Marco Rubio Needs to Shut the Fuck Up, and Here’s Why
Has there been a US politician more eager to participate in regime change in Venezuela that Florida Senator Marco Rubio? Rubio, who is ostensibly supposed to be representing the US state of Florida and working for solutions to problems facing people who live in the state, tweets nearly every day about fake “interim president” Juan Guaido and the rest of the Venezuelan opposition to the administration of current president Nicolas Maduro. Rubio has made it abundantly clear that he cares so deeply about the people in Venezuela that he is willing to take to social media every day to support the US’s current attempts at a coup. What’s one more to throw on the pile for Latin America? And as we all know, they work out so well for the poor and working class of the nations who inevitably are subject to, at best, strangling neoliberal reforms and austerity measures, and at worst, murderous right-wing dictators.
Rubio, like most of the Republican party and the majority of the Democratic Party (including locals like Stephanie Murphy, Darren Soto, etc.), cares so much for Venezuela’s oil, er, people, that he is willing to do whatever it takes to remove so-called socialist dictator Nicolas Maduro from the office into which he was democratically elected. It is likely just a coincidence that there have been reports that the only president Rubio recognizes, a man who just declared himself president despite not actually being elected to that office, is more than willing to sell out Venezuela’s oil resources to the US.
Perhaps Rubio really is concerned with the material situation of the people living in Venezuela, and has good intentions. After all, he was very vocal about the recent incident in which the Maduro administration burned a convoy of humanitarian aid that was supposed to enter the country at the Colombian border. Rubio tweeted about it and shared supposedly damning footage of the incident. The only unfortunate part is that the whole thing turned out to be false, and the footage was likely doctored by the Colombian government who support regime change in Venezuela, and were aware that the aid was actually set ablaze by the opposition. Additionally, groups that participate in efforts to provide actual humanitarian aid regularly, like the Red Cross, have made it very clear that these efforts by the US to provide “humanitarian aid” is the wrong answer when it comes to actually improving the lives and conditions of the average person living in Venezuela. It’s not like Rubio doesn’t have a better option if he is truly concerned about the lives of those living in Venezuela. If he was truly concerned, he would be better off rescinding his vehement support of US sanctions on Venezuela, which clearly harm average Venezuelans in lieu of actually being effective.
Recently, Venezuela experienced a series of major power failures. The blackouts started when the Guri hydroelectric plant, which powers 70% of the country, caught fire. Rubio diligently reported that the “German dam” had blown a transformer, despite the fact that no such dam exists, and “German Dam” is the name of the journalist who reported the information on the blackout. In his effort to smear the Maduro administration, Rubio has found little time for fact-checking. In response, the Venezuelan government has accused the opposition and the United States of engaging in sabotage in the case of the blackouts. This has largely been laughed off by mainstream media sources as more of the same so-called conspiracy mongering by Maduro, despite the fact that US funding of groups that sabotage and cause chaos in a country is right out of the CIA’s playbook in Chile. This is the same opposition group that was responsible for the beheading death of a motorist and multiple shooting deaths during a series of protests in 2014. The opposition barricaded whole neighborhoods, it would not be a stretch to consider that they would attempt to sabotage the country’s infrastructure in other more damaging ways, especially as the US continues to ramp up its support, financial and otherwise, of regime change efforts.
All while Rubio continues to furiously smash that “send tweet” button when it comes to Venezuela, he had noticeably very little to say when it came to a different blackout - the one that affected the entire island of Puerto Rico post-Hurricane Maria. Puerto Rico was out of power for over a year, and some parts of the island still report having issues with electricity access. Nearly 3000 people died during and in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, and the blackout on the island was the second longest in the world. A cursory “ctrl+f” of Rubio’s Twitter feed shows how often he’s tweeted about Venezuela versus Puerto Rico. As of the date of writing this article, the number of times Puerto Rico was mentioned on Rubio’s feed was once. The number of times for Venezuela? Thirty.
Where has Rubio been when it comes to human rights abuses in Brazil, another country that has swooped in to crown Juan Guaido as the one true president of Venezuela? Where was the outrage when Marielle Franco, a prominent black and LGBT activist and politician in support of the rights of the impoverished in Brazil’s favelas, was gunned down by assassins who have since been tied to Rubio’s pal, newly elected proto-fascist president Jair Bolsonaro? Where are the efforts to install democracy in Brazil, where the popular left-wing candidate was imprisoned prior to the election, a similar situation to what many claim as the reason behind the Venezuelan opposition’s failure to take the presidency from Maduro in the recent election?
All this being said, as part of our efforts to extend solidarity to the people in Venezuela struggling against U.S. imperialism and fighting for their country’s right and ability to try to build the society they want to live in, The Orlando chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America would like to kindly recommend that Marco Rubio shut the fuck up. There is no justification for his laser focus on the so-called “crisis” in Venezuela, other than his own interest in seeing Guaido installed as part of a more US-malleable administration. Since Rubio has appointed himself to be the expert and chief regime change agent for this latest attempt at a US coup in Venezuela, our chapter will be demonstrating outside of his Orlando office at regular intervals. We are aware that it is unlikely to sway his opinion or change his tweeting habits. However, we still consider it our duty as a Florida chapter to reveal the hypocrisy of Rubio’s support for disastrous regime change in Venezuela, and his abandonment of his constituents in Florida - including the thousands of displaced Puerto Ricans who continue to struggle in our own Central Florida neighborhoods.
We stand ardently in solidarity with the people in Venezuela against the US-backed coup and against those like Rubio who would spread lies and disinformation to bolster their efforts to infect all corners of the world with Trump-esque proto-fascism! Hands off Venezuela!
