Tuesday, January 29, 2019

Venezuela: Selective Indignation

As Venezuela erupts in violence and the United States moves quickly and unilaterally to capture its oil, historian Miguel Tinker Salas offers some useful background.
Although many reviewers of Salas' most recent book find him to be too sympathetic to Maduro, he puts the current crisis in the appropriate context of other interventions in the region. One need not support Maduro to oppose his forced ouster.

In a recent editorial statement, the Council on Hemispheric Affairs makes much the same case, in more detail. It is from the COHA statement on Venezuela that I lifted the title of this post. In a world full of legitimate causes of indignation, it is instructive to notice which human-rights crises lead to interventions, and which do not. Oil is not the only cause -- the Obama administration had other reasons for supporting a right-wing coup in Honduras -- but it very often is.

If the United States gets involved in Venezuela militarily -- which seems very likely -- it will have been optional, and it will have been under the leadership of two of the architects of the worst policies of the 1980s, one convicted and one unindicted.


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