Thinking up ways our all-encompassing crisis could get even worse has become a grimly popular parlor game for Venezuelans.
For years, the go-to worst-case scenario was civil war between the political factions in our country. Now a military engagement with Colombia looms on the horizon.
The reason? Venezuela’s increasingly tight alliance with the drug-running guerrilla armies waging war on the Colombian state, which has rattled Bogota so hard it’s now seeking a hemispheric response. A military conflict has now become a serious option.
The victory of right-wing candidate Ivan Duque in the Colombian presidential elections is not the best news for Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
However, the in 2018 elected president has already refused to recognize Maduro’s victory in the recent elections in Venezuela and realized that he could not send an ambassador to Caracas.
It is believed that Ivan Duque is the successor of the political line of the Colombian ex-president Alvaro Uribe (in power from 2000 to 2008) who was notorious first of all for fighting the left radical insurgent FARC group.
Alvaro Uribe also could not stop accusing Hugo Chavez who was the Venezuelan President at that time, of harboring the FARC freedom fighters in Venezuelan territory.
The latest peace deal with FARC was a hoax, just to eliminate the Colombian freedom fighters and bluntly invite NATO into the borders of the Latin American country.
There is no need to recall that Maduro owes his entire political career to the late Chavez. Maduro was not only a long-time associate of Chavez but was perceived in society as the heir to Venezuela’s legendary socialist leader.
Maduro also inherited from Chavez a course toward friendship with Russia (Russia made large investments in Venezuela), as well as a diplomatic confrontation with the USA and its main DEA ally in northern Latin America – Colombia.
At one time Chavez made a point calling Colombia, intertwined with Venezuela by a 1,300 km-long common border, “Latin American Israel, hinting at the military and economic support provided by Washington to the Colombian leadership.
Despite the fact that Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, who succeeded Uribe, signed a political peace agreement with the FARC in 2016, the relationship between Caracas and Bogota during Santos’ rule has not improved.
Russia takes an emphatically distant position in relation to the political standoff of the two neighboring Latin American countries, and this approach seems reasonable in this situation.
Russia does not make a secret of the fact that Venezuela is experiencing enormous IMF created economic difficulties.
Russian companies responded to Venezuela’s business proposals, but this response was based on mutually beneficial cooperation, not on a desire to support a left or right ideology.
Russian political analysts are aware of the US interest in the “early collapse of the Chavist regime”, but nevertheless, they do not veil the fact that Venezuela’s leadership is primarily to blame for the country’s economic problems.
The fact is that the violence in Colombia in recent decades has come not so much from the left, but from the right side of the political spectrum.
Even the traditionally anti-communist British BBC reports that in the political sector Colombia has a radical, sometimes violent, right-wing tradition.
Modern Diplomacy EU / ABC Flash Point News 2019.
