BLACKWATER USA | DAILY BRIEF - Blackwater Worldwide

Posted by BW Actual on Sep 9th 2025

Venezuela

Pres. Maduro claimed that over 8.2 million Venezuelans answered his call to volunteer to take up arms to "guarantee peace" against the threats that Maduro (probably correctly) perceives from U.S. anti-cartel naval operations in Venezuela's neighborhood.
However, The Economist astutely challenged Maduro's enlistment claims: "Election receipts show he received fewer than 3.8m votes last year; it is improbable that more people would fight to defend him than would vote for him."
The new recruits aren't exactly volunteering, either: media reports and rights groups say Maduro's regime is forcing government workers and demographics unfit for service to enlist.
Separately, in another example of Maduro's penchant for numerical creativity, he announced that Christmas will come early again this year. Like last year, Christmas will start on Oct. 1 - instead of Dec. 25 - "with joy, commerce, activity, culture, carols, bagpipes."
In practice, "advancing" Christmas only means that public decorations will come out of storage sooner. Year-end bonuses (aguinaldo) won't be paid early, and workers won't get extra holidays. Maduro has preponed Christmas in four of the past five years, and usually does so to distract public attention during bouts of social and political upheaval.

France

As anticipated, French Prime Minister François Bayrou's minority government fell yesterday in a no-confidence vote that saw the far left and far right unite to reject Bayrou's centrism.
President Macron said he would name a new prime minister - his fifth in 20 months - "in the next few days."
The NYT summed up Macron's dilemma nicely: "France has become nearly ungovernable because the old alternation between power on the moderate left and right has been replaced by the growing dominance of political extremes. The country does not have a tradition of coalition building, as is the case in Italy or Germany."

Nepal

Nepal's government capitulated to protesters and lifted a week-old ban on social media that had (in part) sparked what officials dubbed a "Gen Z protest" - a moniker the mostly-young demonstrators embraced.
Officials who think kids just want to get back to chatting with their friends on WhatsApp and Facebook are missing the point. The demonstrators' gripe with the social media ban was about free speech - not the right to chit chat - and the ban was just one of the two major grievances that sparked the protests.
Their more significant - and harder to resolve - grievance is over government corruption and a lack of progress prosecuting cases against high-level officials. The government has done nothing to address those concerns, and its heavy-handed reaction to protests - in which police killed at least 19 demonstrators - gave Gen Z agitators another reason to demand better from their government.
Protests continue, and look likely to escalate further - despite Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli's resignation today.