Economists typically use GDP per capita to assess how rich a country is. It is basically a measure of the average income per person. If journalists cared to be at all precise when they say that Venezuela had once been “rich,” then that’s a statistic they’d cite.

Imagine being imprisoned for nonviolently attempting to prevent a heinous crime. That sums up the absurdity of Saab’s predicament–and Western media’s coverage of it.

On April 11, the second round of Ecuador’s presidential election saw the rightwing candidate Guillermo Lasso prevail by 52.4% to 47.6% over his left wing opponent Andres Arauz.

Brutal dictators supported by Washington have no reason to doubt that establishment journalists and big NGOs will try very hard to keep them out of jail. Removing the threat of U.S.-backed coups from the world will involve a constant struggle against Western media and the sources they present to us as reliable.

For decades, Cuba has sent tens of thousands of its medical professionals abroad to work in countries where natural disasters or poverty have left people without healthcare. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the catastrophic U.S. response to it, the absurdity of a propaganda war against Cuban medical missions has become more obvious than ever. But you can’t rely on corporate media to explain why.

A line from the trailer for Jack Ryan, an Amazon TV drama whose second season streams on November 1, is: A nuclear Venezuela…. You will not hear about it on the news, ’cause we’ll already be dead.

All of the reasons above make a powerful case for questioning the integrity and objectivity of Amnesty when it comes to Venezuela. And for the sake of peace and justice, we should hold Amnesty to much higher standards.

The phrase “a threat to the world” has a hyperlink to an earlier Tharoor piece (3/1/18), which includes the claim, “As many as 4 million Venezuelans—more than 10 percent of the population—have already left the country, according to the Brookings Institution,”

Review of Alan MacLeod’s Bad News From Venezuela

The US Empire consists of allied governments like Canada, private media companies and prominent NGOs who all share its delusion that it is entitled to decide which government is a “dictatorship” that “must go”. It is a truly formidable and lethal system of misinformation. Leftists should always have done more to challenge the US Empire on Venezuela during the Chavista era, and to challenge imperialism in general. We really need to step up now.

Venezuelan public opinion is not what you’d expect if you rely on the disinformation loop in which corporate media and Washington-friendly NGOs like HRW participate.

I sent the following note to Amnesty on June 16 after it put out a detailed report on the conflict in Syria: Dear Amnesty In your most recent report on Syria you ask the UN Security Council to impose an arms embargo on the Syrian government.  You ask for no such arms embargo on the […]

Dear Amnesty (amnestyis@amnesty.org): “Russia’s threats to abort a binding UN resolution on Syria for the second time are utterly irresponsible,” said José Luis Díaz, Amnesty’s representative to the UN.  “Russia bears a heavy responsibility for allowing the brutal crackdown to continue.”1 With Libya still suffering the lethal consequences of western military “liberation,” with Iran gravely […]

The way Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported on Haiti and Venezuela in its 2008 World Report reveals an underlying assumption that the U.S. and its allies have the right to overthrow democratic governments.1 The Venezuela section of the report said nothing about ongoing attempts by the U.S. to overthrow the Chavez government.  It is a […]

DAMMING THE FLOOD : Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment by Peter HallwardBUY THIS BOOK In Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment, Peter Hallward meticulously explains how, on February 29 of 2004, the U.S. managed to “topple one of the most popular governments in Latin America but it managed to […]

Despite being the most impoverished country in the Western Hemisphere, Haiti lags behind many countries in the Americas in obtaining debt relief through a program run by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. A hard-hitting paper published in December by the Washington D.C.-based Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) argues that […]