(full interview, his wife Cilia Flores can be seen in the backseat)
This comes despite N.Maduro agreeing to the u.s. pillaging their oil.
No point in arguing that it has nothing to do with drugs(, so many videos talking about it, Grayzone since 2020, even Rand Paul), not even western journalists seem to buy this lie.
They used their oil to improve the lives of their citizens instead of enriching only the wealthiest venezuelans complicit of this robbery by the u.s. for decades before Chávez. And then we(sterners) talk of sovereignty.
(source)
But i.m.o. oil is also an excuse, as it was for Iraq. The problem here is that socialism is contagious(, just like anti-zionism was contagious in the Middle-East).
Venezuela was set to lead latin american countries in economic growth, much more than the regional average of 2.9%, they survived the harshest phase, sanctions became inefficient, but the capitalists-owned empire doesn’t allow socialist countries to be successful :
The worker’s exploitation has to continue at all costs and this is more important than anything, imagine if the wealthiest lost their passive income and had to work like everyone else, that’s what has always been fought against i.m.o., whether in the Cold War or as far as the discussions of the bourgeois during, e.g., the french revolution, on the importance of keeping the right of property.
We can’t build a world where everyone is ‘a capitalist’/‘exploiting other workers while lazing around’, that’s why they hate anarchy, or Venezuela.
Needless to point out that the US won’t suffer from “international”(western) sanctions, the assets of D.Trump and american oligarchs won’t be seized, there will be no sports/cultural/… boycott, closure of US medias, freezing of the bank accounts of pro-americans, …
(oops, sry)
An interesting account/website among others : https://venezuelanalysis.com/opinion/reimposing-democracy-in-venezuela-decoding-western-propaganda
You can often hear the argument that the sanctions against Venezuela began after its economic crisis, whereas in fact they started when the oil’s crisis ended :
https://cepr.net/images/stories/reports/venezuela-sanctions-2019-04.pdf
« According to the National Survey on Living Conditions (ENCOVI by its acronym in Spanish), an annual survey of living conditions administered by three Venezuelan universities, there was a 31% increase in general mortality from 2017 to 2018. This would imply an increase of more than 40,000 deaths. »
These numbers were now back to a million barrels per day and rapidly rising.
The truth is, of course, not that socialism never works, but that capitalists fear that socialism works so much that they fight it until it falls. That’s what they did/do with Cuba or the USSR.