Alejandro Velasco

But then there's the other reason, which is people abroad

can send money back in the form of remittances.

And so it creates this kind of, and this is what we find beginning around 2020, 2021, where there is as low and as catastrophic as the economic collapse was in those deep years of darkness, there is a sense of economic recovery, not because things are vastly improved, but because they're minimally improved.

I mean, I think the fear, and I would submit the legitimate rightful fear, is that many of the warning signs are present, but weirdly enveloped under a very different rubric and discourse.

It's not socialism anymore.

It's not anti-imperialism.

It's the opposite.

It's like hypercapitalism, crony capitalism, and a new form of imperialism.

But the mechanics are similar.

It's the militarization of policing.

It is the patrimonialization of the state such that the only thing that matters is what you can extract from the state and whether you have access to it.

And so the kind of nakedness of that

project, I think, I suspect, as an historian, is occasioning a sense of shock such that, can it really be this crass?

And that sense of crassness then creates a little bit of a delay in terms of response.

I experienced this since the attack on Venezuela, where

So many of the quiet parts were being said out loud that as an historian of Latin America who is trained to read subtext, who is trained to read between the lines,

who is trained to read behind the blacked-out parts of declassified CIA documents.

Suddenly, I'm being told all of that, and my first instinct is, well, maybe there's something else behind this, rather than the thing itself.

It can't just be the American president saying, we're going to the country to take the oil.

It can't just be that.