Extrajudicial Killing

This week we talk about Venezuela, casus belli, and drug smuggling.

We also discuss oil reserves, Maduro, and Machado.

Recommended Book: Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

Transcript

Venezuela, which suffered all sorts of political and economic crises under former president Hugo Chávez, has suffered even more of the same, and on a more dramatic scale, under Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro.

Both Chávez and Maduro have ruled over autocratic regimes, turning ostensibly democratic Venezuelan governments into governments ruled by a single person, and those they like and empower and reward, over time removing anyone from power who might challenge them, and collapsing all checks and balances within the structure of their government.

They still hold elections, then, but like in Russia, the voting is just for show, the outcome predetermined, and anyone who gets too popular and who isn’t favored by the existing regime is jailed or killed or otherwise neutralized; the votes are then adjusted when necessary to make it look like the regime is still popular, and anyone who challenges that seeming popularity is likewise taken care of.

As a result of that state of affairs, an unpopular regime with absolute power running things into the ground over the course of two autocrats’ administrations, Venezuela has suffered immense hyperinflation, high levels of crime and widespread disease, ever-increasing mortality rates, and even starvation, as fundamentals like food periodically become scarce. This has led to a swell of emigration out of the country, which has, during the past decade, become the largest ever recorded refugee crisis in the Americas, those who leave mostly flooding into neighboring countries like Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador.

As of 2025, it’s estimated that nearly 8 million people, more than 20% of Venezuela’s entire population as of 2017, has fled the country to get away from the government, its policies, its collapsed economy, and the cultural homogeny that has led to so much crime, conflict, and oppression of those not favored by the people in charge.

This has also led to some Venezuelans trying to get into the US, which was part of the justification for a proposed invasion of the country, by the US government, under the first Trump administration in 2017.

The idea was that this is a corrupt, weak government that also happens to possess the largest proven oil reserves in the world. Its production of oil has collapsed along with everything else, in part because the government is so ineffectual, and in part because of outside forces, like longstanding sanctions by the US, which makes selling and profiting from said oil on the global market difficult.

Apparently, though, Trump also just liked the idea of invading Venezuela through US ally Colombia, saying—according to Trump’s National Security advisor at the time, John Bolton—that Venezuela is really part of the US, so it would be “cool” for the US to take it. Trump also later said, in 2023, that when he left office Venezuela was about to collapse, and that he would have taken it over if he had been reelected instead of losing to Joe Biden, and the US would have then kept all the country’s oil.

So there’s long been a seeming desire by Trump to invade Venezuela, partly on vibe grounds, the state being weak and why shouldn’t we own it, that kind of thing? But underlying that is the notion of the US being a country that can stomp into weaker countries, take their oil, and then nation-build, similar to what the government seemed to be trying to do when it invaded Iraq in the early 2000s, using 9/11 as a casus belli, an excuse to go to war, with an uninvolved nation that happened to own a bunch of oil resources the US government wanted for itself.

What I’d like to talk about today is the seeming resurgence of that narrative, but this time with an, actual tangible reason to believe an invasion of Venezuela might occur sometime soon.

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As I mentioned, though previously kind of a success story in South America, bringing people in from all over the continent and the world, Venezuela has substantially weakened under its two recent autocratic leaders, who have rebuilt everything in their image, and made corruption and self-serving the main driver behind their decisions for the direction of the country.

A very popular candidate, María Corina Machado, was barred from participating in the country’s 2024 election, the country’s Supreme Court ruling that a 15-year ban on her holding public office because of her involvement with an alleged plot against Maduro with a previous candidate for office, Juan Guaido; Guiado is now in exile, run out of the country for winning an election against Maduro, which Maduro’s government has claimed wasn’t legit, but which dozens of governments recog