Defined as?

I'm not arguing with you, BTW. But I'd suspect that there would be a buttload of countries that would vote on the basis of self interest rather than what is "right" - I mean, how interested in Venezuela is Nepal going to be - but they're VERY interested in how China views the matter, and might well go along with China as a nod to their huge neighbor.

One could argue that the OAS, made up of states that should have a fairly direct interest in the matter, has already (in January) voted to not recognize Maduro as the legitimate leader of the country due to the most recent sham election. Of course, you run into the same issue on the other side of countries shading their votes in terms of what they feel will play best with a particular gorilla (in this case, the US) in the next tree over....

As usual, it's complicated.

MM MD

Not perfect. Just better than what one would reasonably expect from the US government. At least there are more competing interests.

We couldn't get aid to Puerto Rico because it was too hard. (It's an island!)

But regime change is coming and it's like that meme about bae my parents are out of town.

Also "humanitarian aid" should have a long side eye. I mean come on. The US military is flying in planes on your border and are ready to help deliver aid, would you think aid is a euphemism for something else?

Well, to be fair, how else are they going to get stuff down there?

To be clear, at this point I have less than no desire to have the US trying some sort of bull**** Arbenz type of play in Venezuela - at the most we should be involved as a member (and not the leading member) of a coalition of South/Central American states who are trying to prevent a humanitarian disaster - and from what I can tell we're nowhere near that yet.

Of course, this would presume President Idiot was capable of doing his ****ing job, which he isn't. I'm afraid he'll turn the whole thing over to Bolton, which will be a complete disaster. I can't imagine this situation is good for Brazil or Columbia, but I also don't see much of a sign they're inclined to do anything about that would lead to US intervention being useful - not that Bolton or Trump would take that into consideration.

But I'm happy to learn more.

BTW, I'm completely convinced that Trump didn't know (and still doesn't believe) that Puerto Rico is actually part of the US. It's full of non-pinkish people and he's at least vaguely aware that a lot of them speak Spanish, so they aren't 'Mericans.

MM MD

The US military delivers humanitarian aid all the time to places all over the world.

*long side eye*

If you really want to understand what went wrong in Venezuela, this is a good place to start.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...P=share_btn_tw

This story has some serious problems, but it is a good attempt at explaining a complex situation.

Except Puerto Rico because of the big water between us and them.

In Trump's world, there are only enemies and friends. It's better to be his enemy than neither apparently.

So much for the humanitarian cover

One interesting thing that needs to be noted is how the US attitude toward Colombia has changed pretty dramatically in the last 18 months.

In Sept. 2017, Trump was threatening to put the country on a list of non-cooperative jurisdictions in the war on drugs, then skipped a planned trip to Colombia in November 2018.

Now, he couldn't be a bigger fan of Colombia, since it will play a key role in any US action in Venezuela.

Which is indictative of why US policy toward LatAm is so FUBAR. It wildly swings from one policy position to another based on extremely shortsighted positions with no thought or greater plan. Keep in mind as well, in 2015 John Kelly was lauding Colombia for its progress against drug trafficking, and then he failed to offer any contradiction when Trump criticized that policy in 2017.

The US has been making the same mistakes over and over again in the region for the last 60 years, and this is just the latest example.

You're thinking about this way too hard. They don't act in good faith and they don't care. Truly.... it's disgusting but the people who call the shots don't gaf as long as they're being enriched by what's going on.

Looks like the armed forces are making their decision. Guaido promised half the armed forces would defect for him and so far about 300 hundred out of hundreds of thousands have

https://www.lapoliticaonline.com/not...re-de-bogota/7

The AP wrote an article that partly discussed how difficult it is for members of the military to leave:

https://apnews.com/5047b6d203bb473ea3ca704ad630b898

In other news, and this is kind of depressing, the large majority of Venezuela has been without power for the past 16+ hours as their major hydroelectric plant has had some sort of catastrophic failure. Maduro has blamed CIA sabotage (he has blamed the CIA for years).

I wouldn't think it would be easy to skip out of the military to join a coup, but regardless the end result is that the Gauido led coup is puttering out. If I had to guess the US will skip the democratic middle man and go to the generals directly and offer them an Egyptian style deal; neo liberal reforms, open the markets up to US businesses and stabilize the country and you get to run the country and keep your hands in the pie. Probably throwing in the idea of future contracts with the US which would be diverted off to the generals, to sweeten the pot.

To be clear, Maduro is the head of a military dictatorship that has seized power. That is a coup. It wasn't a quick coup; it happened over many years and through myriad processes.

The most recent free-ish and fair-ish election was the 2015 National Assembly election. Maduro got his ass handed to him, and thereafter ended those pesky free and fair elections.

The leader of the National Assembly would become the interim President if the Presidency was vacated, and his job would be to call new elections. This is exactly what has taken place. Which is why the interim President has the support of pretty much the entire free world, and Maduro's primary defenders are authoritarian regimes.

The legitimate interim President using protests and urging the end of a military dictatorship, in the face of violent repression, is not a coup in any way, shape, or form.

As to whether anything is puttering out, the economy continues to spiral downward at a rapid pace. That is hardly conducive to a regime premised on stealing to mollify a military that is tasked with repressing the population. That is going to be made a lot worse with this power outage, which appears to be quite significant, and also shows that the country is now almost completely reliant on one electrical plant (a huge dam/hydroelectric).

And NYT is reporting that Russia's support for Maduro is beginning to show some cracks:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/w...uro-putin.html

Russia has made huge bets on Venezuela that risk leaving them in the cold if the dunce dictator is replaced.

One nice thing about having idiots like Marco Rubio taking the lead on US policy in Venezuela is that it gives Maduro a credible cover story to blame the worsening situation on the US.

Yes, things are getting worse. But Rubio has been tweeting for the last month that the US was planning to make things worse. It makes it harder to believe the US government now when it starts claiming it had nothing to do with the recent power outage. (Not that I believe the US had anything to do with it, but it gave Maduro an easy out, and put Rubio in the uncomfortable position of having to claim that the idea that the US would so something like that is ridiculous, when it is exactly the kind of thing the US would do.)

The US has been costing the Venezuelan economy $30 million dollars per day over the past several years through their sanctions. The coup attempt so far has been a failure, but those sanctions will only be tightened until the misery of the Venezuelan people is great enough to support the coup, and then finally the US will have a Venezuelan president who is friendly to America's imperialistic demands.

looks to me like Colombia should build a wall to keep those illegal people out.

Lol. Please you cannot be serious.

Limited American sanctions began 18 months ago, and ramped up about 45 days ago.

The protests due to food shortages, corruption, and a poor economy, were 5 years ago. Multiple people were killed by the regime as a result of those protests. It's been downhill ever since, with the suffering ramping up to a disgusting degree.

Coup, counter coup, revolution, bringing of the one true President, whatever you want to call it the American backed push with Guaido seems to be failing for now.

They've been saying the quiet part loud the entire time yet people like domer still stan for them.

Chomsky fan?