Jan 2026
Caracas, Venezuela’s capital and largest city, sits in a narrow valley in the Venezuelan Coastal Range at about 900 meters elevation. Home to roughly 2-3 million people in the city proper and 5-6 million in the metropolitan area, it serves as the nation’s political, economic, and cultural center. Caracas is a major urban center with notable architecture, museums, universities, and cultural institutions.
The El Paraíso Tunnel is a crucial traffic artery in Caracas that connects the city’s eastern districts with the center, running roughly parallel to the Guaire River valley. Built in the 1950s as part of Venezuela’s mid-century modernization push, the tunnel handles traffic and serves as an alternative to congested surface streets. The tunnel’s name comes from the El Paraíso neighborhood on the western end, and it remains an essential component of the city’s limited highway network despite the challenging conditions facing Venezuela’s public infrastructure.
Your tax dollars are being spent on an international crime-spree bombing Caracas, slaughtering poverty-stricken civilians and kidnapping it’s political leadership because the corrupt US government has been seized by criminals who want Venezuela’s heavy crude oil. Maduro is a bad dude, but this is no solution to that problem. Blowing up a fragile urban center strengthens those who argue that Venezuela can’t be governed by Venezuelans, and that the US must intervene to “restore democracy.” This is bullshit designed to divert attention from the heist.
Why Venezuela’s oil? Because it is heavy crude, and the aging refinery infrastructure in the US is optimized for processing heavy crude. Light crude, like that from fracking and shale-oil in Texas and North Dakota, is easier to refine, but it yields less gasoline and diesel per barrel. Heavy crude from Venezuela, Iran, and Canada produces more of these high-demand fuels, making it more valuable for US fossil fuels interests.
This is why the orange stain wants Canada as the 51st state–to get their tar sands heavy crude oil. The US government is being run by criminals who want to steal the resources of other countries to enrich themselves. They are fundamentally otherwise disinterested in government. We have regressed to criminal imperialism, plain and simple.
Note that heavy crude is found in Iran also. The US government has been trying to overthrow the Iranian government for decades with the same pretext–“they are a dictatorship that oppresses their people.” These are diversionary polemics also. The Iranian government is not a democracy, but it is not a dictatorship either. It is a theocracy. The US government wants to control Iran’s oil to keep US refineries busy, not to help the beleaguered and ancient Persian culture free itself from nearly a century of religious zealotry.
I am a Registered Nurse with no training in international relations or geopolitics. Even I am not fooled by this.
The people of Venezuela deserve better. We deserve better too. We deserve a government that respects the sovereignty of other nations and does not engage in criminal imperialism. We can succeed as a peaceful nation who respects boundaries. We are far too powerful to stoop like we have. We deserve a government that serves the people, not the corporate interests that fund their campaigns. We deserve a government that is accountable to the people, not to the criminals who run it.
There’s not much else to say.
It is a new calendar year for most of the world. I’ll grant you that. I hope yours is happy.