Even though the whole thing never got to the support stage from the US, the fact that US officials entertained the idea is still going to anger a lot of people since it just looks like we're up to our old Cold War sheneinighans. And of course, there's no guarantee that the military coup will actually restore democracy or be any better than things are now.
It went ok the last time Venezuela had a right-wing coup. They merely abolished the constitution, the human rights ombudsman, the supreme court, the national electoral commission and parliament. Democracy restored! (at least according to Bush-era American TV).
One question we can ask is what effect the sanctions are having. Zimbabwe had similar sanctions, and the hyper-inflation only came
after the sanctions were imposed. Similarly, Venezuela during Chavez's period 1999-2013 had
lower inflation than the decade before, while the current hyper-inflation follows a set of similar sanctions as imposed on Zimbabwe in 1999. Also, the famous Weimar Republic hyperinflation was noted as being connected to the Treaty of Versailles, which was effectively a set of sanctions too. So, historically, you see sanctions followed by hyperinflation in a range of nations, regardless of whether they're rightwing, leftwing or whatever. It doesn't make much sense to say that hyperinflation is due to the
economic theory of the one country such as "socialism" in Venezuela's case (hint: it's still a capitalist nation), because that doesn't explain why such disparate nations have all had the same thing happen, preceded by one specific thing: sanctions. Politically, sanctions also rarely (if ever) lead to democracy, instead they fuel controlling tendencies of the current political order, so you see nations becoming more authoritarian in response to sanctions quite often in history.
I can make some good predictions about what would happen if Maduro is ousted from power. It would be good for some people, sanctions would be lifted, IMF loans would flow, US and UK taxpayers would bail out the nation. Then they get oil flowing at big discounts after bringing in the oil companies. Those are the good things for Venezuela. However, domestically, you need to look at who will be running the show, mostly people who signed off on, or approved of that coup in which they abolished all traces of constitutional rule when they had the chance last time. "War on the Poor" would be a likely scenario, with unions crushed, public health spending slashed and so forth. Don't forget that 54% of the nation were living in "extreme poverty", and they had peak inflation of 100% per year
before 1999, when the people who want to overthrow Maduro used to be in power. You're only hearing about it more now because the people complaining are lighter-skinned middle-class people. When it was peasants in the barrios starving to death, the world just didn't care.
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Topic: Latin American Politics: Moralism (Read 94989 times)