Tom Phillips
speaker
367 appearances
5 recordings
3 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 7 Jul
Tom Phillips’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Everyone basically tried to carry help down to the affected area.
And then traffic jam just stopped and a group of police had blocked the tunnel.
They said they've received a presidential order.
We don't know why.
And they were not letting anyone through.
I think what had happened was that the president, Delcy Rodriguez, was visiting a field hospital in La Guaida.
Perhaps they didn't want more people going down.
Whatever the reality of it, this massive queue of humanitarian aid wanting to get down there got angrier and angrier and angrier.
They could not believe that the government was telling them they could not go to help, given that the government was doing so little.
think fundamentally people feel they are there to deter any kind of rebellion or protest to stop this sort of incandescent rage that is gripping many people down here exploding into some kind of anti-government protest or violence so that the government's focus has been repression or deterrence and security rather than saving lives and that
really plays into one of the biggest complaints, which is that over the past few years, since 2013, since Nicolas Maduro became president of Venezuela, the country has descended into dictatorship.
And many people feel that resources that should have been channeled into getting the emergency services ready for a natural disaster like this have been spent on repression and on equipping the armed forces to put down protests.
I think there are a few reasons, very complex and interlinked reasons.
Venezuela has, over the past 12, 13 years, been plunged into one of the worst economic crises ever outside of a war zone.
Nearly 8 million people have fled the country to escape the economic collapse, to escape hunger, hyperinflation.
and to start new lives in other parts of Latin America, in the US or in Europe.
Just a massive, massive historic migration, the likes of which Latin America has not seen.
And that has come hand in hand with a very severe political chill.
And that, of course, all came accompanied by crippling US sanctions.
And all of that has left the country just completely enfeebled.
Showing 81–100 of 367 · page 5 of 19
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