Under the guise of protecting human rights, the Trump administration is illegally meddling in three countries it has apelidado the “troika of tyranny” — Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua. National Security Adviser John Bolton claimed, “Miami is home to countless Americans, who fled the prisons and death squads of the Castro regime in Cuba, the murderous dictatorships of Chavez and Maduro in Venezuela, and the horrific violence of the 1980s and today under the brutal reign of the Ortegas in Nicaragua.”
But the U.S. government’s registro de direitos humanos doesn’t compare favorably to Cuba’s. And the Trump administration, which ignores notorious human rights violators like Saudi Arabia, is acting out of more cynical motives in its commission of egregious human rights violations against Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua.
O governo dos EUA tem Imposta unlawful, coercive sanctions on these nations, and attempted to mount a coup to illegally change Venezuela’s regime.
Trump and the real troika of tyranny — Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and U.S. envoy for Venezuela Elliott Abrams - ter fracassado na sua tentativa de golpe contra o democraticamente eleito Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Trump’s troika, instigado by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida), are seeking to substitute U.S. puppet Juan Guaidó for Maduro as president of Venezuela.
On May 1, Pompeo disse Fox Business that the U.S. might use military force in Venezuela “if that’s what is required.” Eric Prince, founder of the infamous Blackwater mercenary group, presented a plan to U.S. and European leaders to provide 5,000 mercenaries to Guaidó.
McClatchy relatado that covert U.S. weapons shipments arrived in Venezuela from Miami in February.
Isto é particularmente alarmante porque a Rússia tem uma presença solidária na Venezuela e um ataque apoiado pelos EUA poderia arriscar uma conflagração com a Rússia.
Além disso, a Carta das Nações Unidas proíbe os países de utilizarem ou ameaçarem utilizar a força contra a integridade territorial ou a independência política de outro país. A Carta da Organização dos Estados Americanos proíbe qualquer país de intervir nos assuntos internos ou externos de outra nação. E o Pacto Internacional sobre Direitos Civis e Políticos garante o direito à autodeterminação.
Sanções constituem punição coletiva ilegal
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has increased punishing sanctions on Venezuela as a step toward forcible regime change. “Statements from the [Trump] administration indicated that the purpose of the sanctions was to provoke a military rebellion to topple the government,” according to a novo relatório by the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Those sanctions are exacerbating the humanitarian catastrophe in Venezuela. They have levou a more than 40,000 deaths from 2017-2018 and oil production has fallen more than 36 percent since January 2019.
O relatório afirma que as sanções económicas impostas por Trump em Agosto de 2017 “reduziram a ingestão calórica do público, aumentaram as doenças e a mortalidade (tanto para adultos como para crianças) e deslocaram milhões de venezuelanos que fugiram do país como resultado do agravamento da depressão económica e da hiperinflação. ” Além disso, “exacerbaram a crise económica da Venezuela e tornaram quase impossível estabilizar a economia, contribuindo ainda mais para o excesso de mortes. Todos estes impactos prejudicaram desproporcionalmente os venezuelanos mais pobres e vulneráveis.”
De acordo com o relatório, “Ainda mais severas e destrutivas do que as amplas sanções económicas de Agosto de 2017 foram as sanções impostas por ordem executiva em 28 de Janeiro de 2019, e ordens executivas subsequentes este ano; e o reconhecimento de um governo paralelo.”
Seeking to pressure Cuba to cease its solidarity with Venezuela, Trump has slammed Cuba with mais sanções, stiffening the economic and travel blockade and activating Título III da Lei Helms Burton to allow thousands of lawsuits that will discourage tourism and investment in Cuba.
Trump tem ameaçou Cuba with “a full and complete” embargo if it does not “immediately” stop supporting the Maduro government. Cuba called Bolton a “pathological liar” for alleging that Cuban troops are stationed in Venezuela. Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez afirmou em entrevista coletiva, “This is vulgar calumny. Cuba does not have troops nor military forces nor does it participate in military or security operations of the sister Republic of Venezuela.” Indeed, the CIA has determined that Cuba is much less involved and its solidarity is much less crucial to Venezuela than U.S. officials think, de acordo com a former official.
In December 2018, Trump signed a bill levying sanctions to block Nicaragua from obtaining loans from the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The U.S. government is targeting Nicaragua’s Bancorp, which has ties para a Venezuela.
All of these sanctions constitute punição coletiva of the civilian population, which is prohibited by the Geneva and Hague Conventions. They also violate the Charter of the Organization of American States, which prohibits intervention in the internal or external affairs of another country and the use of economic or political coercive measures “to force the sovereign will of another State.”
This is not the first time the U.S. government has interfered and intervened in these three sovereign socialist countries. In 1960, responding to a secret Memorando do Departamento de Estado, the Eisenhower administration imposed an economic embargo on Cuba. The memo proposed “a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” The cruel U.S. economic blockade against Cuba, which continues to this day, has never led to the overthrow of the Cuban Revolution.
In the 1980s, the Regan administration illegally assisted the Contras, who sought unsuccessfully to overthrow Daniel Ortega’s socialist government in Nicaragua.
And in 2002, the CIA during the George W. Bush administration mounted a failed coup attempt against socialist president Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.
