What Venezuela tells us about Labour Party foreign policy

Venezuela has been reduced to a political point scoring exercise in the UK - whilst it plunges deeper into an enormous humanitarian disaster. Did we learn anything new from Labour party conference?

A week after the debate in parliament about Venezuela this month, the Political Editor of the Daily Mirror, Kevin Maguire tweeted a response to a story about Yemen and Saudi Arabia:[/url]
“And not a peep on the terror of a British Govt ally from those who pretended to care about Venezuela only to have a pop at Corbyn”.
Now there's a few things going on here. You might think that he's responding to the likes of the Tory John Redwood


But it seems that Maguire may also be having a go at Labour MPs like Catherine West, Kevan Jones, Siobhan McDonagh, and Mike Gapes, who've all asked questions in Parliament about Venezuela, and at Graham Jones MP, who had organised the debate on Venezuela and set up an All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG), having had a long-standing Latin American interest through his membership of the APPG on Latin America.

In the background to his comments we have the widely circulated, and wrong,claim that Graham Jones was only setting up an APPG to hurt Corbyn.

So would I be correct in thinking that the only way Corbyn’s supporters, both in the blogosphere and even the mainstream media, can think about the humanitarian disaster that is happening in Venezuela is through a Corbyn lens - And what happens when that thought-bubble meets real life?

“The police are in on it”
“They do it without shame. Whenever they approach a microphone. Each time a camera focuses them. At every press conference. Outside and inside the country. No matter the subject. It may be about the hospital crisis, shortage, hyperinflation, the epidemic of murders, the disappearance of cash, the absence of gasoline. Any obvious and visible topic. And despite that, of the irrefutable and manifest that is our misery, lie. They say that the country is increasingly prosperous, that the world envies us, that we are a reference and paradigm, that if God would plagiarize us to design the earthly paradise in the image and likeness of Venezuela. They become grandiloquent and pompous. Rhetoric and cheesy. They cite Bolivar until his fainting. They lie when they talk about economic warfare and universal conspiracies. They lie to feel guilt free. Meanwhile, the people, the common citizen, the very people, seek to survive in the rubble of a country ruined and plundered by the illustrious leaders of the revolution.”
Venezuelan writer Leonardo Padrón.

Ivor Heller is a South London resident and Director of Wimbledon AFC. His partner, Lisa, is Venezuelan. She has family including six sisters in Venezuela and Heller has listened to a "continued barrage of disturbing messages" in disbelief at the levels of anguish in their phone calls to his partner.
One sister, "ordinary working class folk", was forced out of her home of 30 years by gangsters. They lost everything. Asked if they had reported it to authorities Heller laughs: "the police are in on it!" A niece called. She hadn’t eaten for three days. She was anxious about her husband, missing after going to protest Maduro's forces coming into his city and "shooting wildly everywhere."

Lisa's relatives are starving. Heller has seen the photos of their dramatic weight loss and the huge lines for any food. He mentions another niece, stabbed in a mugging. The country has an appalling murder rate. The reason you saw solely daytime images of street protests was because people were afraid to be outside at night.

Another Venezuelan Londoner, who asked not to be named due to concerns for her relatives, talked of “people...eating wild donkeys in Paraguana“ and of of “giant holes in roads the size of cars”. She had tried to get in touch with her dad, to get some lines from him to relate to me, but power cuts meant she could not contact him. She talked instead of Venezuela before she stopped returning in 2014. Long before the oil price fell, she had found it “too dangerous to visit any more", with an “utter loss of security” and “a lot of old people still living indoors, terrified…You could be robbed any time at gunpoint and many of my family were.” Chavismo was already failing, with “train tracks abandoned, outrageous inflation, serious food shortages, daily kidnappings, polluted beaches, rubbish all over the countryside, private companies closed, only brand names left as Venezuela stopped making stuff”. She had heard “heartbreaking stories of people losing homes and businesses they had worked for years to build - just taken."

More recently, "drinking alcohol was banned at Easter” and now “an abundance of narcotics [is] readily available”.

Joaquin Villalobos, the Salvadoran ex-guerrilla turned consultant for conflict resolution, told El Pais. "In the midst of chaos, the power acquired by criminal platforms is incredible."
Here are some headlines from Venezuela from just the last couple of weeks. 

NGO reports at least eight prisoners in Venezuela have died of malnutrition so far in 2017.

Catholic charity Caritas says that 41% of Venezuelans are now feeding on waste in markets. 

Two thirds of Caracas' buses are out of action because of a lack of spare parts.

There's a 85% shortage of medicines in Venezuela, including no antibiotics for children. Blood banks are almost collapsing.

The UN's Food & Agriculture agency said there are 4.1 million people with malnutrition in Venezuela.

“Distress about starvation is much greater than our party disputes”

https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/paul-canning/what-venezuela-says-about-labour-party-foreign-policy


More to read on the link

This is what Corbyn wants for us? He's a fucking maniac !