A ver la editorial del NYT hoy lo dice clarito:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/03/opinion/venezuela-attack-trump-us.html

Trump’s Attack on Venezuela Is Illegal and Unwise

Over the past few months, President Trump has deployed an imposing military force in the Caribbean to threaten Venezuela. Until recently, the president used that force — an aircraft carrier, at least seven other warships, scores of aircraft and 15,000 U.S. troops — for illegal attacks on small boats that he claimed were ferrying drugs. On Saturday, Mr. Trump dramatically escalated his campaign by capturing President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela as part of what he called “a large scale strike” against the country.

Few people will feel any sympathy for Mr. Maduro. He is undemocratic and repressive, and has destabilized the Western Hemisphere in recent years. The United Nations recently issued a report detailing more than a decade of killings, torture, sexual violence and arbitrary detention by henchmen against his political opponents. He stole Venezuela’s presidential election in 2024. He has fueled economic and political disruption throughout the region by instigating an exodus of nearly eight million migrants.

If there is an overriding lesson of American foreign affairs in the past century, however, it is that attempting to oust even the most deplorable regime can make matters worse. The United States spent 20 years failing to create a stable government in Afghanistan and replaced a dictatorship in Libya with a fractured state. The tragic consequences of the 2003 war in Iraq continue to beset America and the Middle East. Perhaps most relevant, the United States has sporadically destabilized Latin American countries, including Chile, Cuba, Guatemala and Nicaragua, by trying to oust a government through force.

Despite this history, Mr. Trump seemed to commit the United States to a nation-building project in Venezuela. “We are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” he said in a news conference on Saturday. He offered almost no details. He has not even offered a coherent explanation for his actions in Venezuela. If Mr. Trump wants to make the case for an invasion and a takeover of another country, the Constitution spells out what he must do: Go to Congress. Without congressional approval, his actions violate U.S. law.

The nominal rationale for the administration’s military adventurism is to destroy “narco-terrorists.” Governments throughout history have labeled the leaders of rival nations as terrorists, seeking to justify military incursions as policing operations. The claim is particularly ludicrous in this case, given that Venezuela is not a meaningful producer of fentanyl or the other drugs that have dominated the recent epidemic of overdoses in the United States, and the cocaine that it does produce flows mostly to Europe. While Mr. Trump has been attacking Venezuelan boats, he also pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, who ran a sprawling drug operation when he was president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022.

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A more plausible explanation for the attacks on Venezuela may instead be found in Mr. Trump’s recently released National Security Strategy. It claimed the right to dominate Latin America: “After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere.” In what the document called the “Trump Corollary,” the administration vowed to redeploy forces from around the world to the region, stop traffickers on the high seas, use lethal force against migrants and drug runners and potentially base more U.S. troops around the region.

Venezuela has apparently become the first country subject to this latter-day imperialism, and it represents a dangerous and illegal approach to America’s place in the world. By proceeding without any semblance of international legitimacy, valid legal authority or domestic endorsement, Mr. Trump risks providing justification for authoritarians in China, Russia and elsewhere who want to dominate their own neighbors. More immediately, he threatens to replicate the American hubris that led to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

As a presidential candidate, Mr. Trump seemed to recognize the problems with military overreach. In 2016, he was the rare Republican politician to call out the folly of President George W. Bush’s Iraq war. In 2024, he said: “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”

He is now abandoning this principle, and he is doing so illegally. The Constitution requires Congress to approve any act of war. Yes, presidents often push the boundaries of this law. But even Mr. Bush sought and received congressional endorsement for his Iraq invasion, and presidents since Mr. Bush have justified their use of drone attacks against terrorist groups and their supporters with a 2001 law that authorized action after the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Trump has not even a fig leaf of legal authority for his attacks on Venezuela.

Congressional debates over military action play a crucial democratic role. They check military adventurism by forcing a president to justify his attack plans to the public and requiring members of Congress to tie their own credibility to those plans. For years after the vote on the Iraq war, Democrats who supported Mr. Bush, including Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, paid a political price, while those who criticized the war, like Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama, came to be seen as prophetic.

