pig.

This is how La Familia Maduro feathers their retirement nest egg.

A lot of people in USA will be irritated that their source of supply got interrupted, I should imagine. They were moving a shitload of product.

I imagine Uncle Diosdado is none too happy. This gives publicity to the cocaine distribution organization that has been fostered by top Venezuelan officials for years now.

the socialism is in a white - dominated nation, then the love is immense of that kind of socialism.

How much more socialist can you get than nationalizing a huge oil industry?

But is that socialism gone too far for the socialists of America?

Venezuelan oil was nationalized many years before Chavez' name was even heard of.

the game, we all know it, but the "right kind" of socialism that does not disrespect the rich as the rich disrespect the poor.

Venezuela, Bolivia, etc. are emerging Denmarks....but more leftist....intolerable to some!

some 30 years ago is "still a sticky issue among capitalist nations", the answer is clearly No. And Venezuela is not 'an emerging Denmark'. If anything, Venezuela is at present closer to being an emerging Zimbabwe.

except chavistas.

Venezuela is a narco-state run by delinquents who are actually siphoning the country's money into their pockets. They're the new rich elites running the country, except worse because they're now at the point where if they don't have the political power they enjoy, they'll easily be tried and sentenced in prison for their crimes against the Venezuelan people, particularly in how they stole millions upon millions from them, and they're not gonna let go of the power whatsoever no matter how illegal and authoritarian they become.

Clearly they must know what the world thinks of them, but as long as they believe there's a chance they can continue to steal, grab, murder their way to gain control, it doesn't matter to them.

We all know what they are.

were one of the elites no longer so elite and just pining for the good old glory days of a handful of families lording over and exploiting tens of millions by force of outright terrorism? Allowing them a free vote was a HUGE mistake!

The pain now after the loss of rush of the power, not to mention the loss of immense wealth, must be like withdrawal from heroin addiction.

In accusing others of what they did maybe it just boils down to simple jealously, even if not true?

made for the huge mass of poor people who were living in horrendous poverty before the new left leaders, without adequate shelter, without access to education, to medical treatment, clean water, decent sanitary conditions, jobs paying enough to cover the most minimal cost of food, transportation.

It will take longer to bring the entire mass of poverty stricken people who lived without hope until changes started happening around 1999, 2000, since it took so many years of living in squalor, ignored and hated by the bastards who controlled the government, and funneled all the resources directly to the oligarchs, bypassing any and all assistance so desperately needed by the suffering poor.

Anyone who has taken the time to research is aware of how they played complete keep-away, diverting any and all help which could have been used to bring hope to the poor by improving their conditions. They took all the resources available to the state for themselves. Now their pampered, putrid offspring and grandchildren spend their time yammering to anyone who will listen about how corrupt the new people at the top are, as if anyone would ever believe it.

I don't know if you remember, but US psy-ops people working against the Cuban Revolution conspired in Operation Mongoose to drive Cubans away from their admiration for Fidel Castro by making up whoppers about the man and trying to force them down the throats of Cuban citizens. So shabby, right?

Wikipedia, on the large scheme, Operation Mongoose:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Project

From another source:

. . .

Another Craig disinformation plot, Operation Bingo, called for faking a Cuban attack on the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, "thus providing the excuse for use of U.S. military might to overthrow the current government."

Some of Craig's plans were more whimsical. Consider Operation Good Times, an attempt to "disillusion the Cuban population with Castro['s] image by distribution of fake photographic material." Craig proposed disseminating "a desired photograph, such as an obese Castro with two beauties in any situation desired, ostensibly within a room in the Castro residence, lavishly furnished and a table briming [sic] over with the most delectable Cuban food with an underlying caption (appropriately Cuban) such as 'My ration is different.'"

The image of a fat, satisfied Castro "should put even a Commie Dictator in the proper perspective with the underprivileged masses," Craig advised.

Most of Craig's plans never got off the ground, but other materials released by the ARRB document the anti-Castro propaganda operations that were actually conducted. On the one hand there were the overt operations, those openly supported by the United States. These included Voice of America broadcasts and State Department statements focusing on Cuba -- messages that were tailored (to the extent possible) to enhance the secret plans of Operation Mongoose.

On the covert side, the CIA did most of the media work. The agency's secret psywar duties included the production and dissemination of anti-Castro radio programs, newsreels, books and periodicals. The Cuban Revolutionary Council, an exile political group covertly created and secretly subsidized by the CIA, served as a major conduit for the propaganda messages and materials.

