Expropriate

What has happened in Venezuela is difficult to comprehend. The United States has launched a military operation on Caracas to capture President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. It is an intervention comparable only to the capture of Manuel Noriega in Panama in 1989.

You will remember those images of Hugo Chávez in his early years, when, walking through Caracas, he pointed to buildings and decreed with a mixture of whim and authority:This building, expropriate it; that other one, expropriate it."It was an unchecked power that stripped businessmen, entrepreneurs, and professionals of their assets and their working lives."

Thousands of middle- and upper-class Venezuelans—entrepreneurs who had built businesses, law firms, shops, clinics, factories, or small companies in a once-prosperous country—saw their companies seized, their assets confiscated, and their projects destroyed. They were expelled. Many relocated to the United States, Spain, Colombia, or Chile, taking their talent, networks, and resources with them as the Venezuelan economy collapsed.

The country, which now depends almost exclusively on its oil resources and remittances, has seen its GDP per capita fall dramatically over the last decade, placing it among the poorest countries in the world, with less than three thousand dollars per inhabitant per year.

Poverty and social decay are overwhelming after years of mismanagement, shortages of medicine and food, and the collapse of basic services. Oil revenues have proven insufficient to sustain an economy that, before the Bolivarian Revolution, was diversified and competitive. Production plummeted, private investment fled, and international confidence evaporated.

During the Cold War, US military operations were justified in the name of democracy and freedom. Liberalism versus socialism. Today, that's no longer the case. There's no ideological discourse. Trump doesn't care if he restores democracy in Venezuela. What he wants is its oil.

And so, as in the years of Chávez, every building and every factory was sentenced with a "expropriate", today it is decreed and executed:

"Expropriate that president"

It seems quite obvious to me that everything has already been arranged with those who betrayed Maduro. Trump's statements showed that there were prior talks and agreements with the current government before the capture. Otherwise, how could Trump have already stated that the vice president should lead this new phase? Do you think Trump is pointing to a successor without being sure he has that person on board?

Maduro's own people have been sold out because he didn't want to leave. So, quite simply, the Bolivarian supporters themselves have ordered:

""Expropriate".