Latin America silent on Venezuela as US airs rights concerns
Deputy National Security adviser Benjamin Rhodes argued Tuesday during a White House press briefing on Obama’s upcoming visit that the language in the executive order was the same typically used in sanctions around the world.
“The U.S. doesn’t believe that Venezuela poses some threat to national security,” Rhodes said. The action, he added, “was not of a scale that in any way was aimed at targeting the Venezuelan government broadly.”
Ricardo Zuniga, the U.S. National Security Council’s senior director of Western Hemisphere Affairs, said during the same briefing that “the situation inside Venezuela clearly is a matter of concern for its neighbors and other countries in the region.” But, he added, “we don’t have any hostile designs on Venezuela.
“The bottom line is we have an interest in the success of Venezuela,” he said. “We are Venezuela’s largest trading partner. We have an extensive and deep history between our countries, including a lot of family connections.”
The U.S. action has been breathing new life into Maduro’s government just as a plunge in oil prices looked set to deepen economic turmoil marked by widespread shortages and soaring 68 percent inflation. He has promised to deliver Obama a petition signed by 10 million Venezuelans calling on the U.S. to repeal the sanctions.
The pushback from the region seems to have caught the U.S. off guard.
“I was a bit, I will confess, disappointed that there weren’t more who defended the fact that clearly this was not intended to hurt the Venezuelan people or the Venezuelan government even as a whole,” Roberta Jacobson, the top State Department official in Latin America, said last week about the sanctions.
It was no surprise that leftist allies such as the governments of Ecuador, Bolivia and Nicaragua would leap to defend Caracas. All have a history of vocal opposition to Washington. But even more moderate governments and traditional U.S. allies in the region have been reluctant to criticize Maduro.
“It’s seen as going against your own,” said Eurasia Group analyst Risa Grais-Targow.
via NorthEast Calling http://ift.tt/1ybj5Uo
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