I would really like to see him gone, but my suspicion is that while intervention might speed things up, it would probably result in many more deaths and/or worse odds for the next government being both stable and competent.

I don't even have an Venezuelan friend.

Your Venezuelan friends are wrong. (I mean, the other option is that they're the type of people who think they would succeed as compradors and grifters under a US puppet government, and I assume that any friends you have are basically decent people.) (Also, based on general vaguely-knowing-Venezualans-online, I think that the people one is likely to know online are more likely to be from wealthier backgrounds and more pro-US, but that doesn't make them the majority.)

I say this as someone who naively pitched the idea that we'd have a quick Iraq war and, bad as that would be, Iraq would at least be able to rebuild with some kind of clean slate. (I mean, I went to the protests, etc.) Let's all laugh hollowly.

Where exactly has post-WWII US military intervention genuinely benefited average, working people? And why exactly would anyone trust the current administration to do anything but murder leftists, suppress unions, attack women and minorities, butcher indigenous people to turn their land over to developers, create militias and paramilitaries to serve the interests of corporations, etc? It would be straight out of the Reagan playbook, except with a real army instead of arms and advisors. Anyone who thinks that's going to be helpful needs to think again.

It is extremely unfortunate that Chavez, who was on balance all right given what he had to deal with, and who was legit pretty popular, did not seem to be willing to plan for declines in oil revenues or any sensible kind of transition of power.

Anyway, no war in Venezuela, no war for Trump, no war for oil. There is no possible historical precedent for this turning out okay by the standards of anyone with normal values.

That's about where I am, although I will guiltily admit that I'm getting there on first principles rather than on a thick understanding of exactly what's going on in Venezuela.

It's been decades since a US intervention in Central or South America to topple a leftist government that resulted in 5-digit civilian body counts, the collapse of a legitimate government, and all-around disaster. ("Decades": almost 2.5. As far as I can tell from 10 minutes on Wikipedia the CIA stopped training the torturers in Guatemala in 1995. Disastrous US interventions elsewhere, or for other reasons, or bad ones that weren't quite disasters, eh, let's ignore those for now.) Venezuelans who aren't loyal to the current regime have more immediate concerns; I can't blame them for contemplating extreme measures to get rid of Maduro.

For American leftists, Maduro is less of an immediate concern and Trump is more of one. We all should be leery about giving Trump the benefit of the doubt or an inch of extra authority about anything. When the thing is military intervention to displace an old-fashioned leftist dictator in an oil-rich nation, we should be very, very leery. A modern Lieberman droning on about how he's liberal but supports Trump would be worse for the nation's blood pressure than anyone except Trump himself. US non-military aid - sure, why not, except to the extent that it makes military aid more likely, which is pretty high. If Guiado explicitly calls for a US invasion of his own country, we'd all have tough choices to make. So far he seems to be asking for non-military foreign aid from Brazil, Columbia, Germany, and Japan, and that's it.

It is extremely unfortunate that Chavez, who was on balance all right given what he had to deal with,

This seems so wildly at odds with what the Venezuelans in my FB feed say that it really makes it hard for me to square all this. I mean, one of Jammies' best friends has been darkly predicting Trump's every move since 2016 based on what Chavez would do. To hear him tell it, they are identical.

Also, the Venezuelans in my FB feed aren't delusional about Trump or how badly it would go. I don't think they're attached to the United States taking action per se, but they also think there will be mass deaths and suffering unless someone intercedes.

Chavez, who was on balance all right given what he had to deal with, and who was legit pretty popular, did not seem to be willing to plan for declines in oil revenues or any sensible kind of transition of power.
Is laughable. He was indeed elected, and some of his redistributive policies were laudable. He also started setting up a dictatorship from the beginning. Maduro's instruments are entirely Chavista. The decline in oil revenue isn't an inevitable fact of nature, it was produced by Chavista mismanagement and corruption, also from the beginning. The older western Maracaibo fields were in natural decline, but new fields there and in the Orinoco Belt are barely tapped.
All that said, I'm in total agreement US intervention would be disastrous. (Though I think the relevant model is Obama's Libya, not Reagan's Central America.)

