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beepbooptheoryyesterday at 6:01 PM1 replyview on HN

What is the scandal supposed to be in the first one? No water in the dam? Mismanagement? Nationalization itself?

The Derwick one seems pretty light too, at least the article here just mentions an accusation from a journalist. And even then, if we are using corruption/overbilling with regard to a government contractor as an "atrocity" now.. That's going to have wider repercussions than here.

And ok, Venezuela took bribes from another government contractor, along with many other countries. I wouldn't call that an atrocity, but if that's what it is I guess I will give you the benefit of the doubt about it.

I give you benefit of the doubt about everything really! I just don't know if you have packaged your case here well is all.


Replies

lentil_soupyesterday at 10:46 PM

The scandal is that the energy crisis was declared in 2009, and 17 years later, after investing $100 billion of which up to $80 billion disappeared, there are still blackouts across the country. That's all in the first article. The Derwick one is not just one reporter either, there's local and international reporters involved including claims from Reporters Without Borders where reporters received "threats, pressures, bribe offers". That's also in the article.

As for the attrocities I meant the Maduro (and current) government in general. There are currently over 1000 political prisoners in the country, a mix of protesters, politicians, reporters, etc. A lot of them have been tortured and many have died in custody. Most of the sources from NGO are in Spanish but the Wikipedia is a good start, specially the section about the Maduro government [1]

If you check the news right now you'll see that only in the past month about 50 have been released. There's a huge effort in the country right now to get the hundreds of others out.

Ultimately, what I want to say is that while we can express disdain for the US government we can do the same for the Venezuelan one, even if they claim to be against each other. Maduro and his gang are not the victims here, they've oppressed the Venezuelan people for 27 years, let's not give them an easy out

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_in_Venezuela