other people reading that the US has a history of sneaking weapons in via food "aid", which is also entirely why the majority of any recent socialist governments in Latin America have refused such aid. El Salvador stands as one of the most horrendous, and blatant examples of this tactic. Reagan poured billions of dollars into various forms of "aid" to support the military dictatorship that was clamping down on any and all leftists within El Salvador(which also happened to be supported by your country and its very own US-installed dictator, Pinochet), which resulted in a drawn out civil war, and the deaths of an estimated 80,000 people; the vast majority of which were not military casualties, but rather indiscriminate killings by the death squads of the US-supported government. Disguising military aid as food aid is an immensely powerful tactic because there is literally no downside; they either accept the aid, and in doing so unknowingly strengthen their opposition, or they refuse it, and lose international and internal support because of how horrible refusing aid for your people appears. This tactic was used under the watch of Elliott Abrams who served in a number of positions under Reagan, and it is no coincidence that Trump just brought him on his team as ambassador to Venezuela. I can't believe the people on here burying their heads in the sand with so much fucking history and evidence of the US performing this, nearly exact sequence of events, to install a government of their choosing in countries that don't play ball.

It is not what is happening here, as you can obviously tell by the smouldering ruins of the trucks they burned, they were actually carrying the items they said they had. I would honestly like to ask Americans in this thread, to stop drawing parallels left and right. You're drawing false equivalencies, and arguing from them. Maduro's government has displaced millions, creating the largest refugee crisis Latin America has ever seen. Maduro's government is unable to feed its people because it destroyed local food production. Maduro's government is unable to pay its debtors because it destroyed the oil wells. Maduro's government has arrested and tortured thousands, including people I know personally. Maduro's government has killed hundreds, and that will surely ramp up to thousands once we know the full scale of his actions. Venezuela is not El Salvador, Venezuela is not Cuba, Venezuela is not Panama. We can't be swapped willy-nilly for your argument to make sense, we're not all interchangeable brown people. Every other country in South America, and I mean, literally every single one has transitioned from a military dictatorship into a democracy, and that has resulted in more prosperous nations: look at Brazil, look at Argentina, look at Chile, look at Ecuador, look at Venezuela itself in the 1950s. Regardless of US interests, South America has overwhelmingly benefitted from democratic governments that don't follow the farcical, criminally negligent model of Maduro. We just want what the rest of South America has already got.

If the USA didn't exist, apologists would find another boogeyman to blame for the woes of the failing dictatorships they slavishly defend.

There's this and then there's ignoring the fucking obvious support that Russia and China provide to Maduro, and have provided to Maduro well after now. Support in exchange of, who would have thunk it, oil. Except, unlike American interests, the Chinese or Russians aren't interested at all in buying oil, they'd rather own the wells themselves, as well as Venezuela's US subisidiary, CITGO. The sanctions that you hear the same idiots parrot? Look into them, look when they were put into place and why. Rosneff has a 51% stake on CITGO they could be taking any moment now if that weren't blocked by a US court. Maduro would have readily continued to sell off state assets for another 2 years in power had the US not denied him access to US financial services, which is what the sanctions do, by the way. There is no blockade, there never was one, Maduro has brought ruination since 2013, well before even the individual sanctions were put in place. And if the events of yesterday haven't made it obvious enough, the only person committed to let people starve is Maduro.

Once again, you are patronizing the entirety of Latin America under the guise of "they don't know better". Look at what Fnox says, an actual venezuelan that had to FLEED his country before he suffered a horrible death. I know you want to "support" Maduro because he is one of the last few bastion against US Imperialism, again, a noble idea, but you are oblivious to what the venezuelan suffer. This is not the 50-80 in which the US could basically buy the entire press of a Central American country and take power. This isn't the Chile of the 70's with a democratically elected socialist president that was fucked by a undercover CIA-ChicagoBoys-Pinochet cover ops. This is a country on the TWENTY FIRST CENTURY. Where people KNOW the history of their OWN land. The context is completely different, plus, you have seen on the news how the country went form an OK country to the absolute shitfest its currently on. How the "president" acts worse than Trump and even the cases of torture, two million venezuelans fleein their country. I have seen them. I saw an engineer working at a fast food place, but he was happy. Because he knew he had a better chance here than there. Stop trying to downplays us, an entire continent, just to fit your narrative of moral superiority. And if you truly want to help: Donate. Talk with venezuelans. At least read a book. I recommend Steven Stern "Remembering Pinochet's Chile" in which the memory of citizens during the coup d'etat and subsequent years. How they look at the events, try to rationalize them, and continue living. You're no better than Maduro and his cronies. Ignoring the reality of the people just to continue with a battle they lost years ago, and the true victims are the people. La gente. Los ciudadanos. Not you, Wafflemonstr.

