At long last Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his mafia have been indicted in the US for cocaine trafficking. Back in November 2015 when the First Lady’s nephews, Efraín Antonio Campo Flores and Francisco Flores de Freitas, were busted for attempting to smuggle 800 kilos (that’s roughly one ton) of cocaine into the US it…
(This is a revised version of a piece first published at Caracas Chronicles. I think that piece lacked nuance, so I’ve worked it over here) Imagine my surprise to hear that my Venezuelan friend’s parents “like” Trump. I suppose that “distance makes the heart grow fonder” since for many years it had the same…
My post was “Editor’s Pick” at Caracas Chronicles this week. Thanks. Go figure. I spend hours on some articles that no one seems to notice, and other posts, like this one, take about an hour out of a morning. I clearly don’t understand the secret to “success.” If I did, I might have the misfortune…
I wrote this piece as a flyer to hand out at the Dan Kovalik talk in Berkeley. This version contains all the links. Venezuela is suffering today under a set of failed policies and unkept promises made by the late President Hugo Chávez and maintained by the “chavista” loyalists under Nicolás Maduro. Chávez promised to…
You can read the “Clifnotes” version of the Human Rights Report on the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela here. I’ve highlighted it and added colored type so you can skim through the document and still be home for dinner tonight. Those who lived through the terrible years of the 1980s when death squads terrorized Central America,…
In May I published my critique at Caracas Chronicles of the Weisbrot-Sachs’ paper on the US sanctions on Venezuela. I titled it, “Pandering to the Imperial Left.” Now a much better critique (I’m not ashamed to say) has come out with the Brookings Institute, a collaboration between four real economists. It’s available for downloading at…
Thanks to journalist Douglas Farah for his great report on the Bolivarian money-laundering empire, out now in Spanish. You should definitely take an hour and a half to listen to this panel at the CSIS website.
The day after my interview on the far left KGNU show hosted by Joseph Richey, I went onto Fox Business News to do my three or so minutes there. Between the two, I’m not sure which one seemed more amenable to my views, actually. I find myself struggling to articulate my ideas between these two…
Thanks to Joseph Richey I was invited to be on his program Hemispheres on KCNU in Boulder, Colorado. It’s available here. Update: Richey evidently felt the show was a success, though I spent most of the time arguing with his other guest, an old-time leftist. Actually, I was surprised that anyone on the left would…
The new CEPR (Center for Economic and Policy Research) report, written by Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs was little more than a desperate attempt to whitewash the crimes of the Venezuelan government and deflect blame for the humanitarian catastrophe. It failed. Even though the report, entitled “Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela,”…