I also agree that US intervention would go really badly, given that Trump is in charge, and that even when good-faith efforts are made by non-Republicans to help self-destructing countries, no one really has any idea how to stop the carnage.

But I don't think the international community should abandon the notion that it's worth figuring out any sort of harm-mitigation protocol for suicidal nations. The answer can't be to let countries just implode as a matter of best practices.

Chavez was a dictatorial shit. Maduro too. Doesn't give the U.S. the right to shoot at Venezuela, but it does mean I'm not going to question the motives of a Venezuelan who is trying to get international help.

I also agree that US intervention would go really badly, given that Trump is in charge

What does Trump being in charge have to do with the price of eggs? When was the last time US intervention in Latin America went well?

Haiti 1994? Exception proving the rule, if so.

My impression is that Venezuela is really, really economically polarized and that most of us in the US hear from the more educated and wealthier classes who were less likely to support Chavez. We hear very little from the people his policies benefited, we hear very little from the left, etc, which seems par for the Reagan course. (And there's a left opposition, whence I've gotten most of my news.)

As far as "the international community" - which international community? Whose? I too would like there to be a relatively neutral way to distribute a lot of material aid, because the obvious utopian thing to do is to stabilize everything, hold the fairest elections possible and abide by the result. If we can get away with sorta neutral-ish powers distributing aid - not led by or blackmailed by the US - that will be a lot more good fortune than seems likely.

I really think that the brunt of US intervention is going to fall, as it always seems to, on the poor, the left, indigenous people, racial minorities and social minorities. Better off, educated people would benefit from "stability" and from whatever return to "normal" will happen when the looting begins, and I mean, I really sympathize with that. Looking at our current, horrible situation in the US, in large part I just hope that my household can ride it out by being in a relatively well-governed state far from the coasts and working in pinkish-white collar jobs. If there were an actual shooting war on the horizon, I'd feel the same only more so. But that doesn't mean intervention would be a good idea.

~~
It's instructive to consider that this country wouldn't even get it together to help Puerto Rico, which is actually part of the US, and yet we're beating the drum about invading Venezuela for its own good. Why Venezuela when we couldn't bother with our own people? Perhaps because of the resources and the leftism and the fact that Trump thinks a war will help him?

(Which isn't, god knows, to beat the drum for Chavez, at least not post about 2005. But consider how terrified the US was of communism during the Cold War even though the USSR wasn't very appealing. They really feel that any kind of leftism, no matter how bad and corrupt, has to be smashed because they don't trust their own vision to be popular. Even something as precarious and unworkable as the Venezuelan system has to be smashed lest it give people ideas. )

Venezuela isn't polarized anymore. Everyone with assets is gone everyone else is starving. Literal famine. That didn't happen before Chavez.

Maduro is paying the men with guns while the rest of the country lacks necessities and food? How's that anything but a military dictatorship?

14: As far as I recall, it didn't happen while Chavez was alive either.

16: Maduro is a Chavista, and what is happening today follows inevitably from Chavez. I remember predicting this in general terms in 2006, specifically on the grounds that oil was their only revenue and they were destroying PDVSA.

Here's a little more (limited) perspective... Half my wife's family is Venezuelan (although she hasn't lived there since she was a small child), and they're at the struggling/poorer end of the spectrum, for sure, always have been. They were firm supporters of Chavez from the beginning, and even now, when the situation is terrible and we send them what we can when we can just so they can get food, they are still anti-US-intervention/anti-Guaido. Chavez took the first steps any Venezuelan regime in decades had taken to look after people who had nothing. Before that it was by the oil classes, for the oil classes. A great part of the reason PDVSA (the state run oil company) crashed was that the middle- and upper-class employees and executives went on strike to sabotage its operations so Chavez wouldn't be successful. It's not just that Chavez ran it poorly... When the US talks about intervening, it's talking about putting the oligarchy and the light-skinned middle- and upper-class people back in control. Even with things a total disaster as they are, there's no incentive for the poorer people in Venezuela to want US-provided "stability" that'll just be the rich looking after the rich again. As far as what that points to as the best way out of the current horrorshow, I have no idea. But a US-backed strongman is not it. Do you guys really think Trump is pushing for this so he can restore proper democracy and opportunity for all the Venezuelan people?

Whoops, 18 was me.

