It is the perfect target to inaugurate the military arm of its doctrine of interference in what it considers its natural area of influence. Nicolás Maduro is an unpresentable dictator and the regime’s second in command is a cliche thug. They are both caricatures, the mustachioed giant dancing on stages before crowded audiences, and Diosdado Cabello swinging a Flintstones club in a TV program called “Con el mallet giving.” Although what makes the residual Chavista regime the ideal target for Trump to inaugurate the military arm of his doctrine against any extra-continental gravitation from Tierra del Fuego to the Canadian Arctic, is its blatant authoritarianism, its criminal nature and the ineptitude with which it managed to set a calamitous record: wrecking an economy that floats on oil.
Vladimir Putin had to invent the hoax that Zelensky’s government is Nazi and that NATO was about to deploy nuclear missiles aimed at Moscow in Ukraine, to justify a crazy invasion and a far-fetched war. On the other hand, there is no need to invent anything about the vileness of residual Chavismo.
By the way, bananaism had already broken out. He made his presentation with the exuberant Caribbean leader having Bolívar unearthed to “prove” his theory that he did not die of tuberculosis but was assassinated by Francisco de Santander and other supposed political ancestors of the center-right Republican and center-left social democratic leaders who questioned his messianic leadership and the contempt he radiated towards criticism and pluralism.
But Chávez had the support of the majorities, while Maduro soon lost that support and moved towards a plain and simple dictatorship, with prisons full of political prisoners, systematic use of torture, extrajudicial executions, ultraviolent shock forces inspired by the “basij” of the dictatorship of the Persian ayatollahs, censorship and persecution, repressions with more than fifty deaths, in addition to disappearances and other brutalities proven by the main Human Rights organizations and by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, before Bachelet presides, with her in the leadership and finally with the successors of the former Chilean socialist president.
The Latin American leaders who defend the Chavista regime have all benefited, in black and white (especially black) from the petrodollars with which, first Chávez and then his pathetic heirs, financed the construction of leadership at the regional level and the purchase of complicities. And fewer and fewer of those leaders are talking about it. The majority has retreated into silence.
That is why Trump chose the calamitous regime that prevails over Venezuela to inaugurate a new era that unifies the theory that James Monroe proposed in the first half of the 19th century (America for the Americans), with the praxis that Theodore Roosevelt applied in the prelude to the 20th century, waging the war that ended the Spanish overseas empire. Doctrine and cudgel so that there are no European presences in any corner of the Americas, today encompassing above all China and Central Asian regimes such as Iran.
Politically, Trump immerses himself in electoral processes, as he did in the recent legislative elections in Argentina and in the presidential elections in Honduras. And militarily, the baptism of fire will be in Venezuela.
From playing target shooting on supposedly drug traffickers in the Caribbean, murdering almost a hundred people, to initiating flights over Venezuelan territory and forcibly appropriating a gigantic tanker ship carrying a lake of oil, without in any case there being a military response from the Chavista regime.
To the F-18 planes that flew over strategic areas with Lake Maracaibo and the state of Falcón without the Sukhoi fighters sold to them by Russia or the North American F-16s acquired by the democratic government of the 1980s. Some Venezuelan air squadron could have approached the intruding planes, to pressure them to leave the airspace, but not a leaf was moved in the local air bases. Of course, there was also no anti-aircraft fire using the Buk anti-aircraft systems or the S-300 missiles that Putin sent them.
After that sign of exaggerated Chavista caution in the face of the North American air raid, another similar example came, but in the naval scenario. Trump was Captain Jack Sparrow and his pirates of the Caribbean, boarding a tanker and kidnapping it, without any vessel from the Venezuelan naval forces coming to the rescue. The warlike nature of Maduro and Diosdado Cabellos remained in the world of words. A show of weakness that would lead Trump, in the coming days or weeks, to the next stage: bombing from the air and from the sea on land targets.
Dog came the first Chavista military challenge. It happens that the naval blockade that Trump announced would collapse the capacity to collect oil in 15 or 20 days and PDVSA would have to close active wells. If the oil cannot leave by sea to the purchasing countries because North American ships intercept and seize them, the collapse would come soon. That is why Maduro had no choice but to abandon his decision to let Trump’s provocations and military actions pass so as not to give rise to a direct clash that would trigger an open war. And he did so by ordering Venezuelan naval forces to escort oil tankers leaving their ports.
Thus, now it is Trump who must decide whether to comply with his order to block tankers transporting Venezuelan oil. If you do, you will have to fire on the local warships escorting them. And open war would break out.
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