The Latin American Report # 570
Beyond the rhetoric and all the theater of the reward for Maduro, a quite interesting and pragmatic level of relations is maintained in practice between Washington and Caracas. Foggy Bottom may say whatever it wants in its statements, but there is a de facto recognition of the authority of those installed since 1999 in the Miraflores Palace, without which it would be impossible to continue, for example, deportations of Venezuelan citizens in the United States.
This Wednesday, 183 more Venezuelan migrants landed in Maiquetía, after a stopover in Honduras. Last Friday, another 194 deportees had landed, including six children whom the Chavista government claims are "kidnapped." In July, a group of Venezuelans returned to from El Salvador. The Trump administration had sent them to the Terrorism Confinement Center there in a controversial measure that was contested in US courts. With this, according to estimates, over 10,000 Venezuelan migrants have returned to their country via this official air bridge.
Dominican Republic / Haiti
Santo Domingo ordered the deportation of just over 291,000 Haitians since October 2024 and maintains a contingent of 11,000 soldiers on the border, according to a report published by an agency created by President Luis Abinader, who holds a tough, conservative stance towards the violent and draining crisis of the neighboring country. In this regard, one of the points defended by the Dominican leader is that his country cannot take responsibility for the Haitian nightmare, which, through migratory flows, certainly impacts issues such as public service management, with healthcare and particularly care for pregnant Haitian women being one of the most discussed topics.
And while there are rational aspects to Abinader's narrative, the ways his policies have been implemented have been labeled racist. Last July, Amnesty International urged him to immediately halt the implementation of his "discriminatory" immigration policies against Haitians, which implies "stopping collective expulsions, restoring nationality to Dominicans of Haitian descent, and guaranteeing legal, safe, and accessible pathways for the entry, stay, and regularization of migrants." The Dominican government's original plan is to deport 10,000 Haitians every week.
The U.S. against the Cuban medical missions
Health Minister of Lula da Silva condemned the sanctions imposed by Washington concerning the Mais Médicos health program, of which, until Jair Bolsonaro came to power, Cuba was a part. Havana sent hundreds of doctors to the South American giant to help with primary healthcare in exchange for much-needed dollars that allowed it to leverage consumption dynamics for a time. But the United States, and particularly the Cuban-origin delegation in Congress to which the current Secretary of State Marco Rubio belonged, presents this as "modern slavery," and has embarked on a very aggressive plan to torpedo all agreements that remain active or to act retrospectively in retaliation, as in the Brazilian case.
Rubio announced this Thursday the revocation of the visa of the current health minister and another former official. "We will not bow to those who persecute vaccines, science, and now two key people in the first stage of Mais Médicos," said the sanctioned minister. Washington also targeted officials from African countries because of working with Cuban doctors.
Regional news briefs
The peak of political violence in Colombia, which so far has its most regrettable result in the death of Senator and presidential hopeful Miguel Uribe this week, became evident again this Wednesday with the attack suffered by Representative Julio César Triana, who escaped unharmed from a shooting against the truck he was traveling in the southern department of Huila. In this case, attribution to one of the dissident factions of the extinct FARC-EP, which the Army is reportedly already confronting for this reason, is clearer. "A helicopter has been sent for the evacuation of congressman Julio Cesar Triana and the Army is in combat with the perpetrators of the attack," said the head of the House of Nariño. Triana, like Uribe, represents the Colombian right.
Yesterday I spoke about the corruption case advancing in Peruvian courts against former President Alejandro Toledo. The fact is that, as a sign of the chronic problem existing there in this regard, there are now four former presidents who are imprisoned, following the preventive detention order issued in the last hours against Martín Vizcarra (2018-2020). Ollanta Humala and Pedro Castillo would complete this shameful quartet, a picture that worsens if we count Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, who is still under investigation and prohibited from leaving the country after spending three years under house arrest.
The politically motivated changes in the narrative of the State Department's annual report on the state of human rights in the world, released on Tuesday, have been the subject of much controversy. Foggy Bottom was quite flexible this time when addressing the issue in El Salvador and raised the tone in the case of Brazil. About the first case, the director of the non-governmental organization Socorro Jurídico Humanitario said the latest assessment "omits a huge number of complaints and reports of serious violations." The Bolsonaro case is key to understanding the changes in the view towards Latin America's largest economy. In this regard, Lula accused his US counterpart of disregarding the Brazilian constitution, also stating that his country "is much more democratic than the United States in many things."
