Tuesday, December 08, 2015

U.S. Congressional Reaction to Venezuela Elections

I'm quoted in this story about the reaction in the U.S. Congress to the Venezuelan elections. The regular suspects want to punish Venezuela more  even though Nicolás Maduro did what they wanted, which was to hold free elections and respect the results.

“I call on the administration to denounce the environment leading up to the elections and impose sanctions on those individuals that caused voting irregularities on election day, a dangerous atmosphere for opposition political parties and a lopsided playing field,” Ros-Lehtinen said.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/latin-america/article48509125.html#storylink=cpy

This doesn't make any sense. Even Mauricio Macri has backed off his calls to suspend Venezuela from Mercosur. Any sanctions or other punishments isolate the U.S. and would make us look foolish. Instead of a carrot and a stick, it's just a stick and a bigger stick. We already saw how well that worked for 50+ years with Cuba.

1 comments:

ConsDemo 8:36 PM  

It appears that the gerrymandering that the chavistas did blew up in their faces. By creating a lot of districts where they could win by running slightly ahead of their national total, they also created a bunch they could lose if they lost by a landslide.

http://www.el-nacional.com/politica/MUD-volteo-circuitos-chavistas_0_752325069.html

Interesting to see what the New Assembly does. The economy's going to continue to be in tank as long as they have currency and price controls. Their number one task (after getting political prisoners freed) should be removal of those controls. Of course prices for a lot of products will go up (and be the subject of much chavista demagoguery), but "precios justos" are a little value if there is no merchandise.

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