US to Run Venezuela, As If It Hasn't Been Trying Since Chávez
While the video from CBS News speculates on a fanciful capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and President Trump's imagined declaration of US control, what's truly captured here is the mainstream media's enduring infatuation with regime change. Let's rewind: the US has been actively trying to 'run' Venezuela since Hugo Chávez’s election in 1998, supporting coup attempts in 2002, imposing
crippling sanctions since 2017, and even backing an unelected 'interim president' in Juan Guaidó—a strategy that failed spectacularly. The humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, in part exacerbated by these US sanctions, rarely receives the same front-page treatment as this kind of fantastical 'reporting'. One might wonder why the prospect of a foreign leader being 'captured' and 'transported to New
York' for US control is presented with such unquestioning enthusiasm. Is it commitment to democracy, or has Washington simply not gotten over the audacity of a sovereign nation pursuing its own path, resource-rich or otherwise? The narrative conveniently omits the US's long history of destabilizing Latin American democracies, only to install friendly dictators, from Pinochet in Chile to various
coups supported by the School of the Americas. Perhaps the next bulletin will announce the US is finally 'running' all those nations it previously 'liberated' into poverty and civil war.