As we know, millions of Venezuelans, around the world, the Venezuelan diaspora, are celebrating the removal of Maduro. It’s a victory for democracy, right? Even though not once did Trump mention democracy when talking about the raid and its meaning. Trump supporters are pointing to the joy and celebrations of Venezuelans. But Trump isn’t celebrating for democracy at all. He’s yet to even mention it. He does not care.
If he continues to snub María Corina Machado, the heroine of the opposition, America will bear responsiblity for the country’s next tragic chapter
www.theunpopulist.net
But only a resuscitation of 19th-century imperial greed—evoking the worst caricatures of “Yanqui imperialism”—can explain why President Donald Trump would justify his lightning military strike to capture and remove Venezuela’s plunderer-in-chief with a single motive: oil. Unless Trump can be prevailed on to change the calamitous course he has announced, Venezuela’s tragedy will only compound.
To understand the depth of Donald Trump’s betrayal of the democratic movement in Venezuela, it is necessary to appreciate the consummate courage, planning, and organization behind the opposition victory on July 28, 2024. For her valiant efforts to organize and lead the campaign for democracy, María Corina Machado was awarded the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize. In her moving
acceptance speech on Dec. 10, read by her daughter (due to her late arrival in Oslo from a perilous escape from Venezuela), Machado described their year of preparation to defend the victory they were confident would come:
600,000 volunteers across 30,000 polling stations; apps to scan QR codes, digital platforms, diaspora call centers. We deployed scanners, Starlink antennas, and laptops hidden inside fruit trucks to the furthest corners of Venezuela. Technology became a tool for freedom.
Secret training sessions were held at dawn in church backrooms, kitchens, and basements, using printed materials moved across Venezuela like contraband….
And then the electoral tally sheets— the famous actas, the sacred proof of the people’s will—began to appear: first by phone, then WhatsApp, then photographed, then scanned, and finally carried by hand, by mule, even by canoe.
They arrived from everywhere, an eruption of truth, because thousands of citizens risked their freedom to protect them.
What does Donald Trump know of respect within Venezuela? What does he know of Machado’s skill in unifying a divided opposition, her tenacity in winning an impossible election, and her courage in defying and then daringly escaping a cruel dictatorship? Such facile ignorance could only flow from a narcissism consumed with resentment that it was Machado and not Trump who the Norwegian Nobel Committee rightly recognized for the Peace Prize, and an insatiable greed that cannot comprehend, much less value, something more precious than a windfall of new riches.
Now, in the wake of Trump’s lightning military strike on Saturday to capture Maduro and his wife, we are left with the worst of all possible worlds. Maduro is gone but his predatory dictatorship lives on, defiant. There is no sign of a plan or strategy to induce this awful regime to negotiate a transfer of power to González and the democratic coalition of which Machado is the political and moral leader. There are only the glib vows that the United States will “run” the country of Venezuela. Given that there are no American boots on the ground, that there is no prospect of the 100,000 or more U.S. soldiers it would take to “run” the country, and that the sinews of Venezuelan state security are well armed and deeply entrenched, the proposition is absurd.
Is there way out of this mess?
Perhaps Republicans in Congress can convince the president that, setting aside all moral concerns, the only way to achieve his administration’s stated goals in Venezuela—an end to drug trafficking, a halt in illegal immigration to the U.S., and a vigorous restoration of oil production—is by restoring a competent, pro-American, rule-of-law state in Venezuela. That can only come through a transition to the government elected in 2024, and there has never been a more propitious moment to achieve that transition than right now.
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Trump cares about oil, not democracy.
Some supporters of María Corina Machado still see path to power after US president refused to back her
www.theguardian.com
"He probably isn’t a big fan because she stole his Nobel Prize"
time.com