I don't think anyone has argued for intervention here.

Fair enough. I suppose you can read my comment, then, as providing an alternative Venezuelan perspective to the friends cited in the OP, and pushback on Mossy's claims that the current situation was always the unavoidable outcome of Chavez's rule.

It's instructive to consider that this country wouldn't even get it together to help Puerto Rico, which is actually part of the US, and yet we're beating the drum about invading Venezuela for its own good.

I am in favor of providing aid to Puerto Rico.

I'm going back through the FB feed of my most vocal Venezuelan friends, and I overstated it when I said "My Venezuelan friends are fervently wishing for intervention". One post likened the situation to Kobayashi Maru, ie two bad choices - abandon the ship with crewmembers on board, or risk a war. Another post linked to this blogger, who seems to capture that friend's view pretty well. A few posts have been more concrete on how they think the needle could be threaded.

What does Trump being in charge have to do with the price of eggs? When was the last time US intervention in Latin America went well?

If it weren't Trump, we might be talking about resettling refugees in mass numbers here. I mean, probably not because we're racist enough to elect Trump, but that would be a much more humanitarian response to the crisis than isolationism.

Right, but that's a general criticism of war-as-humanitarian-aid, and I think it's a good one. Is it possible that military action might reduce the sum total of human suffering? It's not impossible, and arguments that it will are hard to refute because predictions are hard, especially when they're about the future. But is it likely at all that it's the most cost-effective type of humanitarian aid available? Really, no. I don't want to hear a humanitarian argument for war until we've stamped out malaria, along with getting Puerto Rico back in tiptop condition. And, you know, global warming.

18: I'm happy to take that pushback, and still to call this collapse inevitable, and to cut Chavismo no slack whatsoever. The PDVSA strike doesn't account for, for instance, the total destruction of agriculture. For PDVSA, if Chavez had had any interest in the country (because, again, sole revenue stream) he would have found a way to get those people back to work, or to replace them from abroad*, or to replace them with competent loyalists rather than incompetent. The previous neglect of the poor absolves nothing, because now everyone is poor. When the smoke clears the only people with anything will be people with offshore assets and drugrunners. Chavismo has annihilated everyone but the 1%.
*Considering the scale of foreign JVs in the country, even the surviving non-expropriated ones today, some mentioned here.

25 to 22, and generally to anyone offering a humanitarian argument for military action, even though there's no one really doing that here.

24: You have ~500k refugees and counting. You could be sending a lot more aid for refugees in surrounding countries.

28 is arguing with 24? Yes, of course we could be.

We could be doing a lot more things. I am not in favor of sending war.

22: Heebie, I hope you didn't think I was implying that you weren't! I was thinking of the "we" of "we invaded Iraq", not the "we" of "people actually in this conversation".

I assume that everyone posting here unless eg Shearer is coming from a place of decency and good will, and supports normal things like aid to Puerto Rico, and that while we might differ in our understanding of the situation in Venezuela, we all basically want the outcome to be a roughly egalitarian society with broadly democratic elections, no one starving, no one killing each other in the streets, etc.

great part of the reason PDVSA (the state run oil company) crashed was that the middle- and upper-class employees and executives went on strike to sabotage its operations so Chavez wouldn't be successful. It's not just that Chavez ran it poorly...

Taking this at face value, it's the perennial failure of populist socialism in Latin American. You can't just magically assume a political environment where your professionals and technocrats--or capitalist governments and firms internationally--will fall in line with the revolution/state.

No, I know you weren't. I was being grumpy.

I know we have basically no institutional mechanisms for interacting with other countries besides via the military (or diplomacy) - there is no "Send in the peace corp!" frex. And sending in the military, even with the most humanitarian intentions, is still being carried out by the military and resembles a militaristic solution.

But there's absolutely no reason why a Doctors Without Borders model couldn't be more widespread. We don't currently have humanitarian aid that isn't being carried out by the military, and that's a problem. (I feel like I'm going to be told that we already do these things and I'm uninformed, which is fair.)

Do I trust the US government to be in charge of humanitarian aid? No. But that's a whole general conversation about how to keep organizations operating fairly and honestly, and if that's the argument, then that's the argument against every single policy that requires a functional government to operate. (I suppose the rebuttal to this paragraph is, "It's different when the collatoral damage of your government's dysfunctionality falls on citizens in a different country." Fair point, you!)

