The Looting of Venezuela | The New Republic

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More puzzlingly still, she refers to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson as the “premier critic of Washington’s foreign policy establishment in US media.” Really? That her book has received advance praise from Carlson (“Anya Parampil is one of the most insightful people I’ve ever met. I’m proud to say I’ve stolen much of my understanding of the world from her”) makes one wonder: How can Parampil square her praise of Carlson as a “fervent anti-interventionist” with his 2019 call for war with Mexico or his 2023 suggestion that the United States should send an “armed force” to Canada to “liberate” the country from its elected leader, Justin Trudeau?

Like her colleagues at The Grayzone, the primary outlet for which she writes, Parampil strongly supports national sovereignty and opposes U.S. interventionism, sometimes to the point of siding with authoritarian regimes. (She has claimed, for instance, that the United States, not Putin, started Russia’s war with Ukraine: “Putin initiated the beginning of the end of a war that started with the 2014 US coup in Ukraine.”) She is no fan of Hillary Clinton (onetime advisee of her father-in-law, Sidney Blumenthal); she classes Clinton, along with Mike Pompeo and Antony Blinken, as an “interventionist zealot.” Maduro attracts Parampil’s sympathy and respect. While she allows that many of Chavismo’s “foreign sympathizers” now see Maduro as “more authoritarian, less committed to revolutionary ideals, and less equipped to manage Venezuelan affairs than his predecessor,” she insists that this perspective overlooks the obstacles that Maduro has faced, confronted with “sustained, turbulent insurgency” and “sophisticated tactics of financial warfare.”

It’s clear that Parampil loves Venezuela. She wrote Corporate Coup after making three extended reporting trips there between 2019 and 2021. Yet her narrative occasionally veers into cartoonish stereotypes: American officials are invariably stupid or duplicitous, Venezuela’s problems are overstated or fictitious, and Guaidó supporters are ultra-privileged tools of the United States. In February 2019, a caravan of trucks packed with boxes from the U.S. Agency for International Development was preparing to drive from the Colombian city of Cúcuta to deliver humanitarian aid to Venezuelans. In Parampil’s telling, they were actually preparing for “a provocative incursion into Venezuelan territory.” Parampil and her journalist husband, Max Blumenthal, spoke with a number of suspiciously prosperous-looking pro-Guaidó Venezuelans gathered to cheer on the trucks. The men, Parampil writes, “appeared to have wandered off the country club and into the city streets,” while the women “modeled salon-treated hair and powdered faces that melted in the Caracas heat.”

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Source link : https://newrepublic.com/article/181217/us-sanctions-venezuela-looting-corporate-profits Author : Publish date : 2024-05-21 03:00:00 Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source .