Isla La Orchila

Russian Tu-160 aircraft make flights in Venezuela
Russia has been flying TU-160's to Venezuela occasionally ever since Hugo Chavez came into power. The TU-160 is a supersonic bomber. It's the only large supersonic aircraft still flying. It's obsolete as weapon, but it is still big and impressive and so these flights make good propaganda.

La Orchila. 2 mile long airstrip in orange.

There has been some talk about Russia opening an air base on La Orchila, a desert island off the coast of Venezuela near Caracas. There is a big airstrip there, but not much else except rocks. It's under the jurisdiction of the military, and so off limits to everyone else. A group of ham radio operators got permission to set up camp there and run their radios, but no one else has shown much interest in it.

Los Roches, La Orchila & Caracas, Venezuela

La Orchila is about 80 miles off the coast of Veneuela and about 30 miles east of Los Roches archipelago, which is a National Park.

My take on this whole thing is that while the upper class was getting along very well in Venezuela before Hugo, the poor were not, and their frustration / desperation was what brought Hugo into power. Now we have Maduro in power, and he doesn't seem to understand the first thing about business, which is why oil production has fallen off and whole country seems to be going to hell. You'd think hanging with Putin he'd figure out that he needs to get his oil business running properly.

But maybe Putin is waiting until Maduro is really desperate so he can step in and save his sorry ass, for a price naturally. Can't really blame Putin for messing about with Venezuela, not after all the messing we (the USA) have done in his neighborhood (the Ukraine). Besides, all these despots need to stick together. Hah. Like they would. Stab each other in the back first chance they get more likely.

I suspect that property rights are at the root of this whole debacle. Pretty much all of Latin America runs on a 15th century model of property rights where the governor doles out land to his cronies and everybody else is screwed. As long as the upper class continues to squash the peasants, the communists are going to have people who are willing to listen to their bullshit, which is where we get revolutionaries.

If you want things to change, you need to give people an opportunity to crawl out of their hole without getting crushed in the process. Problem is, the upper class think they have to give up something, but if they can give the peasants an opportunity, they will reap rewards much greater than anything they are getting now. Hard to imagine, and that, I think, is the problem.