I'll just argue with myself, indefinitely.

Lenin said he'd get the capitalists to sell him the rope he'd use to hang them. Hiring a few Russian petroleum engineers doesn't sound like it should have been that hard.

We don't currently have humanitarian aid that isn't being carried out by the military, and that's a problem. (I feel like I'm going to be told that we already do these things and I'm uninformed, which is fair.)

Here you go. Here's their page on Venezuela specifically. (Obviously this is worlds away budget-wise from the military.)

35 is true, but long-term hollowing out (long before Trump) of non-military foreign policy (including State) is something DC wonks complain and worry about constantly.

36: Yeah, it's a big long-term problem for sure.

Just capability to handle massive refugee flows near origin alone would be worth having. With that, good chance there'd have been no Brexit, no 5/Liga, no AfD.

Great!

39 was to 35.

"Where exactly has post-WWII US military intervention genuinely benefited average, working people?"

Korea? South Korea now is richer per capita than a lot of western Europe. That wouldn't have happened if Kim Il Sung hadn't been stopped.
Bosnia? Kosovo? That was stopping or preventing actual genocide among other atrocities. You can go there on holiday now, see the Sarajevo Roses.

I think the relevant frame is regime-change type interventions.

35

wikileaks cables from 2006 show that the goal of USAID in Venezuela is regime change

http://cepr.net/blogs/the-americas-blog/usaid-subversion-in-latin-america-not-limited-to-cuba

Venezuelan immigrants to the US are typically strongly against the current regime. That is why they left. I am sure they are fine people but it is a mistake to base US policy solely on their testimony.

It burns my fingers to type it, but the Trump administration's current approach - assembling a large group of nations to exert diplomatic pressure - is, if you are going to get involved at all, the correct one. I presume that some fuckery is underway, but as of now they are being non-awful. Considering.

43: Ah, CEPR. I interned there did a couple of years. Good people. Here's more of their Venezuela thoughts.

Link didn't go through: https://bit.ly/2F4Gr5w

32 inspired me to look on the internet for a good version of Natalie Merchant singing Gun Shy. It's always so hard to find good audio paired with good video.

45 Don't worry, he'll fuck it up.

45: Dick Cheney agrees, and he's pissed.

41. Yes but the Korean intervention killed millions of civilians so not exactly cost effective.

Good point. The Kim regime starved millions of civilians essentially for free.

||
Nice fuck you from Pelosi.
|>

"Venezuelan immigrants to the US are typically strongly against the current regime. That is why they left. I am sure they are fine people but it is a mistake to base US policy solely on their testimony."

There are fine people on both sides, right?

Thousand fine!

Going only off my newfound knowledge from the Mike Duncan podcast, the US did use that kind of soft pressure, in concert with the other European powers, to oust Porfirio Diaz, right? Possibly some bloodshed was averted at that particular point. But thereafter we went way overboard and worked more unilaterally towards the military ouster of Madero, including his assassination, and then the Veracruz intervention, and much more.

43: This project supported an NGO working with women in the informal sectors of Barquisimeto, the 5th largest city in Venezuela. The training helped them negotiate with city government to provide better working conditions. After initially agreeing to the women's conditions, the city government reneged and the women shut down the city for 2 days forcing the mayor to return to the bargaining table.

Yeah, they sound like real villains.

There's intervention in the abstract vs intervention as it actually exists, and all the noises make it sound like it will be similar to past interventions in Latin America.

18. Chavez took the first steps any Venezuelan regime in decades had taken to look after people who had nothing.

There is certainly something to be said for that. On the other hand, Chavez and his cronies have looted many tens of billions of dollars during their rule, not to mention being heavily involved in the drug trade, etc. See the Wikipedia article on Corruption in Venezuela for a summary. (To be fair, corruption has been endemic since the country first won its independence.)

Military intervention would probably be a disaster, but what is the backup plan if Maduro and his clique hold on? My understanding is that the OAS, Guiado and the US are hoping the military will eventually decide (or be convinced) to overthrow him; that doesn't sound like a very good outcome.

