No. of Recommendations: 4
You're missing the point.
The end game is China. Not hotels, not oil companies. Not tourist spots or whatever other conspiracy theory du jour there is out there.
China.
China has always been the point. Clearing them out of the western hemisphere and denying them spheres of influence over here is a vital task.
There were ~11,000 Chinese nationals in Venezuela in 2011. Now there's over 600,000. The Venezuelan GDP is about $80 Billion. They're into the Belt and Road for some $60 billion. The Chinese want to own Venezuela. Effectively they more or less do.
China wants a stable oil supply, they want a base of operations in the western hemisphere and they want a partner to give the US fits in its own back yard. Venezuela checks all 3 boxes.
Removing Maduro is a step in the right direction. Decapitating one of the world's largest producers of illicit drugs (FARC) is a step in the right direction. Getting rid of some of Maduro's henchmen is a step in the right direction. Smashing up the $6B of Russian defense equipment (including some of their air defense toys) is a step in the right direction.
What's her face now has a choice. Maduro's government is still intact, albeit toothless.
She can keep the same crapola going. If she does, good luck with that. In the span of about 6 hours the US went in there, neutered her military and walked into her former boss' house and dragged his a$$ out of there in his PJ's. As I said on this board it was beyond obvious we had people running around down there - as evidenced by the beyond excellent intel we were getting on their drug boats.
She can keep it up...only now, no more Russian air defense. The Venezuelan people have renewed confidence. Her grip on power is tenuous at best. She knows the CIA knows everything she does and she further knows that she probably has skeletons in her closet that might wind up in a DOJ charging document and she further knows that if Trump decides to charge her and drag her a$$ out of her house in her PJs that there's exactly ZERO she can do about it.
What to do? She further knows that some of the regime loyalists are going to start looking for the exits as in they're going to want to make a deal with Machado's faction. She knows that her cops and army now fresh from the receiving end of US firepower aren't going to be super enthusiastic about fighting to keep her in power either.
So. Phone calls will be made to her from Washington. Those phone calls will have offers for her. Offers to agree to holding fair elections in a couple of months in exchange for maybe those charging docs to not come out. Maybe even give her some seed money for her new life in Havana, Moscow or Beijing.
Therefore, we'll see.
