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Getting Maduro personally is the easy part. All of the interests that he represented and championed are still there. How is an American puppet government supposed to have popular legitimacy given that we executed a smash-and-grab over the skies of Caracas in plain sight?
Many of those interests know they would be much happier and richer if they could align with the US and get the oil flowing. That's what the deal Maduro was trying to make was about. Hopefully we get the right general taking charge.
The third world isn't naive enough to think the USA brings prosperity to 3rd world countries these days with the last 40 years worth of examples. This is a western conceit.
The difference is that if you're an Arab, outside of perhaps Syria and Libya, you believe things can get worse. Venezuelans absolutely do not; they believe that for very low baseline reasons, it's impossible for the situation in Venezuela to degenerate further.
It has been darkly amusing people trying to model Iraq or Syria onto Venezuela, however.
Iraq and Syria were as bad as they were because they were sectarian civil wars on ethnic and religious lines, against minority ruler sects that had been suppressing the demographic majority for decades. In turn, those regimes were backed by demographic minorities who knew/feared that, if they lost, they might be genocide/ethnically cleansed. It's not exactly clear who the corresponding ethnic groups are in Venezuela. They were also as bad in part because Syria in particular spent nearly a decade supporting the neighboring insurgency in Iraq... but the Venezulan-supported narcos and gangs are already present in the capital city, by design.
In turn, the Iraq War accusation that the US would steal the oil runs into past and contextual history. In the past, that accusation never actually occurred- the Iraqi oil wells were back under Iraqi control, and largely used to fund the reconstruction and social welfare programs. Which is not what they are currently doing in Venezuela, because in the Venezuela contextual history the Chavistas already stole the oil for foreigners by giving so much away for basically free, especially Cuba, and in the corruption/mismanagement of the state oil companies. An American takeover, Iraq-style, would be unironically an improvement of the oil benefits to the country.
While there are certainly ways for this to get worse, and I am never inclined to rule it out entirely, it warrants a bit more insight than merely 'it's gonna be a quaqmire like Iraq!' or 'but Syria!'
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You are an american or american-adjacent whose post history is largely getting mad at Trump for cucking to da jooz. The reality is that, yes, capitalism, and specifically Western capital investment into otherwise dysfunctional countries, plus western trade opportunities, does make them richer. Very quickly and effectively. It also has a tendency to make them more functional, at least within the limits of the people you're working with. Now, the US is also very happy to bring aimless neocon foreverwar or lefty post-colonial massacres to third-world countries, and this could certainly degenerate into the former. But there's no particular reason it has to, and if there's one thing that Trump loves, it's making deals.
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Saudis disagree with you. El Salvador. Argentinians. Smart Chileans. Polish. Ukrainians dying for that opportunity. Often the issue has been weak local partners.
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Could a synthesis of this be that those who now grab the reigns of the criminal, crony-patronage machine built by Chavez and inherited by Maduro could still make more money playing ball with American oil companies?
Yes, I think this is the obvious play if you are a high-ranking Venezuelan crony right now, particularly in the military rather than the civilian patronage structure.
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