I was just reading about Vietnam's removal of the Khmer Rouge: I'd forgotten that the US opposed it, and helped fund opposition groups that were in a coalition with the KR.

I think our backup plan ought to be letting the people of Venezuela sort it out. Same as Plan A. With sanctions targeted to a very narrow range individuals, not the people already suffering.

We should support the boycott/divestment/sanctions campaign because the leader of the opposition has supported it, on the basis that it's the only way to force this awful undemocratic regime to change its policies.

No, wait.

We should oppose the boycott/divestment/sanctions campaign because the leader of the opposition is not a good representative either; much of his support comes from the refugee community outside the country, so we shouldn't let them dictate what we do; the current government is the legitimate government of the country; and boycotts, divestment and sanctions would only cause widespread hardship.

I was just reading about Vietnam's removal of the Khmer Rouge: I'd forgotten that the US opposed it, and helped fund opposition groups that were in a coalition with the KR.

Did it go better or worse than the US removal of the Taliban, would you say?

Better! But, still not great.

Better! But, still not great/i>

Ooh, wrong answer.

25,000-52,000 Vietnamese military casualties, plus another 30,000 Vietnamese civilians. At least 15,000 Khmer Rouge casualties plus another 200,000 Cambodian civilians. And hundreds of thousands of Cambodian refugees from the fighting, and ethnic Vietnamese refugees from Cambodia, fleeing KR reprisal killings. And uncounted dead Cambodian civilians from the famine caused by the Vietnamese invasion. That's why there was an enormous - really, virtually unprecedented - famine aid effort staging through Thailand into Cambodia in the 1980s. And topped off with the accession of an extremely violent dictatorship under Hun Sen, who has murdered thousands of opposition members, journalists, etc etc over his 34 years in power.

It didn't go well! Not at all! There's no metric in which it went better than Afghanistan!

You should know this!

I mean, being invaded by the VPA is not a good thing to have happen to you. They filled mass graves all over southern Vietnam after 1975, and about a million south Vietnamese became refugees. They killed pretty much an entire generation of Hmong males - you can still spot the demographic gap if you go to northern Laos. They were no gentler in Cambodia.

64 Strongly disagree, it went very well, it put an end to the Khmer Rouge's genocidal regime (close to 2 million killed through outright murder and deliberate starvation and overwork) and the Khmer Rouge's murderous border incursions into Vietnam (I forget the figures but around 30,000 and up). How is this even controversial?

Hun Sen not even close to Pol Pot in body count.

I think ajay is saying US intervention in Afghanistan has gone less badly than Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia. Which I don't think tells us much since as he points out Vietnam sets a really low bar.

68 is correct.
Also remember that arguments very similar to 66 are being used to claim that the Iraq War was a success (genocidal regime, hundreds of thousands dead, murderous incursions into neighbouring countries etc). And the Vietnamese had to occupy Cambodia for about the same length of time that the US kept combat troops in Iraq.

There's no metric in which it went better than Afghanistan
I can think of one, namely degree of success.

Pretty sure bin Laden's still dead and there aren't any training camps any more, so, no.

Pol Pot, meanwhile, lasted to 1998.

Arguments very similar to those were used to claim that the Allied intervention in Germany was a success, too. That such arguments are being made needs to be weighed against their accuracy and the degree to which they're made in good faith.

I've been distracted by Brexit news (since I'm weighing a job offer in the UK), but is there any reason to think that the chance that US is going to intervene militarily in Venezuela is any greater than zero?

54: I think the issue is that by definition the people who felt they had to leave a country are going to be radically biased against the government of that country. It's like asking the average height of everybody over 6 feet. It's also why the IRA always had easy time raising money in bars in Irish neighborhoods in the US.

18: I find the "strike" argument a creepy one, for two reasons. One, if you are a skilled worker for PDVSA, you don't suddenly lose your right to refuse work. Two, isn't the the excuse that dictators always use? All of their plans would have worked great, if it wasn't for internal subversion.

since I'm weighing a job offer in the UK

Go Wildcats.

Not that UK. Here's a hint. It's the "oldest and largest institution of tertiary education in Afghanistan".

