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Comment by cols | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but think this is going to end so poorly for the innocent men, women, and children in Venezuela. I feel for them. While Maduro seems to not be loved, these periods of violent transition can result in horrid outcomes for the local populace. I can only hope my fellow Americans start to see the light and vote the current administration out of office. I'm not hopeful.

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This comment is so out of touch with the reality of Venezuelans. They are crying tears of joy. This is a society that knows what it wants, knows how to function as a democracy, but has not been able to for decades.

They are crying tears of joy.

That pretty much sums it up. I think Zack covered it well too. [1] I do not understand what benefit there was to a dictator remaining in place and why so many on HN support him. Over a third of Venezuelans fled that country and lost everything to escape tyranny.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_x9aWccFCE [video][52m][language]

Exactly. As if leaving Maduro in power is somehow better for Venezuelans than an external intervention. Things could not be worse than they have been.

>Things could not be worse than they have been.

Things can always get worse.

The GP didn't say changing Maduro to other president is bad, but that "periods of violent transition" can have dire consequences for the regular people. And US seems to be in it for the money, not to liberate the downtrodden.

I wish them peace and prosperity, though.

I wish them peace and prosperity as well. Everyone does. It’s been 25 years of hell and it was just going to continue as such.

They can and often become worse. Look at Saddam Hussein and his family. They were monsters, but the reason they engaged in torture and fearmongering was to keep the other monsters in place.

Collapsed states are the worst, these becomes breeding grounds for organizations like IS.

Most places often hold as failed states and by our standards, they look terrible. Law enforcement doesn't work, so gangs become enforcers. Money doesn't really work either. But it still beats total anarchy and especially anarchy of a region with a lot of natural resources. A few hundred billion dollars of oil may not be much to a country, but it's a hell lot to terrorist organizations who are waiting to come in once the US pulls out.

> why so many on HN support him

Because "anything orange man does is bad, no matter what."

Seriously. People cannot think beyond their stupid party lines at all.

Venezuelan here. It’s not that simple: Maduro was an _absolutely_ horrible dictator and yes many Venezuelans (myself included, and likely many of the 8+ million that left) are overjoyed with him being ousted, we haven’t seen any change in over two decades. And yet, it is transparently clear that the Trump admin is here not to save Venezuela, or Venezuelans… it’s here to line its pockets and that of its shareholders.

There was a very evident omission during Trump’s press conference: Any mention of Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, the duly elected president-elect of Venezuela (who won with a super majority last July - backed by Maria Corina Machado). Instead, Trump bad mouthed Maria Corina saying that “she does not have the support or respect of the country to run it”. They ousted Maduro, but they kept his VP (Delcy Rodriguez - which along other things is in charge of running the torture centers for political prisoners) as “she will do anything we ask her”. Trump doesn’t care about democracy or regime change - these things take time and are a long, thorny road (this wouldn’t be the US’ first rodeo). Instead they’ve chosen to keep the regime obedient with the threat of force, and instead just come in and extract as many riches as humanly possible…

Dark times ahead for Venezuela and the Venezuelan people

At least there is hope of… something changing for the better though? With Maduro out.

What we’ve been living through in the last 28 years is Chavismo and yet Chavez is not around. When Chavez died in 2013 we celebrated that he was gone, and what we got after was much, _much_ worse. Now Maduro is gone, and we can celebrate it too. That said, Trump has signaled that he’s not interested in removing Chavismo: he’s keeping Delcy, Diosdado, et al, as they continue to be the brokers of power as long as he gets access to oil. This is just Chavismo aligned to American interests. Time will tell whether this is better or worse.

PS: As an aside, since I was a child growing up in 90’s Venezuela, the overall political mentality of people was that things were so bad that they couldn’t get any worse - and yet they continued to worsen. A lesson that I’ve learned is that in politics things need to be intentionally built - there is no “rock bottom”, the fact that things have been horrible doesn’t mean that they can’t get even worse. Thus my hesitation with what’s going on. There are no guarantees that this isn’t going to be a deal with the devil that leaves us in an even worse state…

Thanks for the reply. I hope the Trump admin does what’s right and puts the people of Venezuela in a position to choose their own leadership. Maybe the remaining Chavismos will be removed from power before too long.

And that’s where my hopes vanish. A dictator-wannabe that has a track record of not respecting the peaceful transition of power in _his own_ country and has run his entire campaign on hatred for immigrants and more recently Venezuelans in particular, is going to, all of a sudden, grow a conscience and do what’s right for the Venezuelan people? Let’s call it what it is: this is about oil. I don’t have to say it, because he already did in front of the cameras. He doesn’t care what happens to Venezuela or Venezuelans.

> That said, Trump has signaled that he’s not interested in removing Chavismo

I think you're jumping to conclusions. What Trump has said is that he wants the demands of the US satisfied. One of those is ultimately elections in Venezuela. You're mistaking taking a case-by-case approach for "non-interest".

Funny how no one listens to real Venezuelans speaking. As a chinese I understand you fully. Everyone hates dictators, but sometimes the alternative isn’t just necessarily better as people might hope. Transition is gonna be long and painful.

