Whatever happens, the spice must flow, so either your military clamps down and reigns everyone in or else the USA takes matters into their own hands. Contras, assassinations, the occasional air strike, missiles, covert ops, even the occasional complete full blown act-of-war invasion - the United States will bring these rebels to heel. Of course, any amount of this shit decimates your country (Colombia, Chile) By this point elections are openly a sham, everyone hates you, and you only have power because you run a police state or military junta. To do much less is to have lost to the communist or been replaced by another American backed leader who can. Oh, and when he gets elected he is going to privatize the bridges and the airport to help cover the war debt you are building up, but also to give himself a sick pool and car because unlike you he's even worse than you and doesn't give a shit.

And I'm not exaggerating about the shit these countries are asked to do for privatization. There are examples where they were forced to sell off the public's drinking water, including water that fell from the sky as property of Nestle (this literally actually fucking happened in Bolivia).

Eventually, a) you are overthrown by the Communists, who are then perceived as defiant heroes across the third world but as evil demons in America (Cuba being the obvious example), b) you are overthrown by someone even worse that you (which will happen as long as they can find a way to promise America more money), c) you become an iron handed resource dictator that wins sham elections (if having them at all), or d) you actually lose an election to the Joe of your country . . . that's what happened under Chavez in Venezuala and brings us to what he did:

choice two - attempt to resist this viscous cycle. This time when you win the election, you do something really fucking bold and dangerous. So Chavez decides he wants out of this horrible cycle that is destroying the third world (and turning the planet into a literal slum, if you hadn't noticed). Chavez decides his country needs an economy. So remember those oil operations that got handed over to BP-Shell and Exxon, well Chavez tells people he's going to take those back. Yep, he's going to nationalize them, and use the money to build schools and hospitals and shit. This, of course, makes him tremendously popular, so he wins the election, and after resisting several coups from the United States (one of them worked, briefly IIRC), he gets back into power with tremendous popular support. The United States is a little weary about full on war, because all those guns and tanks that were given to Chevez's predecessors to kill communists, that he now controls. So he now has a pretty decent little defense against the United States (it wouldn't last, but it'd be a little messy) so they are reluctant to be hamfisted here. Instead, they put a shitload of embargoes on him to make sure he cannot trade.

But guess what, it's the mid 00's and oil just keeps shooting up. And now that those oil operations are Venezualan again, suddenly they are getting a nice little influx of cash. And it keeps going up. So, like a bad gambler, rather than using the money to diversify the economy, they decide the best strategy is "more oil!!" So they focus their surplus, in part, on building all those schools and hospitals I talked about, but all their reinvestment goes into producing more oil, instead of starting new industries.

It doesn't matter because this high stakes gamble looks like it paid off for Venezuala. Oil is just too in demand to be ignored so he find buyers and at high prices, and it all keeps going up and up. His country is getting rich, his poor are actually seeing their conditions improve - with millions being lifted out of squalor, and Chavez basically became the toast of the town. Chavez was literally giving away oil to poor Americans for a time.

As oil prices stumbled, you could start to see the cracks in his plan, but he died before it started to play out like this.

So Maduro finds himself in one of the worst situations in political history. He wants to continue all the shit that Chavez started, but slowly starts to realize that less and less income in coming in, and pretty soon, he's going to be in a very bad situation. He has no real friends other than the tiny island of Cuba, in the hemisphere - as the rest are more or less American puppet states. A few have legitimate elections, but most dont.

So what can Maduro do? Try to make nice with the US? Well he better be prepared to say goodbye to all that oil - the USA never ever going to allow that to happen to the spice supply again. And he better be prepared to pay some serious reparations to the United States. Like if he thought the country was poor before, wait until you see what it looks like when capitalism gets through with it - disobedience must be punished.

But what else can he do? Oil prices are stagnant. I think he is basically clinging to power as long as he can hoping that just maybe a sudden spike in oil might save him, but otherwise it is basically a ticking clock until the economic siege starves him out.

Also, for the record, I do not know the inner workings of the Maduro government. I could be wrong about their motives. They may also be quite corrupt - I have no way of knowing because MSM spews out so much bullshit that I have trouble pulling out the truth about the corruption allegations.

Heres' where Reddit Liberals really bother me.. There is a huge bloc of upper and middle class that oppose Maduro. They want money back in their society. Totally undestandable, I wouldn't want to live like that compared to how I live now. Total horrible downgrade, I dont want that at all. I get why millions hate him, want him gone, and some portion of them will be better off with him gone (at least in the short term).

But what they dont show you is the huge groundswell of support from the poor for Maduro (and Chavez, especially). There are people who finally saw a doctor for the first times in their entire life, getting treatment for easily curable disease, and tools to help with disability. Literacy is skyrocketing as Venezuala has become a leader on education in South America. For many of the poorest people, their lives have been changed immeasurable by the Chavez reforms.

All these liberal redditors saying "Haha, fuck you, teach you for not being capitalist!" as these people are (and especially will be when the American private interests return) kicked down to lower than they were before, and beaten and bloodied worse than ever for having the audacity to rise above their station for a brief moment on the world stage. These people will be beaten and broken and sent back to the mines to work as little more than slaves for private US business and it all "severs them right" according to reddit, because they wanted shelter and clean drinkable water, and voted for the guy that delivered that for the first time in their lives. Reddit calls it murder when Trump threatens to take people off Obamacare to their deaths, but they dont give a shit about stripping what little healthcare there is from the poorest Venezuelans as long as their oil companies are happy - that's what's important. The spice must flow.