Here's your freedom, damn it!
Trump administration Secretary of State Marco Rubio was the mastermind behind the military operation dubbed Absolute Resolve, which culminated in the arrest of Nicolás Maduro, accused of drug trafficking, early Saturday morning. Both the military operation and Maduro's arrest were carried out without any judicial or political warrant and are therefore criminal acts, executed outside the bounds of legality. Approximately forty people, both civilians and military personnel, died. Rubio is now the strongman at the head of Venezuela's provisional (mis)government, which no one knows will lead to new elections or resolve itself with the establishment of a board of directors handpicked by the US government and those members of Maduro's government who are willing to comply, with Vice President Delcy Rodríguez at the helm. Marco Rubio hates Maduro's Chavista dictatorship in Venezuela, but he adores Nayib Bukele's neoliberal dictatorship in El Salvador, who recently mocked Maduro's downfall on social media.
It's infuriating to see the videos of María Corina Machado offering Trump and major American investors Venezuela's enormous natural wealth. "We don't just have oil and gas [...], we also have mines, gold, infrastructure, energy, tourism. Venezuela has 2,800 kilometers of virgin coastline, ready to be developed." Her eyes and mouth twitch as she recites the attractions of her own country; she looks so greedy and brazen that she could pass for a Mallorcan. As is often the case with lamas like her, the first thing Trump did after the coup was to contemptuously remove her from the power struggle. This somewhat silenced Machado's fan club within the Spanish right, which, unsurprisingly, has once again made a fool of itself. Here, Mr. Esteve's Trump supporters, poor things, have hesitated between applauding the anti-Bolivarian determination of their idolized sheriff and what is an alarming display of imperialist brute force, Monroe Doctrine included.
The violent and shameless breach of international law—and of all the consensuses of the modern world order—suggests, in effect, a return not so much to the Cold War as to the 19th century, with its great empires. America for Trump, Europe for Putin, Asia for Xi Jinping? And Africa to be divided up, as always. For now, what is happening in Venezuela is, as we said, a coup d'état and a plundering perpetrated with the staging of Chuck Norris and Steven Seagal (DEA, Delta Force, the weapons favored by Trumpism), in the face of a complicit or powerless international community. We citizens—Venezuelans, but also citizens everywhere—have no say. Territorial sovereignty, and also the sovereignty of the citizenry expressed at the ballot box, become meaningless. The year begins with this and with the videos of the young people laughing as they filmed the flames on the ceiling of the Le Constellation bar in Crans, Montana, before dying in the fire, victims of tourist greed. These news stories coexist with those about the party radish And the verbal violence of the day's football matches, vulgar and clumsy forms of escapism. It's our world.
