I would like to start off by acknowledging that my perspective as a white USA born individual is vastly different than those who have been living in or forced to leave Venezuela. I do recognize that and caveat my post with that knowledge. A question on morality of methods is, in many ways, rooted in privilege and I think it's important to acknowledge that. 🇻🇪🇺🇸
That said, this does not invalidate US-born Americans perspective on what's happening to their country. If you're still with me, read on...
Right now, I think many are trying to balance humanity and empathy in an insane world while also watching legal protections and boundaries dissolve here in the USA. That is why many people I know right now are very happy (& rightfully so!) for Venezuelans who fled their country or weren't able to but at the same time are alarmed, if not angry, at how Maduro was taken down.
The Monroe Doctrine was referenced by Trump as support for his action as well as resources he kept referring to as "ours". The Monroe doctrine talks about foreign colonialism. What is (if not foreign colonialism) the USA multinational publicly traded company EXXON, going into Venezuela and setting up a system to systematically deprive that country and its people of profit for about a century by pillaging their own oil out from under their noses? Yes, I can see why a corporation would be pissed off when Hugo Chávez began a nationalization campaign, kicking out this foreign company that left little to no profits for their own resource, but I can also see why Venezuela did it! What ensued was not much better for the people, unfortunately, but you could understand why a country would say, "you can't have and profit off our resource just because you were a first world company at the time and got it set up first". That'd be kinda like England still profiting off the USA... I mean we went to war over that shit. Taxes for foreign wars put on everything (most famously tea thanks to Boston & their "tea party", throwing bags of tea into Boston Harbour demonstrating their opposition to financial domination by a colonizing country they wished to be free from). I fail to see how the USA has more right to do that to Venezuela than England had (which is where the colonizing Americans [note i intentionally did not say the first Americans] largely came from). They have LESS say in the matter. The USA wasn't the "mother country" to Venezuela and we didn't even put up with taxation from our "mother country"!
I know empathy doesn't seem to have any place in politics and maybe logic doesn't either but if you're gonna quote things like the Monroe Doctrine, MAYBE see the irony there when talking about "foreign colonization"? Now, don't get me wrong ... Maduro was a POS that needed to go... but how and with whose authorization? This sets a dangerous precedent! There has to be a process or we actually encourage this type of authoritarianism elsewhere. Almost anything can be spouted as justification. How are we better than Vladimir Putin & his Russia right now waging war against Ukraine? That question might anger some but it is worth asking and answering carefully.
I remember how happy I was for Syrians when Bashar al-Assad was finally ousted via ... get this... SYRIANS. Yes it was a messy and bloody, brutal civil war. But the USA didn't get involved. He was HORRIBLE to his own people. We knew it and still didn't intervene. I know those examples don't perfectly match but from a moral high ground... why did we do nothing? I think we know the main answer... it wasn't a US interest. We will find reasons to intervene (whether that ends up being good for the people or not) when it's an interest of ours (i.e. oil) and not when we don't. Had Obama or Biden intervened on Syrians' behalf without the approval of Congress, there would have been hell for them to pay. That is actually important. And not just because one party is so-called better or morally more justifiable by some than the other. It's important to ask ourselves questions like, "why? How was it different? Why was one party looking the other way when their president broke laws? Why isn't more being done by the opposing party now when Trump so blatantly broke the law?". These are valid questions that deserve answers.
Contrary to many people's favorite line, reality is NOT just perception. There is actual truth out there as messy as it can be to find. That doesn't mean there's no gray and that is part of the point of my whole post. We can be happy for our Venezuelan friends and also upset about this at the same time. Happy because oppressed persecuted Latin Americans are free of their dictator and many can go home and be reunited with friends and family. Upset because our country seems to be sliding, ever more visibly and blatantly, into authoritarianism.
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