Nuance 4

Venezuela is much in the news these days. As we all know, Juan Guaidó, till now a virtual nonentity, outside of his country, has been sworn in as the de facto president of Venezuela with several countries, the US and Canada among them, already recognizing him as president. But Nicolas Maduro doesn't seem set on going anywhere just yet as China and Russia and other more or less despotic regimes insist on continuing to back him. I am thinking of all the many sunny reports I used to hear on Co-op Radio from their Marxist Latino Collective about the glorious Bolivarian Revolution, thanks to Hugo Chavez, and how they boldly resisted and overthrew an attempted coup sponsored by the meddling USA and their CIA lackies. Of course they were painting things in broad strokes of black and white, the evil United States being prevented from meddling and overthrowing the legitimate people's government of Venezuela and all the dumb rhetoric that goes with it. When things go wrong, blame the Americans. There is good reason for blaming America, by the way, with how they engineered the fall of the Salvador Allende government in Chile and the brutal fascist military takeover by Pinochet in 1973, not to mention the huge role they were playing in supporting fascist governments in Central American countries leading to hundreds of thousands of butchered citizens and many more refugees creating a mass diaspora. Maduro, of course, is really making hay out of this, and has only managed to very thinly cover his own incompetence as a leader while blaming it all on US sanctions and interference. Perhaps it's more, in this case, both and. I have a Venezuelan friend who hates Maduro and socialism. She doesn't really seem to give a lot of thought to the many poor Venezuelans whose grinding poverty helped necessitate the Bolivarian Revolution. Being of the middle class, for her, they really have little or no existence, and this kind of thinking, sadly, is very typical of many middle class people from Latin American countries. I came across this in Bogotá, Colombia, when on my first visit there I was riding in a car with some middle class Bogotanos. When we were entering a poor neighbourhood the car windows were sealed shut, because they didn't want anyone to threaten or rob us. It turned out, on further research, that the poor and homeless there and in other South american countries are widely despised, feared and vilified. I do not doubt that there have been crimes committed against wealthy and well off South Americans by disenfranchised persons. I also don't doubt for a minute how much the hate and fear of the poor and homeless I have heard expressed by middle and upperclass Venezuelans, Colombians and Peruvians is largely irrational and fueled by hatred and fear. There is still very little compassion for the poor in those countries. I don't know really all tlhe miscalulations and missteps that were made by Chavez and by Maduro, but I think that we have to try to look at the whole picture before we judge. if and when Maduro is voted out or overthrown, there will be a lot of rejoicing and celebrating in the streets of Caracas and elsewhere. What remains uncertain is this: what is going to happen to the poorest and most vulnerable Venezuelans under the new government that will be presumably headed by Juan Guaidó? It is a very sad fact of the way politics and global economics are done, that no one is going to care much about the most vulnerable, so long as capital can flow freely and the rich can go on getting richer. The other elephant in the room is Venezuela's oil reserves, and how even the good revolutionaries from Co-op Radio seem to think that oil wealth would be great for that country, carbon emissions and climate change disaster be damned.