74: What's creepy about the "strike argument," as you call it? The well-off managers at PDVSA decided it was more important to sabotage the system than to allow Chavez a chance at success. I guess that was their right - I wouldn't say they should have been compelled to work - but when people say Chavez destroyed PDVSA, they usually leave out the step where that destruction was a conscious choice by supporters of the previous regime. Seems like that's a relevant piece of the puzzle.

I'm not a oilman, but based on my general work experience I think that only communists and "well-off managers" attribute that much of the success of an industry to "well-off managers."

Not just the managers, but the middle- and upper-class technicians and engineers. Is it really so hard to believe that people who had been winning for decades decided they'd rather knock the gameboard off the table rather than cut more people in on the winnings? And again, I'm not attributing all the Chavez regime's problems to this. I'm just asking that this factor be included in the "Chavez destroyed PDVSA" discussion. If the response is "Oh what commie propaganda," well, so be it.

Yes, it's really hard for me to believe that people with the technical skills crucial to fun an industry are generally wealthy enough that they can just decide to quit working to spite somebody. That goes against basically everything I have seen in my entire life.

Speaking of technical skills, somebody fucked up gmail and now I can't send attachments.

fun s/b run.

Not that they were wealthy enough to quit working just to spite someone; but that faced with the wealth getting spread around differently, they struck in hopes of crippling the new regime in order to restore the prior one. But instead they just accomplished the crippling, and not the restoration. And if that's impossible for you to believe, then I probably won't convince you.

Actually, I'm not even sure what you're asserting. Are you claiming the staff of PDVSA didn't strike, because if they had, it would go against your priors? Or are you asserting that they did strike but it was for some other reason? If so what reason was it?

I don't have any trouble believing a strike happened, but it's been twenty years. That enough time even with a small number of willing workers to train a whole new workforce.

I was intimately familiar with PDVSA operations as of 1997-2005. at that time, the issue wasn't so much upper middle class managers on "strike" as it was replacement/sidelining of that management by corrupt cronies and deliberately making the company ungovernable so as to loot it. the idea that Chavez was attempting to run PDVSA at any time successfully as an oil company and not a source of looting is just wrong, that's true even if some of the fruits of the looting went to the poor. it was patently obvious to everyone at the time that Chavez was looting/destroying the country's major industry and that the administration was thoroughly rotten though nobody I knew knew in advance that things would get as bad as they have

69 Only the genocide in Iraq against the Kurds was already in the past, the one in Cambodia was ongoing. If you're going to break the analogy ban than I'd put forward the analogy to the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as being more apt. And Germany, also occupied for decades afterwards.

My priors are that eventually (after a period of time but way less than 20 years) middle class people will take give up and take the job that exists because they need to eat.

I find the whole story about PDVSA implausible. Maybe there's some rich top-level managers, but you can just fire them. For skilled middle-class workers, like Moby said there's no way they're going on strike for 20 years just to screw Chavez. What did they do in those twenty years? Starve to death to stick it to Chavez? If they go on strike for a year, that's not going to cripple an oil company.

It's also play one in the dictator handbook when things to shit. The dictator's visionary plans were foiled because of internal subversion. It's never because the dictator broke the economy.

I assume "strike" is meant not in the literal sense of stoppage but in the go-slow sense - keep drawing a salary, but actively or passively allow the works to be gummed up.

It could simultaneously be the case that many existing employees and managers consciously / subtly worked toward the enterprise failing, and that Chavista appointees looted, featherbedded, and screwed things up from their own direction. In which case apportioning blame would be very difficult.

Oops, serves me right for not googling first. There was an actual strike, but that ended in layoffs of the strikers, so it seems like one needs a longer-term explanation either way.

Are there any actual historical examples of a socialist (or even vaguely left-wing) country's economy being crippled by the decision of upper-middle-class technical specialists in key industries to engage in a go-slow or strike in order to force the overthrow of the government? As Walt points out, there are lots of examples of dictators saying it's happening when it wasn't. But did it ever?
There was a lot of opposition to the New Deal in the US, for example. Did senior managers at General Motors and US Steel collectively decide to sabotage their companies in order to foil FDR?
The postwar Labour government in the UK actually nationalised a lot of industry and also brought in a lot more state control of the economy - things like the NHS - which led the opposition (eg Churchill) to accuse them of using Gestapo tactics. But were there a lot of department heads at Vickers and ICI deliberately cocking stuff up just to show Bevin and Attlee that they couldn't have things their own way?

