One can’t help but note all those dictators are doing just fine, thanks for asking, even the one who just got 500k of his soldiers wounded or killed in a war he’s going to win if America doesn’t remember who actually needs financial and material support (probably not the country doing a genocide)
So now you admit that it’s not about whether Maduro was singled out, that we do actually address a very broad swathe of authoritarian regimes, but now it’s not enough because it hasn’t toppled all of them. Great. Glad we’re making progress in discussing this.
Exactly how many of those 7 million Venezuelan refugees were to blame for any of Maduro’s sins? The ones fleeing that economy we helped fuck into ground, mind you.
How many of those Venezuelan refugees would have fled even if we did keep funding Maduro’s dictatorship and it’s ability to repress and torture dissidents while it drove the economy into the ground? The ones fleeing the regime that has put boots on the street to murder protesters and make mass arrests to the consternation and objection of all of their neighbors and almost every functioning democracy in the fucking world?
Maybe the oil ISN’T the main problem here?
No, it can’t be the authoritarian dictatorship. People LOVE those.
How many more are you willing to see made? How many do you think need to flee before his regime, somehow, actually topples?
We were perfectly willing to raise sanctions in exchange for the very basic behavior of having free and fair elections. We pre-emptively relaxed sanctions as an incentive towards that. And yet the Maduro regime was unwilling to adhere to that very basic requirement after having already explicitly agreed to it with the US. So what should our reaction have been? Said, “Aw, shucks, you really got us this time! We’ll buy up all your oil, just for humoring us for ten seconds!”
But yes, it is OUR fault for the refugee crisis. God, if only we had kept funding Maduro’s regime without any strings attached, THEN we would TRULY be acting morally. For oil’s sake, of course.
Oh, just by the by? America has been sanctioning Venezuela since Chavez was in charge. You’re probably confused because reporting likes to separate talking about post-crisis sanctions in response to the growing red fascism from acknowledging that they existed prior to the crisis as well.
Sanctions during the Chavez administration were on individuals, and individuals related to the drug trade at that. That’s not even close to the same ballpark.
And, obviously, the worse the humanitarian crisis got, the more the cycle of violence kicks in, the more sanctions we piled on (especially under Trump, obviously), the worse it gets, the more sanctions we place…
And of course, the alternative, buying oil from Venezuela, directly funding that cycle of violence in favor of the oppressors, is definitely the legitimate and superior option.