US LAWLESSNESS

YASHA LEVINE—On the empire front: Using the chaos of the pandemic, we’ve been ramping up attacks on the usual list of official enemies — and Iran and Venezuela in particular. Trump’s bloodthirsty hairless walrus Mike Pompeo has been going around telling anyone who’ll listen that he and his people want to make sure COVID-19 kills as many people as possible over there. He wants to use the pandemic to finally push these countries over the edge — and so they’re squeezing them more than ever.

The State Department offers US$15 million bounties for Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro. Regardless of the human costs that the economic blockade causes the Venezuelan people, the U.S. Attorney General William Barr Thursday announced that his country will designate Venezuela as a state sponsoring terrorism.

ATILIO BORON—That is why I can only express my satisfaction with the article that Juan G. Tokatlian published on March 12, 2020, on the opinion page of the Argentinean newspaper “Clarin.” For its clarity and forcefulness, I would like to recommend it to those who follow my writings because it adds novel elements derived from an analysis of the current moment of the Trump Administration and the dangers it entails not only for Latin America and the Caribbean but also for all humanity.

To understand the nature of the January 2019 coup unleashed against Venezuela, it is important to see it in terms of its basis in economic warfare designed to undermine the sovereignty of the Venezuelan state. Former United Nations (UN) special rapporteur, Alfred de Zayas, declared in a UN report on Venezuela, completed in August 2018, that the “economic sanctions and blockades” like those being imposed by the United States on Venezuela in defiance of international law were “comparable with medieval sieges of towns. Twenty-first century sanctions attempt to bring not just a town but sovereign countries to their knees”

MoA—We followed (see below) the strange story as it developed and found that the official UK government version of it made absolutely no sense. Many of the assertions made by the British government did not withstand any scrutiny. The story was also inconsistent with a later incident in the nearby Amesbury during which Dawn Strugess allegedly died of contact with a similar substance as the one that supposedly poisoned the Skripals.