Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘Last Sunday night, I wandered over to the federal courthouse in Manhattan where Maduro would appear the next day to face American justice for the first time. I wanted to speak to Venezuelan exiles who gathered there, draped in their national flag, to celebrate his ouster. The mood was jubilant, but in every conversation there was an edge of uncertainty. Trump had denigrated their hero, Machado, and was cozying up to the interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, a hard-line Maduro ally.

I met a Machado supporter named Franklin Gomez. He had been a dissident journalist and local activist in Machado’s conservative movement, winning a seat on his local City Council at the age of 22. He fled after being detained and tortured by the regime, going first to Colombia, then making the long, overland journey through the Darién Gap to the U.S. border, crossing over in 2022. He has a pending asylum case but hopes to return to a free Venezuela soon.

“I never came here looking for American dreams,” he told me.

I asked him if he was concerned about Trump’s plans to take Venezuela’s oil; he was strikingly sanguine. It already is being taken by Russia, China and Cuba, he said, and the profits stolen by a government he refers to as a mafia. Things could not go on as they had — and change brings opportunity. “It’s only necessary to return the freedom in Venezuela,” he said. As for the oil, “You deal with that later.” How much freedom the country will enjoy, given that Trump has declared that American oversight might go on for years, is an open question.

Yet as he spoke, an inescapable thought popped into my head. In the years ahead, might I find myself in some foreign city, a dissident journalist in exile, celebrating the arrest of the rogue president of the United States? I once would have scoffed at such sensationalism. But watching Trump and his allies blow past what once seemed like impregnable safeguards of American democracy, I marvel at the failure of my own imagination. It can happen here. In fact, it already is.’ (from the New York Times)