Obama Signals Four More Years of Bad Relations With Latin America

[Judi Lynn]

4. Mark Weisbrot is accurate as always and knowledgeable. More from his great article:

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Yes, there have been abuses of authority in Venezuela, as in all of the hemisphere - as President Obama should know. It was Obama who defended the imprisonment without trial for more than two-and-a-half years, and abuse in custody, of Bradley Manning, which was condemned by the United Nations' Special Rapporteur on Torture. It is Obama who has refused to grant freedom to Native American activist Leonard Peltier, widely seen throughout the world as a political prisoner, now in a US prison for 37 years. It is Obama who claims the right, and has used it, to kill American citizens without arrest or trial.

Venezuela is a middle-income country where the rule of law is relatively weak, as is the state generally (hence the absurdity of calling it "authoritarian&quot . But compared to other countries of its income level, it does not stand out for anything in the realm of human rights abuses. Certainly there is nothing in Venezuela comparable to the abuses by Washington allies such as Mexico; or Honduras - where candidates for political office, opposition activists, and journalists are regularly murdered. And much of the scholarly research on Venezuela under Chavez shows that it is more democratic and has more civil liberties than ever before in its own history.

By contrast, we in the United States are not doing so well by comparison to our own history and income level. We have suffered a serious loss of civil liberties under the administrations of George W Bush and President Obama. And of course if we count the victims of US crimes abroad - the civilians and children killed by drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan, for example - President Obama, the one with the "kill list", has little standing to criticise almost any foreign president.

~snip~
When President Obama met with Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff he said:

"It gives me an opportunity as well to remark on the extraordinary progress that Brazil has made under the leadership of President Rousseff and her predecessor, President Lula, moving from dictatorship to democracy..."

So, if Obama (and his staff) didn't even know that Brazil's dictatorship came to an end more than a decade before Lula was elected in 2002, how can he be expected to know anything about Venezuela? I mean, Brazil is a big country, bigger than the continental US and the sixth largest economy in the world.

Really sad no President since Kennedy has dared take conscientious steps to separate this country from the filthy history created by his predecessors regarding the countries south of the US border, (and within our borders regarding brown, black, and leftist peoples).