Latin American Dictators Are on the Rise

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

Some Latin American countries have again come under the rule of autocrats in recent years. Nicaragua’s ruler, Daniel Ortega, was re-elected to a fourth term as president in the Nov. 7 election.

Once the leader of Nicaragua’s left-wing Sandinista revolution, Ortega, who held the top job from 1979 to 1990 and then again since 2007, has morphed into an autocrat, turning his back on his revolutionary ideals and coming to resemble Anastasio Somoza, the dictator he deposed.

Most of his political opponents have been thrown in jail, and human rights groups and newspapers have also been shut down. Ortega quashed protests in 2018 that left 328 dead.

U.S. President Joe Biden described the vote as a sham. What Ortega orchestrated “was a pantomime election that was neither free nor fair, and most certainly not democratic,” Biden said.

Latin American dictators like Ortega have learned to adapt. They’ve realized that they must transform themselves and, above all, do so without army revolts. They no longer wear military garb or seize power by wielding rifles.

They have resorted to elections which they can manipulate to their advantage. Ortega can point at the results of national polls.

Ortega used state institutions to purge the electoral lists and remove from the race those who would have taken power from him in a true democracy. He used the judiciary to jail his political opponents, prosecute inconvenient journalists, and ban civil society organizations that denounced his transgressions.

Ortega proved it is possible to become a dictator without a coup d’état. He used what dictators who in the past overthrew revolutionaries like him once feared: elections.

“Ortega is more willing to sell out the national patrimony than even Somoza was,” remarked Bianca Jagger, the Nicaraguan-born human rights and social justice activist. “When we talk about what people think of this idea of a leftist revolution, they better think twice. If anyone betrayed the principles that inspired this revolution, it was Daniel Ortega. The left needs to come to terms that their utopian dreams of what these revolutions have brought to these countries are completely and totally fictitious.”

Ortega is not alone. The death of Hugh Chavez in 2013 offered new hope for Venezuela. But his successor, Nicolas Maduro, has instead continued the economic follies of Chavismo to the point that Venezuelans were reduced to scavenging for food. Political violence has been unleashed upon opponents of the regime. A few years ago, voices were raised in the international community on behalf of democracy in Venezuela, but now the world has mostly reconciled itself to Maduro’s ongoing tyranny.

According to the International Organization for Migration, more than 5.6 million Venezuelans have fled the country in recent years, many living in extremely precarious conditions in neighboring countries such as Brazil and Colombia. The 2020-21 Encuesta Nacional de Condiciones de Vida (National Survey of Living Conditions) from the Universidad Catolica Andrés Bello in Caracas found that 76.6 per cent of Venezuela’s 28 million residents live in extreme poverty.

Yet Maduro portrays himself and the country’s ruling Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV) as vanguards of an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist nexus of regional powers including Cuba, Nicaragua and Bolivia.

Bolivia was rocked by nationwide demonstrations after socialist leader Evo Morales won his fourth election in October 2019. Protesters claimed that he had committed election fraud, as hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets.

The accusation was corroborated by a report issued by the Organization of American States. Morales resigned and went into exile, first to Mexico and later to Argentina.

After Morales fled the country, his party, the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) opposed the selection by the country’s parliament of a conservative, Jeanine Anez, as interim president.

Bolivian elections held in October 2020 saw Luis Arce, Morales’ handpicked MAS candidate, win the presidency. Morales then returned to Bolivia and was granted a pardon.

On the other hand, Anez was arrested on charges of terrorism, sedition and conspiracy last March. “They are sending me to detention for four months to await a trial for a ‘coup’ that never happened,” she protested. In August 2021, she attempted suicide while in prison. It seems Bolivia has come full circle.

 

Iran is a Greater Danger than Russia

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

Why is the United States so intent on picking a fight with Russia, while placating Iran, a much greater threat to world peace and the rules-based international order?

Russia is at the most an irredentist power, having lost much of what used to be the Soviet Union. It is trying to gain leverage over Ukraine on behalf of the ethnic Russian majority living in Luhansk and Donetsk in the east of the country. It’s the reason that Moscow annexed Russian-majority Crimea, until 1954 not even part of Ukraine, in 2014.

On the other hand, Iran is an expansionist state, striving for hegemony over the Middle East. Tehran has succeeded in establishing itself firmly inside Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen and has proxies there fighting on its behalf, while it also threatens Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states.

The Islamic Republic’s intent has never wavered: the overthrow of the regional regimes and the destruction of Israel. It makes no secret of this and has said so countless times, and it may yet follow through should it acquire the nuclear capability to do so. And then what?

Even without nuclear weapons, Iran is wreaking havoc across the Middle East. It is already one of the world’s top missile producers, and its arsenal is the largest and most diverse in the Middle East. The Islamic Republic has thousands of ballistic missiles, according to U.S. intelligence assessments. They can reach as far as 2,100 kilometres in any direction. Tehran has shown no willingness to barter over its missiles as it has with its nuclear program.

