I encourage you to read all of the OHCHR reports on Venezuela. I recent started going through them. They don’t support these claims.
The first major OHCHR claimed 6k deaths from the Maduro administration, with over 5k attributed to documentation submitted by the Venezuelan government. I can’t find that documentation and the Venezuelan government claims that it never submitted any such documents.
This is before any fact finding missions were approved.
Then you can read every year of fact finding reports. Nothing anywhere near as terrible is found as what was written in the original report.
Nearly everything that is found is ultimately a small quantity of human rights in the context of 25 years of US covert operations including soldiers on the ground, spies on the ground, weapons and munitions trafficking, drug trafficking, espionage, kidnapping, murder, sabotage, and organizing violent decentralized groups to attack the people and government of Venezuela.
In this context, the Venezuelan government has been relatively restrained in their behavior. Look at Machado - still alive, still collaborating with the US military, still calling for a US invasion of Venezuela in exchange for money. If Maduro was a bloodthirsty dictator would she be alive? If you think he’s tried but failed, is that because the US has a strong network of covert ops on the ground that is a legitimate threat to the Venezuelan government?
Wikipedia is a known propaganda outlet for the US MIC. It sources lots of things that are known propaganda outlets for the US MIC and the international network of propagandists for empire generally. You actually have to analyze and evaluate the claims. You can’t just repeat them.
For example, the OHCHR lists failure to feed secure sufficient food for Venezuelan people as a violation of human rights but does not mention the US embargo as a human rights violation, when in fact collective punishment (which is what broad sanctions are) is a full on war crime over and above being a violation of human rights. This claim then gets parroted by the news media internationally (NYT, Guardian, BBC, WaPo, even Al-Jazeera). Then it ends up on Wikipedia with 4 sources and looks totally legit.
Meanwhile, US sanctions have killed 10s of thousands in Venezuela. And the explicit purpose of US sanctions is to make the population suffer so that they will revolt against their leadership. Which means that any country subject to sanctions is going to see revolts aligned with the goals of the US, whether the protestors know it or not. If that country wants to prevent the US from taking it over, it’s going to need to manage those protests effectively. Sometimes that means working your ass off on the food problem, which Venezuela under Maduro did, to great effect. And sometimes it means sending in militarized police to ensure the protests don’t become extreme riots masking violence and sabotage from US covert ops and their 25-year cultivated network of saboteurs and coup teams.
I know we want to feel like we’re on the side of “good” and against “evil”, so it’s confusing when we’re told both sides are evil. But the reality is that you live in the West and you understand that your own leadership is evil. But you don’t live in the gap, the periphery, or specifically Venezuela. You don’t have first hand knowledge of their leadership. You only have the narratives that your culture gives you, and you have mountains of evidence that your culture’s narratives about enemies are full of lies, twisted truths, fabricated evidence, and cynicism.
I encourage you to read all of the OHCHR reports on Venezuela. I recent started going through them. They don’t support these claims.
The first major OHCHR claimed 6k deaths from the Maduro administration, with over 5k attributed to documentation submitted by the Venezuelan government. I can’t find that documentation and the Venezuelan government claims that it never submitted any such documents.
This is before any fact finding missions were approved.
Then you can read every year of fact finding reports. Nothing anywhere near as terrible is found as what was written in the original report.
Nearly everything that is found is ultimately a small quantity of human rights in the context of 25 years of US covert operations including soldiers on the ground, spies on the ground, weapons and munitions trafficking, drug trafficking, espionage, kidnapping, murder, sabotage, and organizing violent decentralized groups to attack the people and government of Venezuela.
In this context, the Venezuelan government has been relatively restrained in their behavior. Look at Machado - still alive, still collaborating with the US military, still calling for a US invasion of Venezuela in exchange for money. If Maduro was a bloodthirsty dictator would she be alive? If you think he’s tried but failed, is that because the US has a strong network of covert ops on the ground that is a legitimate threat to the Venezuelan government?
Wikipedia is a known propaganda outlet for the US MIC. It sources lots of things that are known propaganda outlets for the US MIC and the international network of propagandists for empire generally. You actually have to analyze and evaluate the claims. You can’t just repeat them.
For example, the OHCHR lists failure to feed secure sufficient food for Venezuelan people as a violation of human rights but does not mention the US embargo as a human rights violation, when in fact collective punishment (which is what broad sanctions are) is a full on war crime over and above being a violation of human rights. This claim then gets parroted by the news media internationally (NYT, Guardian, BBC, WaPo, even Al-Jazeera). Then it ends up on Wikipedia with 4 sources and looks totally legit.
Meanwhile, US sanctions have killed 10s of thousands in Venezuela. And the explicit purpose of US sanctions is to make the population suffer so that they will revolt against their leadership. Which means that any country subject to sanctions is going to see revolts aligned with the goals of the US, whether the protestors know it or not. If that country wants to prevent the US from taking it over, it’s going to need to manage those protests effectively. Sometimes that means working your ass off on the food problem, which Venezuela under Maduro did, to great effect. And sometimes it means sending in militarized police to ensure the protests don’t become extreme riots masking violence and sabotage from US covert ops and their 25-year cultivated network of saboteurs and coup teams.
I know we want to feel like we’re on the side of “good” and against “evil”, so it’s confusing when we’re told both sides are evil. But the reality is that you live in the West and you understand that your own leadership is evil. But you don’t live in the gap, the periphery, or specifically Venezuela. You don’t have first hand knowledge of their leadership. You only have the narratives that your culture gives you, and you have mountains of evidence that your culture’s narratives about enemies are full of lies, twisted truths, fabricated evidence, and cynicism.