Trump, Rubio and a Zombie State In Venezuela

Some say they left behind the fear of denouncing the state’s negligence because they have nothing else to lose. Social media spread videos of police and soldiers looting the ruins and of volunteers facing them, something unthinkable before the Jan. 3 incursion humiliated the armed forces. 

Many Venezuelans have understood for years that this is not a representative government. The rest of the world might realize it as well, having witnessed it, through the eyes of their own rescuers, agencies, military personnel, and officials, that this zombie state, led on a short chain by a Trump Administration, is structurally incapable of producing the economic transformation Trump and Rubio have promised.

That truth is one the Chavista regime could not suppress: it traveled on the cellphones of the survivors crying for help beside ruins that smelled of death, and in the reports of Venezuelan and foreign journalists who refused to look away. At least this time, the voice of my people, deprived of their rights by the zombie state and the American government that sustains it, was heard.