US aid to Venezuela driven by more than just need: report

A new report finds that the US deployment of aid was aimed in part to unseat Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro.

It was billed as the beginning of the end for Nicolas Maduro. With foreign leaders in tow and the world watching, anti-Maduro activists gathered in Colombia in February 2019 with the aim of pushing entire warehouses worth of aid – flown in on US military cargo planes – across the border into Venezuela. Instead, the humanitarian convoy was violently blocked by security forces loyal to Maduro – the first in a series of miscalculations in the Trump administration’s policy towards Venezuela. More than two years later, the risky gambit is being questioned by a US government watchdog. A new report (PDF) by the inspector general at the US Agency for International Development raises doubts about whether the deployment of aid was driven more by the US pursuit of regime change than by technical analysis of needs and the best ways to help struggling Venezuelans.