Venezuelan ship sinks itself after ramming cruise liner with a reinforced hull

The military is a lot less militant than you'd think. At least in the Navy, we train hard for everything but we also ensure that we use force correctly and in proportion. We would never try to shoot at or harm a bunch of civilians, they're the people we were trying to protect, Americans or not. Maybe not every branch thinks like that, or things have changed in ~10 years I've been out, but I'd like to think any professional Navy would act the same.

a depth charge is something you drop at submarines - a charge at depth. You can sink surface vessels with any combination of regular munitions.

For the same reason sanctions agreed on by Russia, China and North Korea (also a group comprising several nations) would not mean "international sanctions".

Not that anyone would refer to that as such anyway, of course, because we easily recognize misleading propaganda when its used by the bad guys.

> Conversely, are international sanctions ever applied by literally every nation on earth?

Nobody said literally every nation on Earth, but it should refer to more than just two political unions which are virtually joined at the hip economically, (geo)politically and even racially, and constitute a mere ~10% of the world.

UN sanctions, for example, could justifiably be called international sanctions, though there still seems no point when it's more accurate and simpler to just say "UN sanctions".

Venezuela was a prosperous and stable country in the mid- to late- 20th century. Declining oil revenues, authoritarian dictatorship, cronyism in PDVSA, expropriation of private assets, unfettered corruption, and narco-capitalism have brought the country to where it is today. Sanctions are a response to the festering illness that has infected the Venezuelan government -- they are not the cause.

Nicaragua is an extremely poor country run by paranoid anti-American leadership that openly welcomes relationships with Russia and China, but Russia is not exactly an economic powerhouse, and China only seeks natural resources and the creation of a second canal via the destruction of Lake Managua (environment be damned).

Cuba is so destitute that its government has had to forbid its citizens from boarding boats.

(Have you ever been to Uruguay? Have you ever had a conversation with a Uruguayan person?)

It is impossible to understand Latin America without considering the effect of American imperialism. But it is also impossible to understand Latin America without considering the effect of American investment. Additionally, it is impossible to understand the mid-20th-century dictatorships that dominated the region without considering them against the backdrop of a Soviet (and then Russian) effort to challenge the interests of the US in its own hemisphere.

So, when you insinuate that the US is the cause of all poverty in Latin America, it demonstrates a one-dimensional interpretation that could never capture the complexity of the full picture.

There are immigrants from all over Latin America living in the United States, from the richest country to the poorest. They want to come to the US because of its economic opportunity, physical security, and greater freedom. I don't understand your point about Uruguay.

Chile has private healthcare (which does not exist in Cuba) as well as taxpayer-funded healthcare programs.

I personally believe that the human right to healthcare is a corollary of the human right to life. Still, I would rather have a surgery in Chile than in Cuba.

Chile's education system has been described as the best in Latin America. And incidentally, the country offers free college tuition to the lowest three-fifths of the income spectrum (https://www.chileatiende.gob.cl/fichas/43203-gratuidad-en-la...). So I don't know what you're talking about.

I would rather get a university degree in Chile than in Cuba.

If you want to go to Cuba for your medical care and education, be my guest. We will see who is healthier and has a more productive career.

Note also that you can't compare a dollar of debt in a productive economy to a dollar of debt in a stagnant economy.

> Nevermind the thousands of tortured, murdered and kidnapped children caused by the US baked dictatorships.

When you compare something, be careful to select the appropriate counterfactual. Arbitrary imprisonment, sham trials, forced disappearances...these are historically quite common in many nations in Latin America, and certainly not unique to US-supported regimes. Nowadays, the most illiberal governments in Latin America are usually those where people are poor and political leaders rail against the USA.

Drifting is a common tactic for vessels which don't need to be anywhere specific, and 13 miles offshore is not an unsafe place to be drifting. In this location the wind and current will be mostly from the east, so the vessel will be moving to the west at a low speed. You can see what is in the way and 'oh we will hit an island in 12 hours unless we do something' is not an emergency.

Go to any city or border crossing in Colombia, Ecuador, or Peru and you will find masses of Venezuelan people, many of whom are fleeing their country after having spent years selling their belongings just to have enough money to pay for food. I met a former central bank economist who was running a hamburger stand in Ecuador. I met a former marine biologist who was selling hawking at events in Peru. I met a baker who told me that his family decided to leave Venezuela when they discovered that someone broke into their bakery through a ventilation shaft just to steal some bread dough, and took nothing else -- not even cash.

When I was in Caracas five years ago, I couldn't even find a single bottle of water for sale in the airport. They just didn't have any. Believe it or not, the country has gotten worse since then.

At the time, I wondered why the US is so happy to wage simultaneous wars in the Middle East, yet would not declare a no-fly zone over Venezuela and fly airdrop missions to put food and medicine into population centers.

Venezuela is run by a bus driver. The state oil conglomerate is run by his political party, and headed by a military officer with no formal engineering, geological, or business experience.

I don't blame you for thinking everything is about oil, after what has happened in the Middle East. But Venezuela is a latch point for US adversaries like Russia to operate in the Americas, its people are starving, and the leader jokes about how Venezuelans are on the "Maduro diet" of eating nothing at all while he himself travels to Turkey to smoke cigars while Salt Bae serves up steaks. It's not a socialist country; it's a place where the government steals everything that isn't nailed down while throwing some table scraps to the military, the police, and the poorest of the urban poor...three groups that can incite fear in the rest of the citizenry.

You are quick to accuse people of distributing propaganda. However I would not be surprised, given the timing of your comment several days after this submission fell far off the HN front page, if you yourself are engaged in some kind of state-backed info war. Almost all of your comments on HN are about political positions. If you don't like accusations of nefariousness being leveled at you, then you should be mindful of your own accusations.

If in fact you are just a regular person, then think about whether your ideology is really brought to fruition in countries where kleptocratic authoritarians have unchecked power. Venezuela is not an example of socialism. Rather, it is a cesspool of cronyism.