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Venezuela soldiers abandon posts at Colombia border
Soldiers from the Venezuelan national guard have left their posts ahead of an opposition-led effort to bring aid into the country, Colombia's migration agency said. In a separate development, Venezuelan troops have fired tear gas at people looking to cross into Colombia to work. Tensions have been rising over a row about the delivery of humanitarian aid.
President Nicolás Maduro said the border with Colombia is partly closed to stop aid being delivered. But self-declared interim president Juan Guaidó has vowed that hundreds of thousands of volunteers will help bring in the aid deliveries, which include food and medicine, on Saturday. The first delivery of aid has already entered Venezuela through Brazil, Mr Guaidó tweeted. The delivery of aid to the stricken country has proven to be a key area of contention between the two men who see themselves as Venezuela's leader.
National Guard fires tear gas amid Venezuela border tension
Venezuela's National Guard fired tear gas on opposition activists at a barricaded border bridge to Colombia on Saturday, and two protesters were killed near the border in Brazil, as the opposition tried to execute a high-risk plan to deliver humanitarian aid over the obstinate refusal of President Nicolas Maduro.
Opposition leader Juan Guaido pulled himself onto a semitruck and shook hands with its driver as he and Colombian President Ivan Duque gave a ceremonial send-off to an aid convoy looking to transport nearly 200 metric tons of mostly U.S.-supplied emergency food and medical supplies from the Colombian border city of Cucuta. "Our call to the armed forces couldn't be clearer: put yourself on the right side of history," he said in an appeal to troops constituting Maduro's last-remaining major plank of support in a country ravaged by hyperinflation and widespread shortages.
Amid the aid push, Maduro struck back, breaking diplomatic relations with Colombia, whose government he accuses of serving as a staging ground for a U.S.-led effort to oust him from power. "My patience has run out," Maduro said, speaking at a rally of red-shirted supporters in Caracas and giving Colombian diplomats 24 hours to leave the country.
The opposition is calling on masses of Venezuelans to form a "humanitarian avalanche" to escort the trucks across several border bridges. But clashes started at dawn in the Venezuelan border town of Urena, when residents began removing yellow metal barricades and barbed wire blocking the Francisco de Paula Santander bridge. Venezuela's National Guard responded forcefully, firing tear gas and buckshot on the protesters who demanded that the aid pass through. Some of the protesters were masked youth who threw rocks and later commandeered a city bus and set it afire. At least two dozen people were injured in the disturbances, according to local health officials in Urena.
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(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday February 24 2019, @03:45PM (3 children)
Starving people are very cranky people unless you're pointing a gun at them. Sounds like Venezuela is getting hungry enough to not even care about the guns pointed at them anymore.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 24 2019, @08:51PM (2 children)
As someone who lives close to the ven-col border, and who has to deal with venezuelans asking for money on a daily basis, the situation is complex, it's a real rabbit hole.
I ask you this: if venezuelans are starving, where are the vids? They post on youtube all the time. So where are these starving masses? It's easy to take photos of an empty shelf, and ignore the full ones.
Now, lets get one thing clear: Maduro is a fucking idiot. And I am not going to say that the venezuelan people have it easy.
Lets get another thing clear: what you read about in the west is propagandised to the hilt. And the levels of BS are truly astounding, as are people's inability to read and think.
Those anti-maduro protests are not as big compared with the pro-maduro protests. If he's such a "brutal dictator", they wouldn't be able to protest. The robocops do not attack, only react.The press is free to hang shit on him, and tbey rightfully do.
The west claims maduro is a dictator, yet at the same time when Guaido declared himself president - this is the word "dictator" defined - you westerners back him!
The aid is a publicity stunt. Venezuela has 35 million people. What the fuck is a dozen trucks with 20000 dollars worth of aid going to fix, exactly? And Guaido has been gifted with 2 billion dollars! Who do they really care about?
Venezuela is already accepting aid through the UN, since December last year. So the US and my stupid country and Brazil could go through official channels if they actually cared about the people, and not their own image.
The borders they tried to use in the first round had been closed via mutual agreement, for over two years. The recently torched trucks went through borders that were not equipped for customs inspections, arrived without prior notification, and from local accounts they were torched by the "brave" defectors, and some unknown antagonists. Note that the defectors aso drove over civillians on the way out, killing two and injuring more. Cunts.
I feel sorry for the average Venezuelan. Rock and a hard place. Maduro's authoratarian hell-hole or a US backed dictator..
And for you armchair experts, safe in your houses far away, just remember the blowback that the little people like myself will have to suffer...years of random car bombings, the FARC will get an influx of new recruits, farmers murdered by paramilitary gangs, political arguments in bars resulting in murders...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 24 2019, @11:43PM
It's worse than that, Manuro is financing the downfall by selling the countries debt to Russia and China. Who are the imperialists now? Who will take Venezuela's natural resources if the US and USAN allow it?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday February 25 2019, @05:15AM
Sounds like they're in Colombia bumming money off of you. And if one is starving, how exactly is one posting YouTube videos (particularly in the below "authoritarian hell-hole")? And what exactly is the point of relying on YouTube videos instead of regular media supposed to accomplish?
Looks like the home-brew dictator sucked more. Somehow most of the rest of the Americas have figured out how to avoid this situation.