US Disappointment with Latin America

Assistant Secretary of State Roberta Jacobson said yesterday that she was disappointed at the widespread rejection by Latin America of the sanctions imposed on Venezuela by the U.S. She maintained that such sanctions were not intended to harm the Venezuelan people or the Caracas government in general. She admitted that the issue evokes historic differences between her country and Latin America, which she did not specify, but that is a clear reference to the traditional policy of Washington towards the rest of the continent: support for and promotion of unacceptable dictatorships, armed invasions of sovereign nations, long-standing looting of natural resources, and constant interference in the internal affairs of the countries of the subcontinent. The set of declarations and hostile measures by the White House against Caracas constitutes the latest chapter in this history.

As will be recalled, on March 9, President Barack Obama declared the South American country to be an extraordinary and unusual threat to national security and U.S. foreign policy. He ordered Venezuelan accounts frozen and prohibited seven officials of Nicolás Maduro’s government from entering U.S. territory.

In response to such nonsense — because there is not a single piece of evidence indicating that the government of Caracas could threaten the superpower in any way — individual governments and regional bodies like the Union of South American Nations, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) have criticized the measures taken by Washington and have asked Obama to promptly rescind them.

If the State Department, as spokesperson Roberta Jacobson has said, is surprised by the unanimity and forcefulness of the Latin American response, it can only be explained by the carelessness of U.S. diplomacy towards the region in the past two decades. Such a reaction would, in effect, have been unthinkable at the end of the past century. But from then until now, claims of national sovereignty and regional integration have been developing in the southern part of the continent which have transformed Latin American paradigms, even in those governments — like those of Mexico, Colombia and Peru — that have lagged behind in these developments and that, conversely, have persisted in maintaining the traditional political, economic and diplomatic subordination towards the power in the north.

At present, Washington is bumping up against continental realities that make it unthinkable to try to isolate one of the countries from its counterparts in order to subjugate it either by financial, even military, means, or by the active support of internal rebellion, as the U.S. had been doing every time that a government emerged in Latin America with proposals for sovereignty and social transformation.

The determination of the U.S. against Venezuela looks so much more grotesque if you consider that the White House recently took concrete steps for the relaxation of relations with Cuba, against which they had maintained an implacable economic blockade for a half century, a policy of permanent harassment and even active support for anti-Castro terrorist groups in exile.

Independent of the posture that may be adopted regarding the tense internal political situation in Venezuela, no Latin American government can, without embarrassment, agree with the nonsense expressed by Obama a month ago. This is the case, among other reasons, because it is clear that exactly the opposite is true; it is Washington that threatens the national security of Venezuela, and its active belligerence in support of the opposition to Maduro is a clear example of this.