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A final exodus in Syria and pandemonium as violence erupts on the border of Venezuela. It’s another chaotic day across the globe, but there’s hope for a better tomorrow. All that coming up on today’s edition of the Hot Zone.
Well things are about as hot as they’ve ever been in the two places I’ve just visited - Syria and Venezuela. If you’ve been following me on my travels you probably have a better understanding by now of what’s going on in these two crises than 99 percent of the people on the planet. You’re welcome. Do me a favor: take a moment and share this podcast with your friends.
You know, there’s a lot of hurt and heartache and mayhem happening every day in this world, and it can get pretty depressing hearing about it all the time. So with the Hot Zone I don’t want to just give you the depressing truth as I experience it on the ground, I want to do something about it. Directly. With your help, we can do SO much! Look - there’s another news podcast I saw the other day that has 11 thousand Patreon supporters. And the guy doesn’t go anywhere, just comments on the news in a kinda irreverent, actually pretty profane way. And he’s pulling in like 65K a month doing it. CAN YOU IMAGINE how much good we could do with 11 thousand subscribers? So come on! Join me and let’s change the way news gets done. Let’s go together into the world’s hot zones and HELP the people who are affected. Go to Patreon.com/hotzone to become a part of what we are doing. Thanks.
Well Syria has had some powerful developments in the past week, and I’ll get to that, but first, let’s look at the pandemonium that happened in Cucuta Colombia over the weekend. Here's a piece I've got airing on the 700 club today that sums up the chaos.
As you remember I returned from there only a few days ago, and when I left everyone was looking forward to Saturday, when they said they’d blast through the barricades thrown up by the Venezuelan government and send tons of American aid rolling into the needy people of the country. Well, it didn’t turn out to be quite so easy.
At dawn on Saturday Venezuelan forces had blockaded all three bridges from Cucuta and deployed riot gear-clad troops all along the border. It took several hours for Juan Guaido, the interim president, to get his forces marshaled and then trucks full of aid, which were at the tienditas bridge only a few hundred meters from the border, took another couple of hours to get moving because there were so many press in the way they couldn’t go very fast. Because the tienditas bridge was truly impassable, they drove the trucks to the north and south crossings, the Ureña and the Simon Bolivar bridges, and that’s when things started to go sideways. The first three trucks that made it to the barricades at Ureña were set on fire by Venezuelan troops, and that blocked the bridge completely. There was a lot of rock throwing and tear gas shooting at the other bridge as well, and still nothing got through. I'm told there were more than 300 injuries along with the two deaths over the weekend due to the violence.
Here and there a few Venezuelan troops decided to switch sides. A grand total of sixty Venezuelan soldiers crossed over Saturday, all low-ranking officers and NCOs from what I understand, which wasn’t near enough to cause the Maduro regime to lose any sleep.
It makes you wonder how Maduro continues to hold that kind of sway over the military - threats against their families? I suppose if you knew your family would disappear if you joined the resistance, well, that’d be a good reason to maintain the status quo.
In the meantime, however, millions of Venezuelans are starving. That might be hard for Maduro to fathom, since he’s obviously never missed a meal. But if there’s going to be any real change, with an unarmed populace, that change will likely only come when a general or other flag officer in Venezuela’s military defects with his entire unit. The CIA could probably make that happen with the judicious application of a few million in cash. But it will still likely be a bloody coup when it comes.
Remember, Maduro is surrounded at all times by private military contractors from Russia and Cuba. He doesn’t trust his own generals or troops to protect him. So it’s likely to get worse before it gets better. And I don’t think Maduro is the winner of Saturday’s standoff. It can’t be good for his image for him to be burning aid while starving people stand by and watch. Also, I heard from one of my contacts just across the border that Maduro sent his “collectivos”, which are armed gangs of thugs, many of them criminals let out of prison - to terrorize the people on the Venezuelan side of the border. They looted stores on Saturday, roughed up residents and stole
Episode 56 - Bombs over Baghouz, Chaos in Cucuta and What to Do when ISIS Surrenders? newspaper mockup | |
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| News & Politics | Upload TimePublished on 24 Feb 2019 |
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