.@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.
