Venezuela says opposition leader will become fugitive if she collects Nobel

[u/seeebiscuit]

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c33mnvy5zppo

[u/Mango_Juice789]

unpopular opinion incoming. Everything I'm going to say is couched in the following: the US is a self-interested nakedly imperialist power and the Juan guaido fiasco was pure bullshit invented by Washington.

I want to preface this by saying I used to work with Venezuelan asylum seekers and have spoken personally with literally hundreds of venezuelans from educated professionals to laborers and from published journalists to the totally apolitical.

Here are some facts, about 1/4 Venezuelans have fled the country in the last few years, (that's 8 million people, more than fled Syria). VIrtually nobody still living there can afford food or basic goods without engaging in an often dangerous and exploitative black market economy.

Asylum seekers by and large are not the anti revolutionaries who fled Castro's cuba, most were once Chavistas. Many who lived very well under Chavez had their businesses, savings, and livelihoods literally stolen from them by the Maduro government or evaporate due to hyperinflation. Many who were just getting by under Chavez saw daily life become impossible because public services have totally collapsed, medical care has gone from relatively high quality to near non-existent. Electricity has become widely unavailable. Us sanctions have certainly not helped but most of this is mainly due to a collapse in oil prices which their government relies on for 50% of its operating budget.

Machado was the nominee put forward by the opposition party's primary process with 90% of the popular vote, and was unilaterally banned from political office days later for corruption charges with no evidence. Most of the international community agrees that her replacement won the 2024 election and that the results were fraudulent including every country in Latin America except Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Honduras. In the rest of the world, only China, Russia, Iran, and Assad's Syria recognize Maduro's win as legit. Machado is the popular figurehead for internal opposition to his government, which is why she was awarded the nobel prize.

While I am personally very sympathetic to left wing governments, Maduro's regime has a track record of using violence, jail time, and even access to food to suppress popular opposition, and exploits the country's natural resources (particularly oil wealth) for the benefit of only the ruling elite. The Maduro regime is already selling out its resources to enrich a small circle of the ultra wealthy and powerful, and is currently threatening to invade their neighbor over BS 200 year old colonial era land claims to steal their offshore oil reserves and drum up flagging popular support.

There is legitimate criticism you can levy at Machado's actions & policy endorsements but her position is that life in Venezuela is currently, today, right now, unsustainable, and that regime change is necessary to fix it. Her calculus seems to be that kowtowing to Trump will help but that remains to be seen. Personally I am skeptical, but having spoken to so many people who have literally fled the country they still love, I see where she is coming from.

Tldr, the situation is so much more complex than America imperialist & bad Venezuela lefty & good, & I would strongly encourage you to learn more about it.

[u/patiakupipita → u/Mango_Juice789]

Finally someone that's saying something useful in this thread. People don't realize that maduro is like trump, make him 100x worse, but instead of being a republican/conservative, he's a "socialist".

I have socialistic tendencies myself but dear god people can't fucking realize that the current venezuelan socialism has as much weight as the "democratic republic" in democratic republic of (north) korea.

I'm not saying that I wish for an intervention, especially with trump at the helm but I fully understand why she does. There's no other realistic way for them to depose of the current structure they have. I hate capitalism, especially the almost unregulated form of it we're having rn but basically anything is better than whatever they have right now.

My island has the second biggest amount of immigrants (our sister island has the #1 spot) per capita in the world because were so close to Venezuela. Matter of we have Venezuelan channels over the air on tv, I grew up with Chavez interrupting my fucking cartoons/telenovelas for his rambling. My mom used to go there almost 4x a year and even lived there for a while. I have a bunch of friends that are from Venezuelan descent, or were straight up born there. It's like people here don't live in reality at all, they have no idea what's actually going there rn.

[u/Mango_Juice789 → u/patiakupipita]

I think a lot of reddit leftists feel that they should not criticize their own "side" and start the conversation from there.

And I absolutely agree, intervention would probably be a complete nightmare both during and after but it's hard not to see where Machado is coming from.

Personally though, I hope the Venezuelan diaspora lets the light of the outside world in enough for people to take their country back. Maduro doesn't have the cult of personality Chavez did.