Dr Mariya Ivancheva, of Strathclyde University in Glasgow, claimed the attack is all about control over Venezuela’s enormous oil reserves.
US President Donald Trump(Image: AFP via Getty Images)
A Scottish academic who lived in Venezuela for three years has called Donald Trump’s military assault a “dark day” for the country and the world. Dr Mariya Ivancheva, of Strathclyde University in Glasgow, claimed the attack is all about control over Venezuela’s enormous oil reserves and marks a “denigration of international law” that should chill everyone, including people in Scotland.
Dr Ivancheva lived in Venezuela between 2008 and 2011 during the years of socialist president Hugo Chavez and wrote a book about the South American nation. She told the Sunday Mail she had “never been a fan” of Chavez’s successor Nicolas Maduro – now captured by US forces.
But Dr Ivancheva added: “Latin America has a very rich history, sadly, of soft and hard power, of direct intervention, especially by the US. What’s quite telling now is that this is a very visible, very open, very unapologetic seizure of power by a foreign government directly.
“We’re speaking of a military assault against a sovereign state which is really, really concerning. I am worried about the people on the ground. A lot of the people that I knew there have left but many have found life in exile.
“I think hopelessness is what I’m feeling despite the fact it’s a sunny day in Glasgow. It just feels like a really dark day. American sanctions against Maduro’s government, against Venezuelan companies, have been really restrictive to any possibility for change.
“A lot of the economic problems have been the making of the US, as much as Venezuela. It has been a difficult day and period but it’s not completely surprising. We have seen something of this scale coming.”
Dr Mariya Ivancheva(Image: Handout)
She said Venezuela had been an “easy enemy” for Trump allowing him to “unleash an assault without sanction”. But it comes as the US president has also threatened traditional allies like Denmark by vowing to acquire its resource-rich territory Greenland.
He has also said he would like Canada to become a US state and suggested America could annex the Panama Canal. Dr Ivancheva continued: “Each and every country including Scotland, each and every sovereign territory, needs to be extremely alarmed about this precedent, because it really speaks of absolute impunity and arbitrary deployment of power against a sovereign country.”
She added: “We seem to be in the hands of a lunatic, or he’s the front of something much more sinister. But it is very easy arithmetic when it comes to a country like Venezuela.
“It is usually the countries that have rich natural resources and have a government that is not a puppet state to the US that suffer, and that’s historically been the case. The only surprise is the way that it happened.”