Alejandro Velasco

The United States bets on a groundswell of opposition that will rise up.

They can't come to Washington and protest, but they can go to Caracas and protest, and that's the idea.

Absolutely.

And in the government, like Maduro certainly, but Chavez most more broadly, which had long...

railed against the United States kind of bullying and power, this fits like, as we say in Venezuela, anillo al dedo, like a ring in the finger.

It's like a perfectly matching reality to a longstanding narrative.

We've long cried about the wolf and the wolf is finally here.

Yes.

You know, as a Venezuelan, I think I would say previously unthinkable.

Meaning what?

Whole families walking hundreds, thousands of miles across Venezuela, and then later

extremely treacherous terrain in some ways not knowing where they're going, just knowing that they can't stay.

Those images around 2017, 18 especially, were really difficult to watch.

you have an increased presence of police and state repressive apparatuses, which are very powerfully in 2017, 2018, going to be used by the Maduro government to mask an operation against crime

But in fact, they're going to be used to exact political control over popular sectors.

So there's an operation called the FAES, which are essentially meant to deploy much in the same way, I should say.

And I'm happy to be, you know, taken to task by this firm anyone wants, much like we're seeing ICE right now.

Just militarized police forces going into popular sector communities with seemingly total impunity.

And there, the numbers of extrajudicial killings that we know of are extremely high.

They're up in the tens of thousands of Venezuelans killed over several years' time.