A New Dawn in US Foreign Policy or Hypocrisy as Usual? US Sanctions in Latin America

Weekend Edition March 13-15, 2015

A New Dawn in US Foreign Policy or Hypocrisy as Usual?

US Sanctions in Latin America

by ALAN MacLEOD


Glasgow, Scotland.

The Obama administration’s easing of sanctions against the small island nation of Cuba was met with a mixed response at home, to say the least. Could this be the beginning of a new dawn in a more humane foreign policy? Many establishment figures welcomed the move. John Kerry was one of them, stating “it is time to try something new” to give “the best opportunity for the people of Cuba to improve their lives and to take part in the choices about their lives.” Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird agreed, “The more American values and American capital [my emphasis] that are permitted into Cuba, the freer the Cuban people will be,” he said.

However, many po-faced articles attacked the President as a spineless leader, guilty of faulty logic. There was also a good deal of concern about the fate of “free speech advocates” and “human rights campaigners” in Cuba. One Washington Post editorial laments that “with no consequences in sight, Cuba continues to crack down on free speech” while one Times article gives voice to another dissident’s opinion: “This is a blank check for the Castros and their heirs in power.” President Obama himself explained the embargo thus: “This policy has been rooted in the best of intentions…it has had little effect.”

Many, even on the left, have hailed the decision as a historic shift in US foreign policy.

While there does appear to be considerable debate among the elite on the subject, a number of key assumptions remain unchallenged and unexplored in the debate and many crucial facts remain unspoken. Firstly, the notion that United States is an honest broker, and its foreign policy has always been designed to improve the freedom and standard of democracy of those in foreign countries is apparent in virtually every article. No opinion column that this author has found challenges the concept of the United States’ ethical foreign policy. Remarkable, considering the US props up some of, if not most of, the world’s most violent dictatorships. Among these being Saudi Arabia, where beheadings are common and women are not allowed to drive a car, Egypt, which has seen “unprecedented state violence” to “quash dissent”, according to Amnesty, and Israel, currently carrying out the world’s longest-running occupation of another country. Indeed, as far back as 1981, Lars Schoultz found that the more a Latin American country tortured its own population, the more US foreign aid it would receive.

Another key assumption underlying the mainstream commentary is that the United States has the right to interfere in the internal affairs of other sovereign nations. As William Blum has chronicled, the United States has overthrown more than 50 foreign governments since 1945. Yet, it is Cuba’s record with regard to its history of human rights abuses and state-sponsored terrorism that is under scrutiny.

This is a shocking reversal of the facts. For one thing, the greatest human rights abuses on Cuba occur at US-controlled Guantanamo Bay, where hundreds of political prisoners have been tortured. Furthermore, no mention is made to the fact that the United States has been waging a unilateral terrorist war against Cuba for more than 50 years. This is a war that has included widespread use of banned bio-chemical weapons resulting in a trillion dollars of damage to the island, according to the United Nations.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/us-sanctions-in-latin-america/