“Iran created a network of regional proxies from scratch --its own alliance system,” Michael Eisenstadt, director of the Military and Security Studies Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, writes. “It’s the most cohesive alliance system in the region.”

There is currently an array of ever-evolving front groups in Iraq and Syria as the Islamic revolution cobbles together military umbrella movements, depending on its needs.

The Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces has allowed Tehran to control much of Iraq, while Syria has always been the hub and the arm of the Islamic Revolution, which is why Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei can not allow Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime to collapse.

Tehran has been deploying its military resources as close to Israel and in as dispersed a fashion as possible. This has meant ensuring each front in the region possesses massive arsenals of Iranian missiles, drones, and other armaments.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah, an arm of Iran, has a stranglehold on the country. Its entire leadership, including its current secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, are Iranian allies.

It controls more weaponry than the government does, with at least 130,000 missiles and rockets aimed at Israel. In a Dec. 27 interview, Nasrallah announced the group now has twice as many precision-guided missiles as it had a year earlier.

The Houthi Ansar Allah front in Yemen will likely become the new tool to attempt to overthrow the Persian Gulf states. It is already responsible for attacks on Saudi Arabia. Using drones and missiles, the Houthis have launched attacks on Saudi airports, oil facilities and military sites.

The United Arab Emirates, which last year normalized relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords, recently came under fire. It intercepted two ballistic missiles over Abu Dhabi that were fired by the Houthis Jan. 24. This came a week after another Houthi drone-and-missile attack on Abu Dhabi.

In another Gulf state, Shi’a-majority Bahrain, which is ruled by a Sunni dynasty, Tehran has supported the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain. In 2019 a Bahraini court convicted 139 people of forming a terrorist cell inside Bahrain with help from Iran.

Iran is also attacking Americans in the region. Last summer, shortly after Ebrahim Raisi was elected Iran’s new president, pro-Iranian militias launched drones at U.S. bases. In January, four rockets slammed into the Green Zone in Baghdad, the site of the U.S. embassy. Five rockets also landed near the Ain al-Assad base in Iraq, while eight struck a U.S. base in northeastern Syria.

All this is happening while our attention remains focused on Russia. The Biden administration needs a more robust policy towards Iran.

 

Iran is Seeking Guarantees

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Iran is an expansionist state, striving for hegemony over the Middle East. It already has proxies fighting on its behalf in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, and it threatens Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

It also wants to destroy Israel. It makes no secret of this and has said so countless times, and it may yet follow through should it acquire the nuclear capability to do so.

Iran and six nations including the U.S. are in the midst of an eighth round of negotiations aimed at reviving the 2015 nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Donald Trump withdrew from the deal in May 2018, which Tehran responded to with escalating violations of the multilateral accord.

U.S. President Joe Biden is seeking a return to compliance with the agreement but has been met by a new, more hardline Iranian president in Ebrahim Raisi, who has demanded the removal of all American sanctions in exchange for the Islamic Republic’s return to the deal.

There was little movement in January. Iran is seeking guarantees that the U.S. will not repeat Trump’s withdrawal from the deal. But Washington cannot offer a legally binding treaty since the Senate would never agree to one, Ned Price, a U.S. State Department spokesperson, warned. “There is no such thing as a guarantee in diplomacy and international affairs. We can speak for this administration, but this administration has been very clear that we are prepared to return to full compliance with the JCPOA and to stay in full compliance with the JCPOA as long as Iran does the same.”

White House National Security Council coordinator for the Middle East Brett McGurk added that “We’re in the ballpark of a possible deal. But again, I’m not going to put odds on this.” But, he added, there’s also “a very real chance that these talks could collapse very soon.”

Talks to restore the Iran nuclear deal are entering their final stage, as negotiators head back to their capitals to receive political guidance on what moves to take in the coming days. Western diplomats are facing a self-imposed mid-February deadline to try and revive the 2015 agreement.

Those close to the talks say they think there can be an agreement, but that from a western perspective it will possibly be so limited in scope it is will be seen as temporary. If so, as Enrique Mora, the chief European Union negotiator has said, it will not be for lack of trying.

The Biden White House may now content itself with massive sanctions relief in exchange for a halt to 60 per cent uranium enrichment -- bomb-grade is 90 per cent. Biden may well allow Iran to stockpile 20 per cent enriched uranium, which enables the production of Uranium-235 quickly. Twenty percent was prohibited under the JCPOA.  

So Iran would become a nuclear threshold state, which means it could produce a nuclear weapon whenever it chooses to. The so-called “breakout” time for Iran to produce enough fuel for a bomb has plummeted, from more than a year to as little as three weeks. And then what?

Iran is now also one of the world’s top missile producers. Its arsenal is the largest and most diverse in the Middle East. The Islamic Republic has thousands of ballistic missiles, according to U.S. intelligence assessments. They can reach as far as 2,100 kilometres in any direction.

Tehran has shown no willingness to barter over its missiles as it has with its nuclear program. Even without nuclear weapons, Iran is wreaking havoc across the Middle East.