There's this whole debate these days about Listening to Venezuelan Voices or Listening to Iranian Voices and while on the one hand it's true that the Venezuelan Voices or the Iranian Voices promoted by the mass media tend to be overwhelmingly right-wing and pro-interventionist, the reaction of the left to dismiss the idea of listening to people from these countries also doesn't help, especially when there are positions that don't serve as cheerleaders either for the imperialists or the government - Haymarket's new anthology Venezuela in Crisis, for example, offers a good selection of Venezuelan leftists opposed to both US imperialism and the Venezuelan government, analyzing the issue of the continuities and ruptures between Chávez and Maduro

But beyond that, the reason the whole Listening to X Voices thing is a farce is that it's always Listening to X Voice. Right-wingers find a pro-interventionist voice in a given country and refuse to listen to any others, and anti-imperialists find a pro-government voice in a country and refuse to listen to any others, when the whole point is that you have to imagine that politics somewhere like Venezuela or Iran are as complicated and nuanced as your own country, rather than a one-dimensional caricature of Barbaric Oppression or Heroic Anti-Imperialist Struggle

Like I guess one example - a lot of Right-Thinking Anti-Imperialist Leftists on bsky would be really confused by my position of "sheinbaum is obviously better than the right-wing opposition parties but also a shitty militarist and timid reformist and part of the reason she's popular is because of the hope that a woman president in a violently misogynistic country might produce a change but that change is honestly mostly cosmetic" when that is, for example, literally the same position these Right-Thinking Anti-Imperialist Leftists had on Obama! They could not imagine Mexico being as complicated and nuanced as the US
(In the case of Venezuela, the inability of the anti-imperialists of the imperialist core to imagine "guy who liked chávez but not maduro" - despite this being a fairly common guy in Venezuela - because they can only imagine two sides to anything says a lot about the limits of their imagination!)
@julieofthespirits there's that Roland Denis guy who was literally a minister in the Chavez government, has some retrospective criticisms of Chavez, absolutely slams Maduro.
@catch56 and he's not exactly alone, so many guys like that
@catch56 and obviously "guy who critiques Maduro from the left" isn't going to be an imperial cheerleader either, since a lot of times it involves Maduro's opening to foreign mining companies in the Orinoco
@julieofthespirits I get what you're saying
@julieofthespirits out of curiosity: a lot of Spaniards think Mexico is in South America. Is this also the case with USians?