In the case of Venezuela, a congressional debate would expose the thinness of Mr. Trump’s rationale. His administration has justified his attacks on the small boats by claiming they pose an immediate threat to the United States. But a wide range of legal and military experts reject the claim, and common sense refutes it, too. An attempt to smuggle drugs into the United States — if, in fact, all the boats were doing so — is not an attempt to overthrow the government or defeat its military.

We suspect Mr. Trump has refused to seek congressional approval for his actions partly because he knows that even some Republicans in Congress are deeply skeptical of the direction in which he is leading this country. Before the recent seizure of Mr. Maduro, Senators Rand Paul and Lisa Murkowski and Representatives Don Bacon and Thomas Massie — Republicans all — backed legislation that would limit Mr. Trump’s military actions against Venezuela.

A second argument against Mr. Trump’s attacks on Venezuela is that they violate international law. By blowing up the small boats that Mr. Trump says are smuggling drugs, he has killed people based on the mere suspicion that they have committed a crime and given them no chance to defend themselves. The Geneva Conventions of 1949 and every subsequent major human rights treaty prohibit such extrajudicial killings. So does U.S. law.

The administration appears to have killed defenseless people. In one attack, the Navy fired a second strike against a hobbled boat, about 40 minutes after the first attack, killing two sailors who were clinging to the boat’s wreckage and appeared to present no threat. As our colleague David French, a former U.S. Army lawyer, has written, “The thing that separates war from murder is the law.”

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The legal arguments against Mr. Trump’s actions are the more important ones, but there is also a cold-eyed realist argument. They are not in America’s national security interest. The closest thing to an encouraging analogy is President George H.W. Bush’s invasion of Panama 36 years ago last month, which drove the dictator Manuel Noriega from power and helped set Panama on a path toward democracy. Yet Venezuela is different in important ways. Panama is a much smaller country, and it was a country where American officials and troops had operated for decades because of the Panama Canal.

The potential for chaos in Venezuela seems much greater. The generals who enabled Mr. Maduro’s regime will not suddenly vanish. Nor are they likely to hand power to María Corina Machado, the opposition figure whose movement appears to have won the country’s most recent election and who accepted the Nobel Peace Prize last month.

Among the possible bad outcomes are a surge in violence by a left-wing Colombian military group, the ELN, which has a foothold in Venezuela’s western area, or by the paramilitary groups known as “colectivos” that have operated on the periphery of power under the Maduro dictatorship. Further unrest in Venezuela could unsettle global energy and food markets and drive more migrants throughout the hemisphere.

So how should the United States deal with the continuing problem that Venezuela poses to the region and America’s interests? We share the hopes of desperate Venezuelans, some of whom have made a case for intervention. But there are no easy answers. By now, the world should understand the risks of regime change.

We will hold out hope that the current crisis will end less badly than we expect. We fear that the result of Mr. Trump’s adventurism is increased suffering for Venezuelans, rising regional instability and lasting damage for America’s interests around the world. We know that Mr. Trump’s warmongering violates the law.

https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/01/trump-venezuela-maduro-delcy-rodriguez/685497/

Bueno, si tampoco es pa tanto.

Estuve en un cumple y estaba la pava esta, mujer de un conocido muy maja. La tipa viene de Houston y se conocieron online en 1994!!!! empezaron a hacer dating de hikikomoris, se conocieron 5 años después en persona y se casaron, y hasta ahora, felices de la vida. Brutal.

Pues le pregunté que si aguantaba esto... me dijo que ni de coña volvía a USA. Que sus amigos estaban asfixiaos, que todo el día currando PARA NADA. No tienen vacaciones, no tienen vida social... Me dijo que en Suecia gana muuuucho menos, pero su calidad de vida es 10 veces mejor. Que aquí ha podido tener dos hijos sin stress, que ha podido estar relajada. Que gana MUCHO menos que sus amigos de houston, pero que vive 10 veces mejor.

