With dictatorships, migration will continue and the United States should not help them
Venezuela is emptying. There are 30 million inhabitants, but almost one in three of them has left the country. The dictatorship of Nicolas Maduro It has created numerous negative externalities, including poverty sufficient to displace millions of citizens. There are 8 million Venezuelan refugees and migrants worldwide; 6.5 of them are in American countries (data as of August 5, 2023 from the Inter-Management Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants of Venezuela). Maduro is happy with the war in Ukraine because the US president has begun to ease sanctions against Venezuela, particularly in the energy sector, imposed by Trump against the regime. It is the geopolitics of chaos. Maduro loves to raise expectations about “solutions” to the political crisis of his own making. There are already more than 15 round tables of alleged dialogues that his regime has held with the opposition. One of the characters who lent themselves to this theater of the absurd is José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the former Spanish president. Zapatero’s alleged “mediation” ultimately benefited Maduro, never the opposition. The same thing happened a few years ago in the Dominican Republic and now it’s happening in Mexico.
One of the first benefits AMLO gave Maduro was Mexico’s withdrawal from the Lima Group
The second advantage was the invitation that AMLO extended to Maduro at his inauguration. On August 5, 2021, AMLO gave the dictator another gift by announcing that Mexico would be the site of the 15th negotiations, which only raised new expectations among the naive. Maduro left the negotiating table after the US ordered the arrest of his friend and asset launderer. Alex Saab. Yesterday, the Mexican president announced that officials from several Latin American countries will arrive in the country in ten days to resolve the migration problem.
He will demand new money from the US while still saying it needs a strategy that addresses the root causes of migration. He’s been saying this since December 1, 2018. Almost five years have passed, but AMLO is still here. The difference is that there are 120,000 Venezuelans in Mexico today; 3 million in Colombia, almost 2 million in Peru and 600,000 in the United States. Maduro is following Cuba’s guidelines: making the country so impoverished that an important part of the middle class leaves it. On September 15, AMLO’s foreign minister met with Maduro in Havana. His communications team covered up the meeting, but it was obvious that Maduro made it public to show that there are countries willing to whitewash his dictatorship. It is absurd that the White House is wasting its money on dictators like Maduro, Ortega and Díaz-Canel, who are part of the problem and not the solution (the full article was published in El Economista).
Paolo Manzo, September 29, 2023
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