By Peter Koenig
8 July 2019
When 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.
However, what Ms. Bachelet should not forget and most certainly did not forget, when she accepted this high-profile assignment, is her father, Alberto Arturo Miguel Bachelet Martínez. Her dad was in the Chilean Air Force as a Brigadier General, who opposed the 1973 CIA-Pinochet coup. He was imprisoned shortly after the coup on 11 September 1973; he was tortured and died on 12 March 1974, while incarcerated, from the usual “heart attack”. In fact, he died from torture. One of his two chief torturers, Retired Chilean Air Force Colonel Edgar Cevallos Jones, died a few months ago, the other one, Ramon Caceres Jorquera, was recently liberated from prison and put under house arrest by current President Sebastian Piñera’s High Court, for “severe dementia and irrelevance”. Together the two were the top leaders of Pinochet’s repressive torture team, “Joint Command”.
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 adding 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.
* Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; RT; Sputnik; PressTV; The 21st Century; TeleSUR; The Saker Blog, the New Eastern Outlook (NEO); and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.
Peter Koenig is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