Que su casa es pequeña (pero normal para suecia) pero que sus amigos sin hijos se pillan casoplones de 5 habitaciones y 300m2. Le pregunté por qué. Me dijo que es porque no tienen tiempo para gastarlo en comer, o vacaciones o nada. Solo currando, de modo que lo unico que tienen para mostrar "que su vida merece la pena y han triunfado" es comprar cosas que no necesitan. Es decir casoplones, trucks etc. Todo está orientado al dinero, no a la calidad de vida, y el aparentar es super importante. Son hiperconsumistas.

Le hablé del libro de Mailer sobre la luna, que claro en parte se desarrolla en Houston, que veía que había un ideal colectivo: "Ir a la puta luna antes que los rusos". Que ahora solo veía hustling, trampeo, pelotazos cutres, a ver quien tima al otro. Estaba totalmente de acuerdo, que eso es una puta merienda de negros.

Me dijo que no se atrevía a contarles a sus amigos el tamaño de su pisito en las afueras de estocolmo, ni lo que ganaba de copywriter aquí con proyectitos. Que se iban a reir de ella, pero es que elllos no entendían que su vida era una puta mierda en lo que realmente importa, felicidad.

Me contó lo de la sanidad. El trampeo desesperado, el hustlerismo, es un intento angustiado de escapar del miedo a ponerte enfermo, a la sanidad privatizada despiadada, a acabar desahuciado en la calle, a ser un homeless. Me contó que su padre el año pasado entró en la UCI 10 días... me preguntó cuanto pensaba que costó la broma. Me dijo que 500.000USD. Le dije que como cojones era posible y que hizo... me dijo..."murió, y eso nos salvó de tener que estar en deuda".

"La gente no se atreve a ir a los hospitales. Mi madre desde pequeña me dijo que si tenía un accidente de coche que NUNCA aceptar ir en ambulancia, que fuera en autobús al hospital si hiciese falta, pero que no fuera en ambulancia que ya era una deuda del carajo".

Le pregunté por qué cojones la gente no prende fuego a todo y mata a nosecuantos. Me dijo que era porque "estaban aterrorizados del cambio". Pensaban que la sanidad "publica" es como la sanidad "gratis" que hay para los pobres... cutre, mala. Cuando ella les explicaba que en Suecia iba a tener un hijo a un hospital público y que la princesa iba al misma hospital flipaban. No les entra en la cabeza que lo público puede ser de calidad y ser gratis.

Hablamos de muchas cosas más, de Trump, de los hippies de Vermont, de cómo casi acabo de Montana pero afortunadamente me vine a Suecia... muchas risas.

USA es un puto infierno. Luego te sale un gilipollas programador en Reddit pa decirte que gana 400.000 euros al año en una FAANG y que eso es la polla... cuando es la puta minoría y el resto gana 35.000€ a 40.000.

Lo que se dice una merienda de negros.

Por eso nos odian y nos quieren exterminar, porque somos el ejemplo positivo que deja en evidencia esa puta mierda de país lleno de trileros.

si han pagado los 7 mil millones es que van a sacarle los 60 mil en 10-15 años

No lo dudes, pero el estado lo que tiene que tener es participaciones en esas empresas semi-publcias, o que estén en fondos con inversión estatal digo yo.

Aquí lo que ha habido es una rata venezolana oswaldiana que le ha dado la mojá al Platanote, y apartate tú que entro yo, que Trump es mu colega y me deja quedarme con parte del petróleo y encima me legitima.

Pos eso. Pucherazo cutre rollo jesús gil. Ni anexión imperialista del hemisferio occidental ni pollas en vinagre.

A ver quien controla a los Venezolanos jajajaja... ni de coña. Pondrán una junta de ex-bolivarianos igual de corruptos y lo llamarán democracia y a volar.