Horrific economic and political conditions in Venezuela have caused more than six million people to flee the country in a desperate attempt to save their lives. Hundreds of thousands of them have come to the United States, where ordinarily they would be subject to forced deportation back to Venezuela under America’s socialist system of immigration controls.
In reporting on the crisis in Venezuela, the U.S. mainstream press scrupulously ignores one important aspect of the crisis: death and suffering are precisely what U.S. officials want for the Venezuelan people. That is what the economic sanctions that the U.S. government has leveled against Venezuela are intended to bring about. The sanctions target the Venezuelan people with death and economic privation in the hope that they will rise up and oust the Nicholas Maduro regime from power and replace it with a pro-U.S. dictatorship.
It’s worth mentioning that that is also what the decades-old, Cold War-era U.S. embargo against Cuba is all about. See my blog post yesterday, “Lift the U.S. Embargo on Cuba.”
Oh sure, U.S. officials and their acolytes in the mainstream press will point to Maduro’s socialist policies for the economic crisis, just as they do with Cuba. But that’s only one half of the vise that has squeezed the lifeblood out of Venezuelan and Cuban societies. The other half of the vise is U.S. sanctions.
President Biden has now extended “Temporary Protected Status” to Venezuelan refugees who were here prior to March 2021. That means that they are protected from forcible deportation back to Venezuela by U.S. immigration gendarmes. Oh, isn’t Biden such a good and caring person?
What about those Venezuelans who arrived here after March 2021? Oh, they’re out of luck because Biden chose not to protect them from forcible deportation. They are going to be sent back to Venezuela against their will, where death awaits them. Biden is afraid that if he extends the protected status to them, that will just encourage more Venezuelan refugees to come to the United States. Of course, he could still change his mind in the hope of garnering votes from Venezuelan-Americans in the mid-term elections and then in the 2024 presidential elections.
In the meantime, Biden, a Catholic, continues to go to Mass on Sundays, where the priests sometimes remind people of God’s second-greatest commandment: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Unfortunately, all too many Christians are convinced that Jesus was referring to one’s next-door neighbor when he made that statement.
So, here you have a government — the U.S. government — that targets the people of a country with death and economic privation as a way to achieve a political goal. Then, when those targeted people flee their country in a desperate attempt to save their lives and come to the United States, they are taken into custody and forcibly sent back to Venezuela. But hey, how can they oust the Maduro regime if they’re here in the United States, right? They have to be sent back so that the prospect of death will encourage them to rise up and violently revolt against their socialist dictator and replace him with a pro-U.S. rightwing dictator. Never mind that many of them would die in such a revolution. What matters is that they would be dying for a noble political goal in the eyes of U.S. officials — U.S. regime change.
Of course, it’s not just U.S. sanctions that are the problem. There is also the U.S. government’s decades-old drug war, which the U.S. pressures Latin American countries to wage. That’s the root cause of most of the violence in Latin America. If drugs were legal, as we libertarians have been advocating for decades, that violence would disappear. No more drug cartels, no more drug lords, and no more drug turf battles. Latin American would, once again, be a peaceful part of the world that would attract tourists and investors from around the world, including American tourists.
But U.S. officials and their mainstream press acolytes simply cannot let go of their beloved evil program, no matter how much death, destruction, and corruption it generates.
And then what happens when people in drug-war countries flee to the United States in a desperate attempt to save their lives? “Oh, Jacob, the invaders are coming to get us! I’m so scared! What are we going to do to save us from the invaders?”
But then when a mass killer in El Paso goes on a shooting rampage to protect America from the “invaders,” the statists go ballistic. Rather than accepting personal responsibility for their “invasion” rhetoric that they have applied to impoverished refugees fleeing U.S. drug-war violence in their countries, they call on U.S. officials to confiscate everyone’s guns. I guess if America is ever really invaded by a foreign power, Americans are supposed to react passively and just let the military handle the invasion.
Do you get the big picture here? The big picture is the U.S. government’s evil, brutal, immoral policies and programs that bring nothing but death, destruction, and suffering to people around the world, not to mention the destruction of the rights and liberties of the American people. Rather than focusing on Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran, as U.S. officials exhort them to do, Americans should be looking inward and committing themselves to ending the rot at the center of their own regime.