The only member of the South American football confederation never to have appeared at the World Cup is Venezuela. So Venezuelans may not be following closely Fifa’s award of its inaugural peace prize to US President Donald Trump.
Instead, residents of the oil-drenched nation are intently watching the build-up of the American military along their coast, and wondering what comes next.
The US has accumulated a considerable armada in the western Caribbean: the USS Gerald R Ford aircraft carrier, other warships, amphibious assault vessels, warplanes and 16,000 troops and sailors, as well as new construction at a mothballed naval base in Puerto Rico. On November 29, the US declared Venezuelan airspace “closed”.
Any military action against Venezuela, a nation of more than 28.5 million people, will not be a simple exercise in gunboat diplomacy like the invasions of tiny Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989. When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, the population was a little smaller than Venezuela’s today. The invasion force for Iraq, which was able to assemble securely on-land, numbered 160,000.
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