TACO War

 

Photo from the wonderful collection "Paradise Lost" by Adriana Loureiro Fernandez (@adriana.loureiro on Instagram), an ongoing project documenting the collapse of Venezuela over the last 10 years, from the crash of basic services and the national economy to widespread violence and hunger, leading to a massive exodus.

Has anybody seen that war with Venezuela? I'm sure it was around here just a few days ago, and now I can't seem to find it anywhere. 

That is, I guess the USS Gerald R. Ford is still wandering around the Caribbean with its 90 aircraft and 4,600 sailors (BBC saw it parked in the US Virgin Islands on Thursday, 600 miles from the Venezuelan coast, and it seems to be spending most of its time with its six-ship strike group entourage right in that northeast Caribbean neighborhood, just south of Puerto Rico), and there have been planes getting closer and presumably gathering intelligence as recently as November 21. Trump "Truthed" a violent-sounding announcement on the 29th of November that the airspace around and over Venezuela should be considered "closed in its entirety"

but a couple of days later the US government was asking Venezuela's permission to send a plane there itself, repatriating a bunch of Venezuelan migrants presumably gathered for deportation by ICE, and Venezuela cheerfully approved the flight, as it has been doing for months now, in spite of the rumors of war. Flights crossing Venezuelan airspace are down around 50%, according to Reuters, but that's hardly "in its entirety". 

Venezuela note

.⁦@NicolasMaduro⁩ has made a terrible enemy. His name is ⁦@realDonaldTrump⁩. Read here: https://t.co/3WX3zslAGg

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) January 24, 2019

Secretary of State Marco Rubio thinks he's engineered a coup in Venezuela, and he's so thrilled he can't stand it, but I want to say that this doesn't mean people on the progressive side should believe him and come out to denounce whatever has just happened as a return to the old banana republic policy where the US government can "make the right decision for Venezuela" as triumphal Eli Lake puts it in the attached Bloomberg article, instead of Venezuela making its own decisions, because it's more complicated than that, and reducing it to a war between Trump and Maduro is exactly the wrong way to look at it (though exactly what Trump and Maduro would prefer you to do).

As indicated by the way the international community is reacting, with all but one of the members of the Lima Group founded in August 2017 to work toward a resolution of the Venezuela situation without the help of the Trump government (Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, and Peru), as well as Ecuador (which hosts a couple of thousand Venezuelan refugees, see map below), backing the self-declared temporary president, Juan Guaidó against actual president Nicolás Maduro—while the exception, Mexico, is remaining neutral, as is the European Union.