Nah, Venezuela was already fucked up when the coup and sanctions arrived. Also never has been true socialist just in word for elections while the leadership have properties and huge fortunes of drugs, and using the oil state enterprise to launder that money. Source: Venezuelan national.
Did you have to flee when the big, bad socialists took over?
The coup itself was not novel, of course, but it was the first Latin American coup in the twenty-first century, and showed that the US government would continue to prioritize its perceived geopolitical interests — and those of multinational corporations — in the region over democracy. The US would go on to support coups, and other sorts of undemocratic political transitions, in Haiti (2004), Honduras (2009), Paraguay (2012), Brazil (2016), and Bolivia (2019) — and would show support for attempted coups in Bolivia (2008), Ecuador (2010), and Venezuela (2019). Elements of the 2002 Venezuela coup playbook would also be repeated in many cases. Source
Nah I left when crime escalated to the point where it was a common occurance to get kidnapped and get a ride to multiple ATMs to get your wages directly stolen without recourse. Instead of increase the rule of law the country descended into anarchy and fear as a state sponsored policy.
Is sad to see the opportunity lost when people in public positions were rich overnight while we, the regular people lost our wages to the highest inflation in the world and violent crime.
I want to say yes F the exterior policies of the US meddling with all economic interests in the world, but don’t lose focus because of this of the damaged Chavez and Maduro put on Venezuelans clinging to power.
Eeeeeh, mixing a lot of apples and oranges on that one. At least in a few of those they have problems way beyond US intervention. Others don't get accused of being wrecked by socialism because that "US backed coup" ended up setting up a fascist government for ages instead, so that kinda muddles the meme as well.
Along with mixing up socialism and socialdemocracy I find sometimes online leftists tend to get overprotective of nominally socialist regimes regardless of what obvious issues they have for unrelated reasons. That seems self-defeating to me, it gives reactionaries fodder to lump all left of centre or progressive governments and only target the worst of them for a cheap rhetorical win.
In the modern day, it’s usually not that we’re just mad at them for being socialist; the days of pointless bloodshed like Vietnam and Cuba belong to a time several generations ago. Ever since the 1980s, it’s usually been just that they have something we want, and socialism doesn’t enter into that equation as much. We’re just as comfortable coup-ing Honduras as we are invading Afghanistan, but not for reasons of ideology. We just want their stuff.
Check out “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” for an in depth look at exactly how fucked and criminal the entire system is.
Interestingly, that Wikipedia edit is NOT in the localized version of that page in languages from countries where people don't make that mistake. The disambiguation segment in that page is also inconsistent with the disambiguation in the democratic socialism page, where it says: "This article is about socialism emphasising democracy. For the form of democracy emphasising socialism, see Socialist democracy. For the ideology focusing on the humanisation of capitalism, see Social democracy."
Gotta love the pros and cons of crowdsourced knowledge.
So anyway, my local socialdemocrat party is very much a liberal center left party. Which you know because they often ally with the socialist and communist left, and things get tense there immediately, given the socialdemocrat party in question rejects Marxism outright since the 70s.
In all seriousness, I'd be willing to accept that in English political traditions they just use the terms differently based on some originalist historical approach as a result of not having an actual major social democrat party to keep up with that sets the commonly understood modern definition. That makes some sense. The problem is that even in English the terms are used inconsistently and mismatched to common understanding of the words worldwide, as helpfully demonstrated by Wikipedia here. As a result, I genuinely don't know what people from anglo territories in general and Americans specifically even mean when they talk about socialism online and I'm increasingly convinced that they don't either.
Direct US intervention is only part of the puzzle. The constant extraction of resources and funding of the people who keep the populace down through less obvious means is the main thing putting down a lot of the nations who are not US and EU, particularly in the global south.
I don’t think it’s unrelated at all to point out that it just so happens that (most of) the rich nations have or had a colonial history, and the poor ones were colonized.
Finally, this is a meme, you’re looking for too much nuance.
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