Democrats Split in Responses to Venezuela Crisis

When Ilhan Omar was asked about Venezuela on Wednesday, the Minnesota Democrat decided to blame America first.

Back in January, when the United States recognized National Assembly president Juan Guaidó as president of Venezuela, Omar had tweeted that socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro was the legitimate leader of the Venezuelan people, arguing that “the legislature cannot seize power from the President.” Now, just over three months later, as Maduro’s forces were hard at work attempting to violently suppress the Guaidó-led uprising of the unarmed and starving Venezuelan people, Omar was on television, blaming American “neocons and warmongers” for the crisis.

American policies “kind of helped lead” to “the devastation in Venezuela,” Omar said in an interview on the news program Democracy Now! “This particular bullying and the use of sanctions to eventually intervene and make regime change really does not help the people of countries like Venezuela, and it certainly does not help and is not in the interest of the United States.”

Omar’s pro-Maduro sentiments make her an outlier within her own party. Joe Biden tweeted on Tuesday that Maduro’s violence against protesters was “criminal” and that the “U.S. must stand with the National Assembly & Guaidó in their efforts to restore democracy through legitimate, internationally monitored elections.” Nancy Pelosi tweeted that “Maduro needs to acknowledge the will of the Venezuelan people, whose moving calls for democracy have been heard around the world.”

“This is one Trump foreign policy that I’ve agreed with because they had multilateral [support]. That’s what gives it its legitimacy,” Representative Tom Malinowski (D., N.J.), a former Obama State Department official, tells National Review. “I want to increase the pressure. I want to make sure we do it in concert with our allies.”