The two big threads on this currently are prime examples of virtue signaling and selfish activism. There are people actually from the region and in the middle of this shit and people who lived in Venezuela or still do arguing one side. Then there are people from nice, well developed countries with no connection to the people in the region arguing against them and downplaying their suffering for their own personal politics.

Im not knowledgable enough about world powers and their relations with latin america to contribute to that discussion, but for what little it's worth I wanted to say I hope the venezeulans in this thread can get through to the other side of this mess no worse off than they are already. I cannot imagine the life you must be living now. I hope the horrors will come to an end as soon as possible.

So where is your evidence that this is happening here? You keep parroting the same thing over and over, that the US is sending weapons and not aid, the US is trying to topple Maduro for shits-n-giggles, and we're just doing it to get the oil "because they have for every other country". So where's your fucking evidence then?

It's ironic that people think the US is out for oil when it's almost entirely self-reliant on fracking now

We also have significant oil reserves ourselves, late last year the USGS discovered a deposit so large it doubled our known oil reserves. I get why anyone is suspicious of US involvement, given both our history of assassination and suppression in the region, and the current GOP warpigs sharpening their knives, but Maduro has to go. I don't think the US should lead the charge, I think South America should take care of it, with US support. But left alone, Maduro is going to destroy Venezuela for generations, just for personal gain.

Hi I'm a dumbass and I think it's a bad idea for the US to help Venezuela because then they gain influence, I would definitely prefer watching the population die of starvation and mercenaries gotta not let the US boogeyman in!

Dude fuck off or actually listen to the people on the ground. If you truely are a progressive than I would gather you subscribe to 'listen and believe'. Well motherfucker you have people from that region telling you that you're fucking wrong. So why don't you listen and fucking believe them. Do not patronize them; seriously.

It doesn't matter how many times you explain, or even what you have respond from actual Venezuelans that we live here (Ever from fnox (I think BIG BANG on pre-newpunch who's in sweden but he lived here in venezuela) will continue with the same narrative over "ugh USA want war" when you don't have with live with fatty dictator who didn't stop killing people during the protests of 2014 and 2017 or massacre Oscar Perez and you don't have to live having to get up at 3 or 4 in the morning to make a long queue for up to hours even making the queue A DAY BEFORE AND STAY ON THE STREET to be lucky enough to sell and people fighting for the last packet of sugar or pasta and endure the abuses by the national guard soldiers or seeing people suffering without medicine or try to show any news against the government is imediatmatne censored with even throwing down the internet where even all channels prefer neither to show or show the government version and to know the truth news we have to use twitter or vpn or people having nothing to eat or feed their children or eating out of the garbage and dropped out of school because they either have to accompany their parents to queue for food, or how they are going to study hungry with even fainting either the pressure of "either I waste time studying" or I drop out of school to help my family member try to buy food or babies who die in hospitals in very poor conditions with no medicines with nothing to eat and with MUCH less weight even showing bones. Thing that I myself, and more than one in this country, is living it, suffering it, and seeing it through their own eyes. and everything from the massive immigration of Venezuelans abandoned the country, and many on foot walking for days or weeks in search of a better life. but not the real victim is the "poor" Maduro and not the Venezuelans, and still insisting that everything is a propaganda machine that maduro is the "good guy" and using pro-government news or "reliable sources" than to hear the word of a true Venezuelan who lives and suffers every day who prefer to shut them up since not want hear the truth. as the folks of r/socialism or r/chapotraphouse who have banned all Venezuelans. where I HAVE even KNOWN people defending when humanitarian aid trucks were burned and they support is the "evidence" shown by the government and (I'm sure I'm going to be banned for this but) https://i.imgur.com/E4ZYLID.jpg Pepole we are no longer in the cold war, we are no longer in 1950s where everything was a disaster, and stop seeing all of Latin America as if we were still in the 1950s or who only think that Latin America is only beautiful women, Pablo Escobar or the beaches of Rio de Janeiro. as we are already in 2019 where you have a dangerous dictator genocide that does not even care Venezuelan people dying of starvation and disease where all income has been spent exclusively for them to live his life of "millionaires". who would rather kill his own people than leaving the power, the same country that is at risk of a dangerous civil war.

As a left leaning person. I'm baffled that people still support the Venezuelan Government.

Left or Right has nothing to do with it He would have it as the Nazi Republic of Venezuela if it meant he would stay in power. Political ideologies only have meaning as long as it serves a purpose.

I posted that for the sake of showing that even left-leaning people are able to realize Venezuela has become a corrupt shithole. To show we ain't blind or ignorant on the situation.