The best senior little league baseball team (ages 13-16) in Latin America is called Cacique Mara, and they’re from Maracaibo, Venezuela.  When they won the Latin America championship, they qualified to play in the Little League Senior League Baseball World Series in South Carolina, which begins this weekend. Unfortunately, the entire team was denied visas to enter the United States. As a result, Latin America will be represented by a Mexican team.

It’s not like they didn’t put in some extra effort to gain entry. The team traveled to Bogota, Colombia to apply for visas, but this wasn’t good enough for Marco Rubio and the Department of State. It’s a repeat of Rubio’s denial of visas to a Cuban women’s volleyball team that wanted to compete in Puerto Rico. But, at least in that case, the athletes were adults.

I’d like to note here that there are approximately 63 Venezuelan players on Major League Baseball rosters. Other than Americans, only Dominicans make up a high percentage of big leaguers. I haven’t noticed any national security risks from these professional Venezuelan ball players. There’s no reason to believe that a bunch of teenager ball players or their parents and coaches would take time out from the competition to harm anyone.

This is a needlessly cruel decision, but it also bodes ill for how athletes, families and coaches will be treated at the upcoming World Cup and Olympics Games that the US is slated to host over the next several years.

But we knew this already. No country that disappears people, including its own citizens, off the streets, can be expected to be a good host of international sporting events. Hang your head, because this is who we are now.