Venezuelans’ Health Shouldn’t Be a Bargaining Chip

Let’s agree, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is Latin America’s ranking tinhorn autocrat. Propped up by thugs, thieves and foreign puppeteers, he betrays little clue or commitment about how to retrieve Latin America’s fastest sinking economy from self-made ruin. His barely two-digit approval ratings don’t do justice to his cruelty and incompetence.

Now forget all that. If international donors and diplomats concerned about Venezuela’s wellbeing want to make a difference, they need to hold their noses and reach out with money, supplies and medicine before the coronavirus pandemic finishes the job that Maduro and his enablers began. However, it’s a measure of the toxic partisanship contaminating relations in the Americas that even a humanitarian interlude to the zero-sum Venezuela diplomacy is far from assured.