Carlos Sanchez Berzain Abogado | Estadista | Político | Politólogo
Carlos Sánchez Berzaín
March 3, 2020
(Interamerican Institute for Democracy) Uruguay’s new president, Luis LaCalle Pou, starts his mandate installing a new foreign policy based on the principles and values of freedom and democracy. The change in Uruguayan foreign policy was brought to light when, one month prior to assuming the Presidency, he announced the dictator from Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua would not be invited to his swearing-in ceremony because the first article of the Interamerican Democratic Charter provides that “America’s nations have the right to democracy and their governments have the obligation to promote and defend it”.
The State’s foreign policy is linked to its internal policy and is understood to be “the set of public decisions that a government makes according to its national interests and with regard to the rest of the international system’s actors”. Foreign Policy is “part of the general policy and is comprised by the set of decisions and proceedings through which objectives are defined and the means of a State are used to generate, modify, or suspend its relationships with other actors from the international community”.
The decision not to invite the dictators Castro/Diaz Canel from Cuba, Maduro from Venezuela, and Ortega from Nicaragua using the terms of the Interamerican Democratic Charter as an alibi and the obligation to respect and abide by it, is a precedent of respect to the principles from which the legitimacy of the Heads of State and democratic governments stem from. It is only the fulfillment of a signed and obligatory international charter for all of America’s States.
Uruguay’s new foreign policy is based on the principles and values of the peoples’ right to freedom, democracy, and human rights. It is the correct one regarding its national interests and a precedent that America’s democratic governments must follow suit. The Democratic Charter besides establishing democracy as the peoples’ right, declares “democracy is essential for Americas’ peoples’ social, political and economic development” and it highlights as the first fundamental component “the respect for human rights and basic freedoms”.
What Uruguay’s new President is doing is not only a change in the Foreign Policy of his country, it is also a proclamation of what we can start to call the “LACALLE POU DOCTRINE” summarized as “the obligation of Americas’ governments to apply the principles and obligations of the Interamerican Democratic Charter to avoid relationships with non-democratic dictatorial, authoritarian regimes that do not meet democracy’s fundamental components, unmasking their dictatorial nature by diplomatic and public means”.
LaCalle announced he will recognize Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s President. He has decided that “Uruguay will distance itself from the so-called Montevideo’s mechanism”, a negotiating forum promoted by his predecessors’ governments and by Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to look for solutions to the Venezuelan crisis”, but operated in such a way as to be a mechanism to help keep Nicolas Maduro’s usurper regime in power and in total violation of the obligations assumed in the Interamerican Democratic Charter. It is important to support the reelection of the General Secretary of the Organization of American States (OAS), something denied by the outgoing government, in spite of Luis Almagro’s Uruguayan nationality.
While democracies from throughout the world recognize with admiration the transparency and courage of the new Uruguayan Foreign Policy and the “LaCalle Pou Doctrine” is embedded, Argentina with its CastroChavist government of Fernandez/Kirchner destroys the historic relationship with Uruguay, hindering Argentinean interests in order to defend Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua’s dictatorships.
Uruguay’s new Foreign Policy robustly helps the fight against “Castrochavism” dictatorships that under the leadership of Cuba operate from Venezuela and Nicaragua conspiring and destabilizing Americas’ democracies, replicating that old but effective Cuban survival’s strategy of sustaining its regime through violence, the creation of internal strife, interventionism, and toppling of governments who defend democracy whom it considers as its enemies.
Everything shows that Americas’ Organized Crime’s dictatorships have already placed as their objective the destabilization of the democratic government of President LaCalle Pou, against whom they will attempt to repeat the crime committed last year in Ecuador, Chile, Colombia, and others.
*Attorney & Political Scientist. Director of the Interamerican Institute for Democracy.
Published in Spanish by Infobae.com Sunday, March 1st. 2020
Translated from Spanish by; Edgar L. Terrazas, member of the American Translators’ Association, ATA # 234680.