Hi. Any updates on Venezuela? I was reading some news earlier, but most of it is from a couple days ago. The news cycle here moves on after 12 hours, if that much. :/
Sadly, there’s not a lot to say right now. Things aren’t looking too promising because Guaido’s military support seems to not have been as stable as it looked originally, and Maduro’s still largely in control of the armed forces.
On the other hand, USA seems to be talking about intervention a lot more seriously now. Back when I wrote my response to your first post, it still didn’t look too likely. Right now, though… going by Bolton and Pompeo meeting in the Pentagon, both Russia and Cuba being in talks with USA and Canada respectively about their positions in Venezuela, things are starting to look like USA is finally attacking the true sources of Venezuela’s support and, unless Maduro walks out NOW, this really may lead to a full-on military intervention by USA, without Russia or Cuba to save them.
According to Bolton and Pompeo, Maduro was ready to jump ship earlier this week, but Russia pressured him to stay. Allegedly, there are highly ranked officials of Maduro’s regime who were negotiating terms to give him up and turn against him. There are apparently documents that confirm these talks happened (I, personally, haven’t seen them), but of course the Maduro regime says it’s all lies.
I guess it boils down to who’s more likely to be lying? Which, frankly, is impossible to say. Trump’s cabinet is hardly the most honest, but believing Maduro is more honest than them? Maduro once claimed Chavez’s spirit came to him as a bird and spoke to him. He got hit by a mango in the face in the middle of one of his speeches and later on claimed the mango merely had an innocent message written across it by one of his supporters, who was only asking him for food (who the hell throws food away when asking for food?). When a drone blew up in the middle of some dumbass military event he was holding, he made a huge deal about this being a ploy by the opposition to kill him (imprisoned a few people for it, even): the lie there resides in the fact that Maduro’s regime has outlawed all drone flights outside of their own, meaning, the damn thing most likely malfunctioned and it belonged to his own people, but why admit that when you can just play martyr and torture a few opposition politicians in the process?
Long story short, it’s impossible to know if those talks were real or not unless those documents truly are shown to the public, or the military officials in question do turn on Maduro. But as things stand, unless they do, we may really be looking at a military intervention sooner than I had thought we would.