Many of the replies to my comment ascribe support for Maduro where there is none. However, I’m still sorry for what we have done. I don’t think there was a single motivation behind it aside from acquiring Venezuelan oil and gold reserves through thinly veiled piracy. Anyone who says we did it to topple a dictator is a rube or myrmidon. Too many unpredictable outcomes have been birthed from government foolishness like this in the past for me to believe it will end any differently.

All the best to you and your family and friends. For what it’s worth (not much I’m sure) many of us didn’t vote for this and are aghast.

> All the best to you and your family and friends. For what it’s worth (not much I’m sure) many of us didn’t vote for this and are aghast.

This white knighting is getting rather tiresome. Why does the _why_ of why it happened matter besides virtue signalling? What matters is the end effect of the action. And the end effect here is better for EVERYONE (or at the worst neutral) involved other than Maduro and his cronies.

To boil down my take down to virtue signaling is a reductio ad absurdum. You desperately need more education on US history in Latin America.

> > This is a society that knows what it wants, knows how to function as a democracy, but has not been able to for decades.

Really? The Venezuelan community online (eg. /r/Vzla and /r/Venezuela) communicate using memes and rather unintelligent discourse.

It's not enough to want democracy, democracy and stability happens when there is an engagement in collective thinking , whereas disorder and chaos happens when people don't want to work and don't think things through

> The social media posts of on a web forum represent the ideological position of an entire nation.

I believe it’s naive to assign Reddit and social media “discourse” any importance. Anything else is an exercise is confirming your already held bias.

Why does the post on a website by some people (who says they are even Venezuelan?) allow you to make the claim a nation “ doesn’t think thing through”?

people naturally want to sound smart, sound empathetic without thinking

Incorrect, actually! I’d encourage you to learn about the history of empire and violent conquest. What you learn may surprise you!

Maduro and Chavez before him are the horrid outcomes.

Chavez was the result of democratic elections, before he grabbed dictatorial powers.

Yes, let's pretend this didn't happen:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_1992_Venezuelan_coup_...

I didn’t pretend that. Still, he was elected and the 1998 election is largely uncontested as far as I’m aware.

And the election he stole last year?

Who, Chavez? He died in 2013.

Are you that clueless?

Does no one remember when Obama did this for the exact same reason in Lybia? He wasn’t as dumb about it, but the outcome will be the same.

While I agree with the sentiment, Maduro’s fate, for the time being, seems much better than Gaddafi’s. And while increased chaos in the region is not unlikely, I don’t foresee open air slave markets in SA at least

Because the oligarchy running the show behind the scenes is the same.

Libya wasn’t for oil, intervention was approved by the full UN Security Council, it was motivated by stopping crimes against civilians committed by the regime, and the intervention ended immediately after the regime fell, instead of “running things” and taking the oil like Trump is doing.

You’re rewriting history.

That's the false history of the felon Nicolas Sarkozy, who is going to prison for the crimes he did in Libya for his personal enrichment [0].

The reason France and its crook leader invaded Libya was, according to public reports[1], because they had negotiated back-room deals with anti-Qaddafi rebels for oil. 35% of Libya's oil production in exchange for French support. Literally a war for oil.

Qaddafi's atrocities were real, but they were never the motivation of the French-lead bombing of Libya. That was a false rationalization made up to manufacture public consent. Manufacture consent for a failed intervention, that left Libya worse off than it had ever been.

> "was approved by the full UN Security Council"

Whose members actually knew about the corrupt oil deal[2], and chose to go along with the fraud, lying to their own people.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libyan_financing_in_the_2007_F... ("Libyan financing in the 2007 French presidential election")

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/01/libya-oil ("The new Tripoli government has denied the existence of a reported secret deal by which French companies would control more than a third of Libya's oil production in return for Paris's support for the revolution")

[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/libyan-oil-gold-and-qaddafi-... ("Libyan Oil, Gold, and Qaddafi: The Strange Email Sidney Blumenthal Sent Hillary Clinton In 2011")

Interesting, I didn’t know about the French side of that.

Lybia is a tribal country that has always been divided between its eastern and western part. Gaddafi married a bride from the opposing tribe to seal an alliance and bring stability to the country.

The "revolution" was done by the Tripoli (western) tribe, against the Cyrenaica (eastern) one - it was more a civil war starting than a popular uprising.

Gaddafi could have indeed crushed them, bring back order to the country, avoiding the current long lasting chaos, civil war, open slavery, migrant waves and so on.

It's hard to evaluate situations with a westerner mind, in countries that are structured around very different cultural norms, and with deep ethnic divisions. "Democracy" is not the silver bullet it those cases, and maybe we should acknowledge that.

Anyone who went to Afghanistan to fight knows this, but explaining it to a suburban Cul du sac family is impossible

Gaddafi was trying to establish a gold-backed "arab" currency system and wanted to sell his oil using it. This was a threat to the US dollar so Obama was very happy to see Sarkozy knock at his door asking to go get the oil themselves lol

I don’t see that at all. Lots of good things will come from this IMO. The old wet-kneed approach to shenanigans going on in our own backyard is a disastrous message to people around the world. Just as a resurgently effective law enforcement body can restore a local community that has gone to the dogs, so too it works at an international level.