The newly released documents include a remarkable file of records from an inter-agency "Psychological Operations Group" set up to advance Lansdale's plans. Lt. Col. James Patchell of the Office of the Secretary of Defense attended the group's weekly meetings, and his notes of the sessions were relayed to Lansdale. Patchell's memos reveal how officials from the State Department, the Pentagon, the CIA and the U.S. Information Agency brainstormed ways of turning the tide of public opinion against Castro.

More:
http://members.iimetro.com.au/~hubbca/operation_mongoose.htm

[center]~ ~ ~



General Edward Lansdale, head of Operation Mongoose[/center]
Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and Counterterrorism, 1940-1990

Edward Geary Lansdale and the New Counterinsurgency

. . .

Operation Mongoose:

Lansdale's own role was to be both coordinator and idea man, although, as Thomas Powers recalls, "He was uneven in judgment. Nutty ideas sometimes seemed to strike him as imaginative and plausible."21 One such idea was to exploit the alleged Cuban wont for "superstition":

Cuba was to be flooded with rumors that the Second Coming was imminent, that Christ had picked Cuba for His arrival, and that He wanted the Cubans to act rid of Castro first. Then, on the night foretold, a U. S. submarine would surface off the coast of Cuba and litter the sky with star shells, which would convince the Cubans that The Hour was at hand.22

Lansdale himself may have been prepared to ride a donkey into Havana as the climax to the show. In 1950, a Lansdale scheme to dress a U.S. submarine in Soviet livery in order to lure Philippine guerrillas into an ambush was scuttled by higher-ups; Lansdale later complained that the request "seemed only to arouse their suspicions that I had gone insane."23

As Lansdale dreamed up new scenarios for Cuba, a considerable proportion of the operation was directed toward a single objective: the assassination of Fidel Castro. The plot to murder Castro had apparently been initiated in 1960, and involved the now-familiar recruitment of organized crime figures as contract killers, and the development of poisons by the CIA's Technical Services Division. Efforts were reportedly redoubled in the fall of 1961 after covert action chief Richard Bissell (Deputy Director for Plans) "was chewed out [for] sitting on his ass and not doing anything about getting rid of Castro and the Castro regime."24 The CIA subsequently organized a unit with its Task Force W, the ZR/ RIFLE group, to carry out "Executive Action"-that is, assassinations-and on 16 November 1961 discussed its use for killing Castro.25 Assassination teams, again linking the CIA with organized crime, went into Cuba in 1962, while more bizarre schemes continued until shortly after ['resident Kennedy's own murder: Among them were attempts to eliminate Castro with such devices as exploding giant clams (while he was skin-diving) and poisoned cigars."

Colonel Lansdale may have been deliberately kept in the dark, but not because of any particular squeamishness on his part. Thomas Powers discusses Lansdale's role in the light of the CIA's silence regarding assassination in both interdepartmental meetings and memoranda, and describes the reaction of William Harvey, head of Task Force W, to a Lansdale memorandum on assassinations:

Harvey was doubly astonished . . . on August 13 [1962], when he got an official memo from Edward G. Lansdale. . . which explicitly requested Harvey to prepare papers on various anti- Castro programs "including liquidation of leaders." Harvey . . . told Lansdale in plain terms what he thought of the "stupidity of putting this type of comment in writing in such a document."27

Ten years later Lyndon Johnson bluntly assessed the whole affair: "We had been operating a damned Murder, Inc. in the Caribbean."28

Rather more important than the colorful eccentricities of Lansdale and the Technical Services Division was the significance of Operation MONGOOSE as a prototype destabilization or "bleeding" campaign. If the United States could not remove and replace the Cuban government, it would make the Cuban people suffer-by destroying its sugar economy, power plants, its peace of mind. Gilpatric recalls:

The agency was allowed to put agents into Cuba for purposes of sabotage, for purposes of trying to disrupt the strengthening of the regime's control [and] of keeping the Castro regime so off stride and unsettled that it couldn't concentrate its activities to harmful ends elsewhere. And so the agency . . . was very aggressive in coming forward with schemes, some of which were really quite fantastic and never got off the ground. Others made a lot of sense, some of which did prove to be effective and successful.29

MONGOOSE involved both American agents and Cuban exiles, although the latter comprised the bulk of the forces sent in on raids and sabotage missions. According to Gilpatric, forces sent in "varied from teams of four or five individuals put in to sometimes several times that, " with every detail of each operation closely monitored by the Special Group Augmented (which Gilpatric refers to as the 54-12 group).30 Gilpatric also suggests that Cuban exile terrorist groups, like Alpha 66, which were allegedly renegades beyond CIA control at the time (and gunning for the president himself after the "betrayal" at the Bay of Pigs), were in fact a part of the ongoing
American government effort to harass Cuba.31

More:
http://www.statecraft.org/chapter8.html

ETC.