Venezuela Libre?

Venezuela’s collapse has made us all very angry because our country was one of the richest in South America thanks to its petroleum reserves.

Governments with a Marxist tendency [that of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro] implemented a totalitarian economic plan that destroyed agriculture and industry and has led to the closure of more than 50 percent of businesses that existed 20 years ago.

This ruin of the country has caused the highest inflation in the world [1,370,000 percent in 2018, according to IMF estimates] and an incredible devaluation of our currency.

The implementation of this infamous economic plan has crippled the country, we’re incapable of managing its infrastructure, including the electrical system which has collapsed.

Finally, corruption is practiced to such an extent that all resources are looted by numerous government representatives.

Cardinal Jorge Urosa Savino, Archbishop Emeritus of Caracas

It looks like the Maduro regime is on its last legs.  It is never a good sign for a tyranny when the head of the secret police turns against it:

Manuel Ricardo Cristopher Figuera, the head of the Bolivarian Intelligence Service (SEBIN), is the highest-ranking member of the country’s security forces to break with Maduro since Guaidó called for a military uprising Tuesday morning.

In the letter, the authenticity of which was confirmed to The Associated Press by a U.S. official, Figuera wrote that while he always had been loyal to Maduro, “the time has come to seek new ways of doing politics” to try and “rebuild the country.” The letter did not mention Guaidó by name but did say that Venezuela has experienced a damaging decline.

Go here to view the rest.  The main remaining props of the Venezuela regime are the Russians and Cubans in Venezuela and that the dictatorship banned private gun ownership in 2019.  As  I see the unarmed people in Venezuela battling in the streets against the armed forces of the tyranny, the wisdom of the Founding Fathers comes to the fore once again in the Second Amendment. In Federalist 46 James Madison explained why the First Congress would pass the Second Amendment:

Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the State governments, with the people on their side, would be able to repel the danger. The highest number to which, according to the best computation, a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This proportion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence. It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops. Those who are best acquainted with the last successful resistance of this country against the British arms, will be most inclined to deny the possibility of it.

As to the Russians and their Cuban puppets, the words of James Monroe who fought as a young officer in the Revolution ring out:

We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power, we have not interfered and shall not interfere. But with the Governments who have declared their independence and maintained it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.