Carlos Ron, former Venezuelan deputy foreign minister (who left that office a year ago to join the Tricontinental Institute as a researcher) is interviewed by Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim of Drop Site News. The interview is part of a longer live stream that was broadcast this morning:
While the US major media have speculated that senior figures in Nicolás Maduro’s government were complicit in his abduction by US military forces, Carlos Ron rejects that premise. And he would know, having until fairly recently been a member of that government himself.
He also delves briefly into the revolutionary socialist history of Delcy Rodríguez, the current acting president, who was sworn in to fill the power vacuum left by Maduro’s kidnapping. If there’s any doubt about where she stands, on this development and what it means for Venezuela, let her own words disabuse you of all illusions:
Message from the Acting President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela
Message from Venezuela to the world and to the United StatesVenezuela reaffirms its vocation of peace and peaceful coexistence. Our country desires to live without external threats, in an environment of respect and international co-operation. We believe that global peace is built by guaranteeing first of all the peace of every nation.
We consider it our priority to advance toward a balanced and respectful relationship between the US and Venezuela, and between Venezuela and the countries of the Region, based in sovereign equality and non-interference. These principles guide our diplomacy with the rest of the countries of the world.
We extend an invitation to the government of the United States to work together in an agenda of co-operation, oriented toward shared development, under the seal of international law and with a strengthened and lasting communal coexistence.
President Donald Trump, our peoples and our region deserve peace and dialogue, not war. That has always been the position of President Nicolás Maduro, and is that of all Venezuela at this moment. That is the Venezuela in which I believe, to which I have dedicated my life. My dream is that Venezuela will be a great power in which all good Venezuelans will find themselves.
Venezuela has the right to peace, to development, to its sovereignty, and to the future.
Translation mine.
Doesn’t sound like she’s in any mood to concede an inch of Venezuela to Donnie and his nonsense. In fact, she’s very pointedly (albeit politely) telling him to back the fuck off, stop doing war crimes, respect Venezuela’s sovereignty and international law both, and be an actual president of peace — and not the one we’ve seen so far, who’s eager to stick his fat little fingers in where they’re not wanted and claim peace prizes that neither he nor the crazy loon who actually won one have earned.
I admire her hope and optimism in expecting him to listen and engage in dialogue, but the man who ordered the bombing of fishing boats (and his drunken secretary of war, who committed his own war crime by ordering the killing of all the survivors of the initial attack) is deaf to anything but the roaring of his own ego. And also, to his panic at the ongoing revelation that he’s the most prominent — and frequent — perpetrator of child sexual abuse in the Epstein Files.
