Venezuela (should we be an audience or participant)

Learnt an interesting fact today, in Venezuela Doctors are not allowed to record a child’s death as due to starvation, its illegal for them to do so.

Recently I also read that these days nearly half of all cocaine shipments coming into Europe come via Venezuela, also that in 2005 Venezuela’s previous president Hugo Chávez,  kicked  the US Drug Enforcement Agency out of Caracas. In 2006 he signed a deal with Russia to create a Kalashnikov manufacturing plant in Venezuela, and also bought 100,000 brand-new Kalashnikovs — far more than his armed forces needed.

The current President Nicolás Maduro is Chavez’s successor have been sworn in for another 6 year term having won a rigged election last May and with his approval  Venezuela’s new Kalashnikov plant, capable of churning out 25,000 rifles annually is due to open this year (2019) , now keeping in mind the cocaine that’s coming into Europe via Venezuela can I remind people how lucrative another export industry is (Firearms) is it unreasonable to think Europe is soon be swapped with AK47s from Venezuela?   

The media certainly shows the Venezuelan economic crisis the poor people are suffering and much (left liberal) thinking and discussions are around how improper it is that many countries including the USA, Brazil and the UK are declaring their support for Maduro’s opposition  Juan Guaido, even some going as far as calling Maduro “a dictator with no legitimate claim to power”

Russia (and Cuba) are unsurprisingly vowing to support Maduro.  In the UK Labour’s leader Jeremy Corbyn has openly given his support for the now deceased Hugo Chavez, but he has never explicitly expressed his position towards Chavez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro, dismissing pressure from his peers to do so but I think it would be fair to assume that he, like most of people of a “left” leaning support Maduro (as they did Fidel and such)

In my own view, while I understand how foreign intervention in another countries domestic conflict is not always a good plan but in the case of Venezuela we simply can’t sit back and do nothing!! What is happening is not only secluded to Venezuela but has a knock on effect globally!! Again referring to recent articles I have read, the influx of drugs and guns from Venezuela has been blamed for the worsening of gang wars in countries such as Brazil and smaller places such as Trinidad. Can we really sit back and await a saturation of automatic arms coming into Europe and a continuation of cocaine via Venezuela? Or on a more direct humanitarian note knowing that people are starving to death across there, for example 75% have lost in weight 17lbs and trucks carrying humanitarian aid for Venezuela are being blocked at the border with Columbia by Maduo who denies the existence of a humanitarian crisis in his country, surly intervention means saving lives!!  Should we sit back and be an audience or a participant of its reform.