‘Spooks hotel’: inside the five-star nerve centre of the US takeover of Venezuela

Diplomats, businessmen and US marines mingle at the JW Marriott hotel in Caracas as deals are done and the country’s resources divvied up Over breakfast in one of the swankiest hotels in Caracas, you can hear them mulling Venezuela’s past, present and future in sporadically hushed tones. As diners tuck in to plates of fried eggs, black beans and arepas, snatched fragments of conversation speak of election roadmaps, political fragmentation and oil-fuelled economic growth. But the murmured disc...

By Tom Phillips in Caracas