Feel the Bern: Military mutiny in Venezuela: It Has Started

January 21, 2019 By Monica Showalter

It's working.

The global effort to persuade the Venezuelan military to begin to revolt against their commanders - by phone calls, web postings, other means, is starting to kick in. The Venezuelan dictatorship said it put down its first revolt from a National Guard unit out in a really miserable slum of Caracas called Petare. Here's the details of what went down in Caracas from the Associated Press:

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Venezuela’s government said Monday it put down a mutiny by a National Guard unit in a poor neighborhood a few miles (kilometers) from Venezuela’s presidential palace.  

The uprising triggered protests in the same neighborhood, which were dispersed with tear gas as residents set fire to a street barricade of trash and chanted demands that President Nicolas Maduro leave power.  

The armed forces in a statement said that it had captured all those involved in what it described as “treasonous” acts motivated by “obscure interests tied to the far right.”  

It said at around 2:50 a.m. (06:50 GMT), a small group of guardsmen took captive a captain in charge of a police station in western Caracas and then moved across the capital in two military trucks to the poor neighborhood of Petare, where they stole a cache of weapons from another outpost. 

They met resistance and were caught hours later at a national guard outpost 3 kilometers (2 miles) from the Miraflores presidential palace.  

The armed forces said all the weapons had been recovered and the mutinous troops captured.  

A few hours earlier, a group of heavily armed national guardsmen published a series of videos on social media saying they won’t recognize President Nicolas Maduro’s government, which has come under increasing domestic and international pressure over a newly launched second term that the opposition-controlled congress and many nations consider illegitimate.

Do you notice that the slum dwellers are protesting against the government, not the mutineers? That's not a good sign for Maduro, just for starters. Back when Maduro's predecessor, Hugo Chavez, was thrown out in an attempted coup in 2002, the poor marched to the palace in Chavez's defense and Chavez and his allies later made political hay from that. That's not what's going on here. Look at the specific details:............ Read more