Can We Have a Reckoning about Biden’s ‘Venezuelan Migrants’ Now?
Random acts of true journalism would be a great place to start
By Andrew R. Arthur on January 6, 2026
Like many, I awoke on Saturday to news U.S. troops had “extracted” Venezuelan “President” Nicolas Maduro from his presidential palace in Caracas and were bringing him to the United States to face criminal prosecution in New York. Can we now have a reckoning about the hundreds of thousands of Maduro’s countrymen who came illegally to this country as “migrants”, and about those in the media who ignored the obvious dangers of the reckless Biden immigration policies the worst of those migrants exploited?
A Quick Recap of Venezuelan History
Ever since the 1950s, the political and economic fortunes of the South American nation have been tied to its key export: oil. The country has the world’s largest known reserves of the stuff, but due to its “density” and sulfur content, Venezuelan crude is especially difficult to extract and refine. Simply put, oil helps an economy, but just because you have it doesn’t mean you’ll get rich.
To put his country on an even economic keel, then-President Carlos Andres Perez in February 1989 tried to impose free-market reforms that were modeled along the lines of the pro-capitalist Washington Consensus. “Populism” in the face of reason is evergreen in Latin America, however, and those reforms triggered riots, in which hundreds died.
The disorder gave an opening to Hugo Chavez, a Venezuelan military officer with a revolutionary agenda, to mount an attempted coup in February 1992 (which got him jailed), followed by another in November of that year, both of which were turned back by troops loyal to the government.
https://cis.org/Arthur/Can-We-Have-Reckoning-about-Bidens-Venezuelan-Migrants-Now