Os Estados Unidos usam dois pesos e duas medidas nas suas preocupações em matéria de direitos humanos e nos seus ataques aos países socialistas.
Coletivo de Proteção à Embaixada protege Embaixada da Venezuela
Enquanto isso, o Coletivo de Proteção da Embaixada remains in the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, D.C. Members of CODEPINK and Popular Resistance have lived in the embassy for more than two weeks to protect it from a coup attempt and possible invasion by U.S.-backed opposition forces. On May 1, members of the collective evitou an attempted takeover of the embassy by forces loyal to Guaidó.
If the Trump administration were to enter the embassy to expel these people, who are present with consent of the Venezuelan government, it would violate the Convenção de Viena sobre Relações Diplomáticas. Article 22 of that treaty states, “The premises of the mission shall be inviolable.” U.S. agents are prohibited from entering the embassy without the consent of the Maduro government. The United States is also “under a special duty to take all appropriate steps to protect the premises of the mission against any intrusion or damage and to prevent any disturbance of the peace of the mission or impairment of its dignity.” And the premises, furniture and other property “shall be immune from search, requisition, attachment or execution.”
Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, members of the Embassy Protective Collective, escreveu,
Se a embaixada venezuelana em Washington for assumida pela oposição, os resultados serão desastrosos. O governo venezuelano declarou que se isso acontecer, tomará a embaixada dos EUA em Caracas. Os EUA considerarão isto um acto de agressão e, como já procuram uma desculpa para o fazer, poderão atacar a Venezuela. Dado que a Rússia e a China são aliados próximos da Venezuela, isto poderá desencadear um conflito global.
Por que a equipe Trump está decidida a aplicar sanções e mudanças de regime?
Porque é que a troika de Trump está tão empenhada na mudança de regime na Venezuela e nas sanções em Cuba, Venezuela e Nicarágua?
Last month, Bolton addressed the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association on the 58th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion, in which the U.S. aided and abetted a failed attempt to overthrow Cuba’s Fidel Castro. “Together, we can finish what began on those beaches,” Bolton disse, adding, “We must reject the forces of communism and socialism in this hemisphere.”
It’s not simply anti-communism that animates the Trump administration’s fixation on sanctions and regime change in these Latin American countries. “With at least a half-million voters who were born in Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia or Nicaragua — and more with ancestral roots in those countries — it’s a constituency that could prove pivotal in November 2020 in a state that’s essential to Trump’s reelection fortunes,” Marc Caputo escreveu at Politico.
U.S. strategies on Cuba and Venezuela intertwine in an insidious way, and Senator Rubio is pivotal in both. “Venezuela is really an extension of the position on Cuba,” according to Ricardo Herrera, director of the Cuba Study Group. The Wall Street Journal relatórios that both countries are part of a plan to reassert U.S. dominance in Latin America and finally destroy the Cuban Revolution.
Moreover, corporate America wants to get its hands on Venezuela’s oil. Bolton dito in January, “We’re in conversation with major American companies now…. It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.”
Os Veteranos pela Paz emitiram um comunicado apelando às tropas dos EUA para resistirem às ordens ilegais de invasão da Venezuela, observando: “Enquanto o Presidente Trump fala em apoiar a democracia na Venezuela e na América Latina, o verdadeiro propósito do ataque dos EUA ao governo venezuelano é abrir totalmente o vastas reservas de petróleo venezuelanas para os EUA e outras empresas petrolíferas ocidentais, bem como para destruir governos progressistas na América Latina que colocam as necessidades dos seus próprios povos acima dos lucros das empresas estrangeiras.”
Although there is opposition to Maduro’s policies in Venezuela, people don’t want the United States to impose its will on them. Eva Golinger, former adviser to Hugo Chavez, disse Democracy Now! que “certamente, há muitos na Venezuela que esperariam por mudanças no seu país, mas não querem um regime apoiado pelos EUA. Eles não querem um regime imposto pela extrema-direita que responda aos interesses estrangeiros, que é o que estamos a ver acontecer no país.”
Em 1º de maio, o deputado Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), também aparecendo no Democracy Now!, dito, “A lot of the policies that we have put in place has kind of helped lead the devastation in Venezuela,” adding, “this particularly bullying and the use of sanctions to eventually intervene and make regime change really does not help the people of countries like Venezuela, and it certainly does not help and is not in the interest of the United States.”
Many in Congress and the corporate media walk in lockstep with the administration on its Venezuela strategy. On April 3, a bipartisan group of senators introduced ao projeto de lei to recognize Guaidó as the president of Venezuela.
Instead, Congress should pass HR1004, the Prohibiting Unauthorized Military Action in Venezuela Act, which would forbid the use of U.S. military force in Venezuela without explicit congressional authorization. This bill is now pending in the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees. People can contact their representatives and urge them to co-sponsor and support H.R.1004.
Marjorie Cohn é professora emérita da Escola de Direito Thomas Jefferson, ex-presidente do National Lawyers Guild, vice-secretária-geral da Associação Internacional de Advogados Democratas e membro do conselho consultivo da Veterans for Peace. Seu livro mais recente é Drones e assassinatos seletivos: questões legais, morais e geopolíticas.
ZNetwork é financiado exclusivamente pela generosidade de seus leitores.
OFERTAR