Versión Español
This weekend, the presidents of Colombia, Peru, and Chile gathered for the XIV Summit of the Alliance of the Pacific, a regional trade bloc whose member states have committed to increased trade, cooperation, and efficiency. Peruvian President Martin Vizcarra is hardly a household name, but his comments on the Venezuelan migratory crisis, and the world’s general indifference, were noteworthy.
“We see a certain laziness and indifference with the countries of the world with respect to this complex issue at the global level…it is not being studied with the appropriate consideration, it is completely underestimated.”
Vizcarra should know. Peru has emerged as a top destination for hapless Venezuelan migrants, who are fleeing social, economic, and political meltdown prompted by two decades of Hugo Chavez’s socialist revolution.
Estimates of migratory outflows are notoriously difficult, but experts generally believe that 4 million of Venezuela’s 30 million have fled. If Maduro continues with his stranglehold on the nation, which unfortunately appears likely, that number could easily climb to 6 to 8 million.
This is a migratory crisis that is far larger than the Mediterranean migratory crisis prompted by the Arab Spring and wars in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Afghanistan. It is straining the Latin American region, and causing significant consequences in far away places.
Yet, the international media has hardly given this mass exodus the attention that it deserves, or more importantly, delved into the reasons why the situation became a crisis to begin with.
Vizcarra is entirely correct to chastise the world for its laziness and indifference, and with nearly a million Venezuelans on Peruvian soil as we speak, he has good reason to be concerned.
Colombia and Peru have borne the brunt of this crisis, and the world has done little. While 50 countries have broken relations with Maduro, and recognized Juan Guaido as interim president, Maduro remains firmly in control of Venezuela’s oil industry and military.
Short of a military intervention, it is time for the free nations of the world to use the full force of their diplomatic and economic power to make it increasingly uncomfortable for Maduro and his band of criminals and drug traffickers to remain in power.
Why is the international media, and the global world order, paying so little attention to this crisis?
The UN’s own report claims that Maduro has been responsible for 6,800 executions in Venezuela. Compare that to the situation in Chile, where Augusto Pinochet overthrew the Cuban-backed Marxist regime of Salvador Allende, and scholars generally believe that his regime killed around 2,800.
Pinochet is widely reviled as one of the greatest villains in Latin American history. Can the same be said of Maduro, who is clearly responsible for far worse acts?
But this does not even consider the inherent value of the competing economic systems. Chile now stands as the undisputed economic leader of the region. The Chavistas, on the other hand, took a strong, vibrant, and stable economy, and destroyed it in 20 years.
Still, the Chavistas have their defenders: from Bernie Sanders in the United States who refuses to label Maduro a dictator, to Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom who has long praised the social justice and income equality of the Chavista revolution, to Canadian “intellectual” Naomi Klein, who long lauded the Venezuelan Chavista movement.
Klein is the biggest fool in academia today, and it is unbelievable that any Canadian or American university would fund her so-called “research.” Among her many pet projects over the years has been to worship at the altar of the Hugo Chavez dictatorship…which she apparently doesn’t understand is funded entirely by oil revenues…contributing to the climate change which she deems the greatest threat to humanity. Apparently, she sees nothing ironic about lauding a narco-petro-dictatorship that is singlehandedly doing more to perpetuate fossil fuels than any other regime on earth.
Setting this blatant hypocrisy aside, here is the sad reality: leaders in the global Communist movement like Sanders, Corbyn, and Klein would be far more welcome on a typical American or European university campus today, than would Juan Guaido, Ivan Duque, or Sebastian Pinera.
An international media and a global elite largely controlled by the left have little interest in the Venezuelan migratory crisis because it doesn’t affect them, and the Maduro chapter is something that inconveniently does not fit into their neat ideological view of the world: wherein a sensible, socialist, center-left establishment can manage economy and society for the benefit of all, while doing wondrous things to eradicate income inequality and fight for social justice.
As long as Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, and Naomi Klein are lauded as heroes by the establishment, the Venezuelan migratory crisis will continue to be but a minor inconvenience for the global establishment…a historical footnote…but hardly a rebuke of the centrally planned economies fighting for “equality” which they would like to see.
