#venezuela-crisis

#venezuela-crisis

The 1980s bring revolutionary wars, CIA-backed conflict and the violent birth of a new democratic era. Episode 2: Wars begins with Nicaragua's Sandinista revolution, which promised egalitarian transformation through literacy crusades. But civil war erupted as United States President Ronald Reagan's administration covertly backed the Contra rebels, plunging the nation into turmoil and suffering. Panama transitioned from Omar Torrijos's diplomatic triumphs over the Panama Canal to Manuel Noriega's sinister collaboration with both the CIA and drug cartels.

Trump has shown a willingness to use the brute force of the US military to achieve his foreign policy goals. On Saturday, the US launched an early-morning attack on Venezuela, with explosions reported across the capital Caracas and at Venezuelan military bases. US troops ultimately abducted Venezuelan President Maduro from Caracas in what critics say was a clear violation of the United Nations Charter, which prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.

Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, who dined on steak and lived in a palace as his country starved, is now in "hell on Earth'' in a Brooklyn jail - and machine-gun-toting authorities are making sure he stays there. Maduro, 63, and his 69-year-old fellow-inmate wife Cilia were thrown into separate cells in solitary confinement away from the general population at the infamous federal Metropolitan Detention Center since their extraordinary capture by elite US forces in Caracas early Saturday.

Remembering that balance in all things is a necessity, Trump made sure to undermine any possible, drug-related justification for U.S. intervention in Venezuela, against the regime of president Nicolás Maduro, by announcing the "full and complete pardon" of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, currently serving a 45-year federal prison sentence after being convicted in a U.S. court of conspiring with cartels to move more than 400 tons of cocaine toward the United States.

Meanwhile, over 600,000 Venezuelans in the United States have lost the protection of the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and are now at risk of being deported. Maduro is facing the most severe crisis of his mandate, yet each passing day is another day in power, even as the arrival of the USS Gerald Ford in Caribbean waters and the launch of Operation Southern Spear seem to signal an imminent checkmate.