By Jacob Gelt Dekker, opinion columnist for Curaçao Chronicle
Venezuela remains an extremely, unreliable, unstable neighbor to the Netherlands Kingdom islands of Bonaire, Curacao and Aruba.
A real war broke out, in 1908, when a row broke out over a stream of Venezuelan refugees, trying to escape the massacres of President Cipriano Castro. Dutch battleships, Jacob van Heemskerk, Gelderland and Friesland quickly enforced a blockage in front of the Venezuelan coast, paralyzing Venezuelan’s oil traffic from Maracaibo. The Venezuelan coastguard ships, Alix of Puerto Cabello, and the “23de `Mayo” were triumphantly interned in Willemstad harbor. President Castro fled to Berlin and an uprising in Caracas replaced his regime. That ended that war.
It was not until 2010, when reporter, Kelly van der Kwast, in the Huffington Post paid attention to a sensational Telegraaf story by Roy Klopper, “ War with Venezuela Threatens.”
Loudmouthed President Hugo Chavez had bellowed for years that the islands in front of the Venezuelan coast were his; or, “that the American invasion in preparation on Curacao was a legitimate reason to reclaim the islands.” Chavez was delusional; there was no American preparation for any invasion on any of the islands. Initially, Chavez successor Maduro, seemed slightly less rambunctious but certainly not less delusional. He produced, like rabbits from a top hat, one CIA-engineered assassination attempt, after another.
Last week, for the media occasion appropriately sweaty, shaking with emotion and fear, President Maduro announced that the time for battle had come, to defend the values of the revolution with compatriot’s blood. Dutch Foreign minister, Koenders, using soothing diplomatic language for his uninformed daydreaming underlings, translated the latent threat of a Venezuela crisis, into a “ risk”.
With dire poverty knocking on the Venezuelan economic door, millions of Venezuelans are ready to call it quits. Those with money, including the Maduro and Chavez clans, long since, smuggled stacks of banknotes to safe-harbor bank accounts in neighboring countries, but the desperate rest would likely climb onto boats, rafts and dinghies and float across to the islands off the coast, the Antilles. The smart ones, those servicing the narco-industy, have already done this crossing for years; they know the route, the currents, whom to bribe and where to land and will undoubtedly become the captains of human trafficking.
Most of the islands’ sacked out civil servants and politicians are too flaked out to even consider such contingent calamities. Their most urgent preoccupation at the moment is where to spend their summer holiday in Europe for the next few months, and preferably on public expense. So, may I suggest, they all make an excursion on taxpayers’ expense to Lampedusa, a little island just off the coast of Italy and Libya. They may learn something…
Bron: CuracaoChronicle