Venezuela humanitarian aid met with teargas and gunfire on borders - Polidicks

r/cth turned tankie?

i thought most of em beat off to sketches of stirner myself

I've seen a decent amount of Maduro apologism there but the majority narrative I see is simply denouncing US involvement. Which is entirely reasonable imo, especially when you consider the two guys running the show there (Abrams and Bolton) are two of the most bloodthirsty war criminal scumbags in the administration. The alleged 5,000 troops in Colombia, seen on Bolton's legal pad last month, is a particular worry of mine. The Red Cross has no problem getting humanitarian aid into Venezuela, and in fact they condemned this move by the US for it's overtly political tone. USAID is an arm of the state department who have done plenty of shady shit in the past, using humanitarian aid to flex political muscle. Of course Maduro isn't going to accept aid from the US. They're trying to overthrow him. If mass murderers like Elliot Abrams and John Bolton really wanted to help the Venezuelan people, they would have coordinated the aid with the help of international humanitarian groups who already have supply lines and deals with the Venezuelan government. They didn't do it because they knew Maduro would refuse a unilateral US shipment and cause tensions to escalate, and people are falling for it hook line and sinker.

This wouldn't have worked as well as you think it'd have. Barely if any of that aid would've received by the people that _need_ it. Who specifically are "falling for it".

so why would maduro refuse the US government shipping in food and medical supplies? what justifies him to do that? should he be doing that?

Why wouldn't it have? The Red Cross is doing it. Surely it would have worked better than what just happened here, where a grand total of zero aid reached anybody.

That’s horseshit, by the way. The Red Cross doesn’t run any aid programs within Venezuelan soil as local authorities have denied them permission. The Venezuelan government does not recognize there being a humanitarian crisis in Venezuela. They don’t run soup kitchens or distribute medicine outside of their own hospital. There’s a handful of organizations, largely religious as they enjoy immunity from prosecution, who run soup kitchens. Maduro doesn’t accept aid from anyone, not just the US. I can tell you of my own experience trying to get my grandpa his heart medicine while I was still in country, we actually put it in a box with sugar and flour so that the National Guard would steal that instead of the medicine. Saying that the Red Cross has no problem operating in Venezuela is offensively ignorant of the reality of the country.

I suppose that 1 > 0, even if for propaganda purposes.

I was going by this reporting, and I interpreted it as the Red Cross expanding an existing operation directly in Venezuela that was receiving aid shipments. I reread and it I was wrong and you are right. I apologize.

So, ultimately, that's why Venezuelans seem to be quite cross with American leftists. They don't realize that we've been asking for help against Maduro for years. Many leftists who paid no mind whatsoever to the country are only coming to the topic because it showed up in their feed. The reality of things is, all of these things have been attempted in the last 6 years: 1) A recall referendum, blocked arbitrarily by the government controlled CNE. 2) A trial against Maduro, blocked by the TSJ, which was deliberately stacked with government-aligned magistrates immediately after the 2015 win by the opposition in the National Assembly. 3) Removal of said magistrates, blocked by the CNE by denying indigenous tribes representation due to alleged voter fraud. A second vote was never scheduled. 4) Creation of a parallel TSJ to overrule the hijacked one. Forced into exile due to SEBIN harassment. 5) Protests demanding Maduro's removal. Violently repressed and disbanded by security forces over and over since 2014. 6) Participating in the illegally scheduled presidential elections of last year. The main opposition party was banned, candidates were threatened with prison, leaving Maduro to run against a stooge who was formerly part of Chavez' party. As of right now, the country has over 3 million displaced in the last 5 years. The amount of household living under extreme poverty is 61%, the amount of households with an income less than the international poverty line is 87%, infant mortality rate is 21%, murder rate is the highest in the world at around 81 homicides per 100000 inhabitants with 4 Venezuelan cities being in the top 30 of murder rates worldwide (Caracas, where I'm from, is number 1, with twice the murder rate of fucking Juarez). This is on top of having the highest inflation rate in the world, a number so hilariously high it doubles every other week, the lowest oil production numbers in all of Venezuela's democratic history, the highest amount of debt, the lowest amount in cash reserves in the last 30 years. Oh yeah, did I mention that 61% of the population has, on average, lost 12 kilos since 2017? Lemme put it bluntly: Maduro is the humanitarian crisis. While this economic disaster is completely the fault of Chavez and his policies, Maduro has actively conspired to make things worse for everybody. I do not give a fuck who helps, so long as he's gone. We have enough in the country to rebuild him, but he, and his entire party must be removed.

They've been tankies from day one, it's just more obvious when Venezuela is discussed.

if day one was jan 1st 2019 then sure. from what I saw this time last year and earlier, it was overwhelmingly lib left and nobody liked the tankies. I guess the cesspool that is r/lsc leaked all over the other left boards.

Eh, maybe it's just my bias since I didn't see much of them until late 2018 when they'd already gone hard in it; honestly this feels like the problem with reddit banning r/leftwithsharpedge, all the wannabe revolutionaries from there infested every other leftist subreddit they could find.

Could someone do me a favor and summerise how Venzuala got to such a shitty sitiuation? As I understand it was corruption and shitty policies (tho what were those policies exactly)?

basically chavez nationalized a lot of industries and then proceeded to badly mismanage them by giving numerous jobs to his supporters in the socialist party, he also squandered oil wealth (often on propping up fellow leftwing governments like cuba). concurrently he squeezed private enterprise to death through regulations/nationalization/outright stealing stuff and made venezuela extremely unattractive to do any business in (or with). the consequences of both these things more or less led to economic ruin as production collapsed, the bolivar became worthless (making business difficult and wiping out everyones savings and investments), and it became impossible to import or export goods. starvation, disease, lawlessness, and general misery followed this naturally, and when maduro came to power he didn't have any idea of how to fix any of it, so he either blames america or capitalists while doubling down on the policies which brought these troubles in the first place. although if you really want to avoid american imperialism, you can just borrow lots of chinese money and have the currently popular chinese imperialism instead.

no facepunch just turned more alt right.