The US has reimposed economic sanctions against a Venezuelan state-owned mining company and says it could go on to reimpose further sanctions on the country’s oil and gas sector after Venezuela’s Supreme Court barred main opposition candidate Maria Corina Machado from running for president last week.
The US Treasury on Monday revoked General License 43, which had authorized dealings with mining conglomerate CVG-Minerven. The Treasury said US companies have until February 13 to wind down transactions that were previously authorized by that license.
While US economic sanctions against the mining company are unlikely to cause significant damage to the Venezuelan economy, the US State Department has crucially signaled it intends to renew oil and gas sanctions from April 18, if there’s no progress between Venezuela’s authoritarian president Nicolas Maduro and the opposition “particularly on allowing all presidential candidates to compete in this year’s elections,” it said in a statement.
I believe they’re referencing how Trump’s administration tried to do a coup in Venezuela, Operation Gideon. Terrible idea from a terrible administration.
Doesn’t change the fact that Maduro is an autocrat, imo, but they’re not wrong that the US consistently puts their thumb on the scale of a lot of elections, especially in the western hemisphere. I still think it’s insane to support this kind of election barring because it’s clearly an easy tool to unjustly benefit incumbents. It’s a totally different story with Trump because he violated his oath of office. With this woman, people just don’t like the policies she’s proposing, in plain day, to the voters. Let them pick who their leader is.
Obama did coups, Bush II did coups, Clinton did coups, Bush I did coups, Reagan did coups. This isn’t a Republican problem, it is a US problem.
I don’t think it’s fair to characterize Libya as a coup, the west just fanned the flames and Gaddafi was a terrible autocrat. I hope you don’t think Euromaidan was a coup. Clinton’s Haiti invasion certainly didn’t work out but it had popular support in Haiti at the time. Not all military intervention is created equal. None under this administration, either
I’m not going to compare coups, of which there are more than you star, because an incredible and dangerous power dynamic is at play. How is it democratic for the US to do these coups when their own citizens are told lies to justify them. Those statements often prove to be false justifications. The US does this shit not for democracy but often for their own hegemony and/or the desires of the capitalist class to extract resources from these nations. If everyone acted like the US, I think even you would see the forest for the trees.
I was just listing the ones democrats “own”. The egregious ones I can think of all belong to Republicans besides Bay of Pigs. I agree with you that much of the US media has manufactured consent when legitimate justification didn’t exist, but I disagree that this is unique to the US. You can watch Russian state media manufacture consent for the war in Ukraine on YouTube, and they’ve regularly tried to assassinate Zelenskyy. Iran props up the Houthis that are also attempting to overthrow Yemen’s government. The French have a long history of it, the British, I could go on. Don’t get me wrong, I find military intervention ineffective in doing anything other than benefiting Raytheon shareholders in most cases, but the only thing that differentiates the US from much of the rest of the world is the ability to project power much more significantly.