Perhaps the Saskatchewan doctors' strike of 1962? But that had little lasting effect (and was much more overt).

And not nearly about overthrow of a regime, just thwarting of a specific program.

Like a lot of discussion of Venezuela, this one feels like a timewarp. It's not 2006, Chavez isn't distributing discount diesel to governments he likes and setting up free violin lessons any more. One of PDVSA's problems is people fainting with hunger on the job.

That said probably the biggest problem is that things have been so bad for so long literally millions of people have fled the country, including the people who knew how to black-start their big hydroelectric dam without causing explosions. There already is a major refugee crisis. I can't really see any way in which the refugees go home without substantial political change, which puts us back to square one.

One of PDVSA's problems is people fainting with hunger on the job.

They're devilish cunning, these upper-middle-class reactionaries.

92: there was that Chicago retail guy who was physically dragged away by US Army Military Police sent to enforce the company's nationalization, itself decreed to force him to recognise the unions. Ah, here we are:

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/04/this-day-in-labor-history-april-27-1944

The photo is pure gold.

This is from 2016, when people were abandoning the cities in favour of subsistence gold mining and the country's anti-malaria precautions had collapsed: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/15/world/venezuela-malaria-mines.html

A cite for collapsing oil workers, from about a year ago:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-02-22/hungry-venezuelan-workers-are-collapsing-so-is-the-oil-industry

91 gets us back to the mystery from above: after the layoffs, why couldn't the Chavez or Madero administrations bring in Russian or other non-Western specialists (Iranians?), or at least competent people to train promising loyalists? Even if the foreigners had to be overpaid, it'd be worth it for maintaining the oil revenue stream. I can't see any other explanation beyond some combination of corruption and incompetence. Maybe sanctions, but sanctions against PDVSA date to literally this year (previous sanctions were against administration officials).

Bringing up Mike Duncan's podcast again, he mentioned in the most recent podcast that when Mexico nationalized the mostly foreign-owned oil industry to create Pemex, they had a similar problem. The skilled workers were all foreigners who the oil companies moved out when the state moved in. So Mexico hired who they could and trained a new generation of local workers, and within a few years (and the demand created by WW2) things worked themselves out. Not to say that Pemex is without corruption, but they might have, comparatively, done something right.

after the layoffs, why couldn't the Chavez or Madero administrations bring in Russian or other non-Western specialists (Iranians?),

Or, heck, Western specialists. It's not realistic to postulate a class-consciousness among middle managers in the oil industry so acute that not one of them would break ranks to take a nice job in PDVSA for a few years. (Apart from anything else, look at the kind of people they _do_ happily work for.)

101: I was imagining a Chavismo* sufficiently developed that they wouldn't want to hire any imperialists, but yes, if they can stomach that, there's no reason to not employ the sort of technician who'd otherwise be doing a few years in a Gulf petrostate.

* Proudly flying the Burberry tricolour.

Are there any actual historical examples of a socialist (or even vaguely left-wing) country's economy being crippled by the decision of upper-middle-class technical specialists in key industries to engage in a go-slow or strike in order to force the overthrow of the government?

I don't think quite in these terms. Cuban economy certainly experienced a lot of absenteeism as it socialized. A dynamic that happened in the sugar industry is those people (non-foreign agri-engineers) wanting to get out, not being allowed out, doing what they were told under the gun (or being arrested for refusing), eventually being allowed out, and then Che taking off his shirt while cutting sugar to motivate people to produce more.

Cuba experienced a bunch of emigration-based loss of workers. I don't know how much compared to Venezuela.

The Venezuelan friends I can still get in touch with: same. I am concerned about all the ones who are not answering my correspondence. :(

Telefónica has a mobile network in Vzla with some share of Spaniards on the staff. When I last heard about them they had started having the usual problems they have in really deeply poor countries - there is no electricity to rely on, so they use diesel generators, people steal the diesel or the generators, so they install them half way up the tower, people climb or topple the tower to steal the diesel, and the really interesting one, which doesn't happen in the DRC? the point-to-point microwave radios they use for backhaul get stolen to order for Mexican drug cartels.