I wonder why Venezuela's debt tripled starting the year that the US tanked their ability to access debt at non-usury rates. So curious! Blowing oil revenues on imports? You don't say? You mean they bought things with their only source of revenue. Shockingly corrupt!
Oh I don't dismiss the chairman of the holding company that owns smartmatic as a capitalist. I dismiss him as an imperialist. The British upper class has a lot to do with oil imperialism. Just ask Iran what happened when they nationalized their oil.
I dismissed the founder and CEO of smartmatic as a capitalist because he is. He's clearly not a Bolivarian or he wouldn't be in bed with a British Lord building out digital voting infrastructure in the periphery. He stands to gain a lot from the capitalists coming back into power, and the chairman does as well.
As for the report, the UN claims that the Maduro regime killed 5k people but they make that claim by extrapolating from interviews, news articles, and satellite footage. There has been no corroborating evidence on the ground. It's totally specious.
As for torture, I don't think anyone in Venezuela is losing sleep over American spies and their collaborators getting the "enhanced interrogation" techniques that those same American spies unleashed on the world.
Look, I'm not saying the Venezuelan government is run by saints. They've done things that are harmful to people, they've killed people, and they have most definitely killed innocent people.
But the US kills almost 6k annually through prison deaths alone, and another 1000 in police custody/police homicides. Every country has black ops, every country does spy hunting, every country under attack by the US has to take calculated risks understanding that they are going to be catching innocents in the net.
And again, Maduro wasn't wrong! Machado was literally asking US oil companies to convince the US to invade in exchange for wealthy contracts. We know for a fact that Machado and her cohort were working directly with US covert ops running money, arms, training, organizing, and facilitation. It's not like there wasn't a covert subversive international threat inside Venezuela. There was one and the Bolivarian Armed Forces is responsible for finding these people, disrupting their networks, and stopping their operations.
You can't use moral logic here unless you apply it evenly, and the result of you applying it evenly would be that nearly every country would need regime change because their leaders are bloodthirsty dictators who indiscriminately commit human rights violations.
The reality is that Maduro is unpopular because 1) the economy is shambles from economic sanctions, 2) there's still a large contingent of capitalist roaders who would rather be a junior vassal of the US and make their millions as compradors and 3) he is uncharismatic as fuck.
The masses are suffering economically and have been for years. Under Maduro, food production for major domestic food crops more than doubled and national food availability more than quadrupled. That's astounding given their situation. The masses still want the Bolivarian revolution to proceed. They do not want to become a neocolony again. But they want the suffering to end. And all the US has to do is stop the crime against humanity that is collective punishment.
The idea that we need to focus on the unconfirmed 5k people killed by the government instead of the multiple thousands killed by the sanctions and the 20 years of violent subversion that the US has been enacting is a clear sign that you don't have your priorities straight. Or rather, you do, but they are aligned with the empire.