Honestly, I don’t know anyone who really knows what’s going on. Donald Trump, the fruitcake president of the US, assembles an armada off the Venezuelan coast and, on the night of January 3, his forces penetrate the presidential compound in Caracas to capture President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia. Briefly, millions of Venezuelans breathe the cool air of freedom.
Maduro has been a cruel dictator, stealing elections while protected by freedom-loving Chinese, Russians and Cubans. More than 30 Cuban guards died in the raid. Trump, in return for the regime’s “co-operation” in allowing the US access to Venezuela’s large but derelict oil industry, has allowed the dictatorship in Caracas to continue.
Some 900 Venezuelans are political prisoners. Make no mistake: Maduro was an utter thug. When Maduro became president in 2013, wrote Harvard economist and former Venezuelan planning minister Ricardo Hausmann this week, “Venezuelans were four times richer than they are today.
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A disaster followed: the largest economic contraction ever recorded in peacetime, triggering the departure of 8-million Venezuelans. Brutality, repression and corruption accompanied the catastrophe.” It’s grotesque. But nothing in it justifies Trump using raw power to breach the sovereign territory of an independent country.
Trump won praise from some conservative politicians and commentators in South Africa. But the only possible civilised response is contempt for both Maduro and the manner of his removal. They are completely wrong.
Of course our government, once a big fan of Changing the World Order, now finds it changing too fast. Having failed to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it was super-fast out of the blocks this time, noting “with grave concern” this “manifest violation” of the UN charter. But the greater the complexity of the problems the ANC faces, the smaller seems its appetite for fixing them.
So cue tape of President Cyril Ramaphosa calling Maduro his “brother”. Much the same would apply to Russian leader Vladimir Putin, violator of Ukraine, or Xi Jinping, tormentor of Taiwan. The ANC loves these guys.
The more political prisoners you have, the more likely the ANC admires you. There will be a reckoning. Trump will face his own, most likely from inside his own Maga court.
And Americans will die trying to control their new prize. But why we align ourselves with the others — the “progressive anti-imperialist” out-and-out fascists — is just beyond explanation. In the absence of an accounting, it is at least amusing to watch our navy exercise with Iran this weekend, knowing that back home Iranians are trying to topple the religious fanatics who have them ruled for 45 years.
My best explanation for our insistence that we are neutral or “non-aligned”, and our complete inability not to align ourselves, is that the ANC just doesn’t care. Certainly, Ramaphosa no longer cares. His function between now and whenever he is required to go is simply to keep the ANC as cheerful as possible as it quietly expires.
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