The paradoxical thing about these actions though, is that when they are run by humble mission-oriented and very effective people, they quickly disappear from the public consciousness. So we are all biased to when it goes wrong, ie to when we have incompetent leadership at the helm.

Good point. I could be wrong. I hope you are right.

Yes, because that is exactly what happened in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Libya, Syria, and on and on and on and on.

You made the exact point of the parent comment.

Everyone remembers the bad ones only.

What about Germany and Japan after WWII? What about South Korea?

The intervention in those countries wasn't explicitly for oil. And do you wonder why do you have to go so far back?

> And do you wonder why do you have to go so far back?

I'm wondering why you don't think they count.

Relevance is relative.

In the presence of more similar experiments, only with pure dogma or dishonesty that one can opt to infer the outcome based on far less similar and even less contemporaneous experiments.

Newer information should cause you to update your Bayesian priors formed with older information.

Because those things aren’t comparable to this.

Germany was a split country for 50 years.

Korea is still a split country.

I guess I have to give you Japan, although now you could say "clearly the solution is nukes" if you're just going blindly on data.

Even if you think it's going to go well this time, you have to admit this sort of thing does not have a good track record.

Germany is still split in so many ways. Just look at any map of demographics, pension, income, anything "social/society scale", the borders are clearly there still, somehow.

Indeed, and not just on maps. If you drive through Germany on secondary roads the border is as visible as it ever was.

So you admit it didn’t go smoothly.

The US did not care at all about Japan had all kinds of nazi clubs in the country.

It only gave a damn from Japan to retaliate against it... And let's not pretend it became all sunshine and rainbows for Japan post WW2. Internment camps. No standing military. Huge cultural disruption.

SK who remembers the war doesn't have the best opinion of the US either. They essentially pulled out and did a half assed job. Who's even to say that a communist Korea wouldn't have been the best long term plan? It might have destabilized faster than what we know today as North Korea.

So you think USA will go into Venezuela and do a complete takeover, rewrite it's constitution, and have troops there for 50 years to enforce the new order?

Venezuela was not a society held together by a strongman unlike Iraq/Libya/Syria. It also does not have the religious or tribal divides those places did. The country was already on the brink of collapse from a combination of sanctions and truly astronomical levels of corruption. There has been a roughly 70% economic decline over the past decade and while there is no longer hyperinflation, inflation in 2025 was at least 200%. Panama would be a more appropriate reference point.

The administration is pretty clear that this is about oil. So i am not sure why people are making up other excuses?

This is a good take if you know nothing about the history of the US meddling with other countries. For those who do have some knowledge here, this is fucking just stupid and naive.

How much worse could you get from a society where 80% of people are living in extreme poverty and where in a good year inflation is 250%? Maduro was not some great guarantor of stability who kept a divided society together. For instance about half the prisons are run under the so called pranato system which means they are literally run by the inmates. I think it's reasonable to say that almost anyone would be better than him.

Pretty much everyone who wasn't in on the CADIVI scam or the subsidized gasoline racket or selling $0.05 screws to PDVSA for $75 stands to benefit from a new government. Many corrupt dictators understand that stealing a small percentage of a bigger pie is a more stable arrangement that can ultimately be more profitable in the long run but the clan that ran Venezuela was so greedy they wanted to take everything as fast as possible.

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>How much worse could you get from a society where 80% of people are living in extreme poverty and where in a good year inflation is 250%?

That plus a power vacuum. So maybe Haiti?

The US has had a successful campaign for a few decades winning the "how much worse can it get" game. Let's not play anymore.

You obviously seem to have no idea how mafia-style dictatorships like those of Iran, Russian and Venezuela work. No fault of you. Most people don't.

And even their own citizens come to the realization after a long time living under them; partly because they get caught in the constant propaganda campaign which is one hallmark of these regimes. They always live in the propaganda mode.

Maduro was handing out guns to civilians but people here thinking he was not loved.

People forget that Iraq was a key wedge issue which allowed Trump to gain mindshare within the GOP:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4ThZcq1oJQ

A fairly optimistic way to spin this situation is as follows. Either it somehow works out for Venezuela, in which case we effectively helped millions of people Homer Simpson style. Or, more likely, failure disgraces Trump the same way it disgraced GWB. Then (fingers crossed) we elect a humbler, more realistic leader who works to rebuild the country we wrecked, and we can move on from the Trump era.

Why would Trump allow a peaceful transfer of power? Jan 6 happened and it failed because the first Trump administration still had people who cared about the rule of law (e.g. Pence).

I think the only hope is that the guy is old and unhealthy, in contrast to e.g. when Putin or Orban grabbed power. And it is possible that the GOP will fracture over fights between who see themselves as his successor. If this doesn't happen, I don't have much hope for the US as a democracy.

I'm not sure he has enough support in the deep state to pull it off.

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