There's nothing like being assertive to a socialist thug regime starving the citizens it holds hostage.

Brazil has declared it's going to be delivering aid to starving Venezuelans whether the country's socialist dictatorship likes it or not.

It's a beautiful thing. And a big problem for Maduro.

According to a BBC story headlined "Venezuela crisis: Brazil vows to deliver aid, defying Maduro":

Brazil says it will send humanitarian aid to its border with Venezuela by the weekend, despite the protests of embattled President Nicolás Maduro.

The delivery and distribution of the aid is being organised by Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó, the Brazilian presidential spokesman said.

Mr Maduro denies there is a crisis in Venezuela and calls the growing aid operation a US-orchestrated show.

Venezuela also closed its sea and air border with Curacao.

The Dutch Caribbean island, off Venezuela's north coast, is planning to host US aid.

The military has so far managed to block shipments of US aid from coming across the border with Colombia.

 Maduro thought he had it good by halting U.S. shipments coming in from the Colombian border. He outsmarted those gringos, see, and effectively called President Trump a "Nazi."

Some Nazi.

Now he's got a major second front in his war on food, coming up from his south, in what's becoming a multi-front war. It's not just the gringos who need to be held off, from both the northern (via the Netherlands's Curacao) and western flanks (via Colombia). He's got aid to keep out from his south, with the loyalty of his military being tested on all flanks. All it takes is one group of soldiers to let the aid through and join the protection of the civilized world and it's likely that all of the military is going to quit and join the allies.

Oh and to keep things interesting, there's also Richard Branson and his Live Aid-style concert to drive home to a global audience that he's unpopular now even with the leftish Hollywood and Davos elites. Maduro's allies are getting thin on the ground.

What this points to is a war fought with food, not guns. And it's a rightful closing chapter in the war on socialism, given that historically, communist and socialist regimes have used hunger as a means of controlling the population. It dates from the very beginning, with the Bolshevik use of starvation to force submission of what was then called the Ukraine. All communist regimes use this - and it's still practiced in North Korea and Cuba. Now Brazil is showing that it recognizes a war to be won all right and is going forward with food as its weapon. 

Brazil, on Venezuela's southern flank, is particularly significant, given that the nation is the bigfoot among the South American states, a nation with a full-blown military and cutting-edge technology. Best of all, it now has a new leader, Jair Bolsonaro, who's been called 'the Tropical Trump.' The characterization may not be perfectly aligned, but it's close enough for the two nations to work closely together on the common project of dislodging Maduro, and this news shows that they are. What a tag team.

If anything, Brazil's new president, Jair Bolsonaro, is far more conservative in a Latin American sense than Trump. Bolsonaro is anti-communist and anti-socialist to the marrow, as is President Trump, to the point of openly declaring his admiration for the likes of Chile's loathed-by-the-left military ruler Augusto Pinochet. Bolsonaro may have done this to get the left's goat, or to persuade Brazil's public he's really not like other politicians, (which is why he won the election), but there is no question that Pinochet, who hated communism so passionately he was willing to try out radical free market ideas enacted by his famous Chicago Boys economists, left his country Latin America's biggest success story.

Maduro knows this, he knows that Brazil was the first nation to recognize the legitimate government of acting President Juan Guaido, well before the U.S. did, and Bolsonaro is someone to be feared. Maduro has a lot of tools in his socialist toolbox to discredit America, given the power and use of the West's leftists, Trump-haters, and the international institutions. But he has nothing to counter Bolsonaro with on that front and he already knows that a determined Bolsonaro is champing at the bit to get rid of him. All that's left for Maduro against Bolsonaro is the Venezuelan military, and the trust he has that it will stick by him in Venezuela's remote south and block the aid. All it takes is a few starving troops in the miserable south, pressured by the area's angrier-than-average locals all around them to let the aid in, join the allies and ... trigger a chain reaction.

With this move, Brazil signals its value and importance to the western alliance and the cause of freedom and democracy in Venezuela. Bolsonaro (along with Trump) is going to be a hero to Venezuelans as its move may prove pivotal in the dislodging of the detested socialist dictatorship.

Image credit: Bild Brasilien, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 3.0