Like most social democrats, Chile's Bachelet has quickly caved in to the empire's pressures and enticements.
[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hen reading the Bachelet Report on Human Rights, following HR High Commissioner’s 3 day visit to Venezuela, published on Venezuela’s National Holiday, 5 July, that it makes hardly any reference to the deadly sanctions and blockades imposed by the United States. How is that possible? The High Commissioner for Human Right does not mention the crimes of all crimes committed vis-à-vis Venezuela?
The Washington based Center for Economic and Policy Research issued a few weeks ago a report co-authored by Jeffrey Sachs and Mark Weisbrot, concluding that mote than 40,000 people have died in Venezuela since 2017 as a result of sanctions. They reduced the availability of food, medicine, and medical equipment, increasing Venezuelans disease and mortality rate. Jeffrey Sachs wrote in the report and repeated to Democracy Now – “American sanctions are deliberately aiming to wreck Venezuela’s economy and thereby lead to regime change. It’s a fruitless, heartless, illegal, and failed policy, causing grave harm to the Venezuelan people.”
Is Michelle Bachelet bought by Washington? Has she been threatened? Been given Washington’s script of what has to be in the report? Has she been told that no condemnation of the sanctions is allowed, or else… and who knows what “or else” might include? Believe me, it could be the worst. Of course, Ms. Bachelet knew what she was doing when she accepted the job of United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on 1 September 2018. It was and still is, a challenge and also a prestige. It’s a prestige traveling around the world and telling countries, selectively that they are in breach of Human Rights – while others will get the thumbs up, usually the world’s most flagrant HR abusers, as long as they are in bed with Washington. But, if not Michelle Bachelet, who knows who would have been made High Commissioner for Human Rights? – Maybe a Saudi? – These are considerations we should not forget. She was maybe the ‘compromise’ accepted by Washington.
Alberto Bachelet was deprived of food and water, water-boarded, tortured with apparent suffocation with plastic hoods over his head, electric shocks – and more. All of this, his daughter, Michelle Bachelet, was aware of and has for sure not forgotten. She knows what torture is; she knows what disrespect for Human Rights means. So, she knows that Venezuela, the legally elected Nicolás Maduro Government, does respect Human Rights; that, if there is any torturing in Venezuela, it’s by the opposition, by Juan Guaído’s criminal cronies.
Michelle Bachelet, member of the Chilean socialist party and a pediatrician by profession, was twice President of Chile, from 11 March 2006 to 11 March 2010, and from 11 March 2014 to 11 March 2018. In her first term she enhanced civil rights and social services. In between her two terms, Sebastian Piñera, a right-wing multi-billionaire, said to be one of Chile’s richest people, served as President, and as if by coincidence, he followed her second term, and is currently serving also for the second time as President of Chile.
In his first term, Piñera had veered Chile onto a fully neoliberal course, “privatizing all” is the name of the game, and now in his second term, very much prepared and pushed by Washington, he is finishing the job. This means, in her second term from 2014 to 2018, Bachelet’s hands were pretty much tied by an all dominating financial sector, while the country’s social infrastructure, from health to education to pensions, started already to deteriorate, and now it is declining at an even faster pace. - Former consultant of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), Alfred de Zayas, says that Bachelet’s report is highly flawed and “unfortunately unbalanced and does not draw conclusions that can help the suffering Venezuelan people.” He went on calling for what Bachelet’s report did not call for – “immediately lifting United States sanctions on the nation.”
The report did not condemn the US sanctions, and did not address the criminality of the foreign guided internal coup attempts. Instead the report states dubious figures of deaths that have occurred during the last several years of violent upheavals – some 9,000 – leaving unclear who is responsible for the deaths, but implies by the general tenor of the report that it is most likely the Maduro Government. – That is not true, but that’s precisely what Washington and its European and Latin American vassals, want to hear.
What Bachelet’s report will undoubtedly do is add more fuel to the western anti-Venezuela fire. It will further justify outside interference and oppression, as well as contribute to continuing with financial and economic torture of Venezuela by western political corruptness. Ms. Bachelet, you, and with you the entire Human Rights Commission, have not served Human Rights. Quite to the contrary, with this report you are serving the oppression of Human Rights.
The Venezuelan Government said there are 70 corrections that the report should make. – Well, it is a real pity that the UN has missed an opportunity to bring Venezuela back into the fold of the nations that make up the “United Nations”, as a sovereign country, deserving the respect of all – as she does. The UN was created as an instrument for Peace. It is currently manipulated by the western powers, led by – who else – the US of A, as an instrument to foment war. Yes, once more, the UN and one of its top agencies for peace advocacy – The Human Rights Commission – has made the bidding of the rogue, unlawful, criminal United States of America.
This is an article by contributing editor Peter Koenig
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