Complicity in 2024 delayed the ending of dictatorships in Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua

Carlos Sánchez Berzaín
January 3, 2025

(Interamerican Institute for Democracy) Dictatorships are one of many illicit enterprises undertaken by transnational organized crime that wields power by supplanting politics in order to wrest the sovereignty of the peoples whose human rights are violated with impunity. 21st Century Socialism has trans nationalized this operation and expanding Cuba’s system now controls Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua with State-terrorism and crimes against humanity that -in this 2024- have had the complicity of several democracies of the Americas and of an ineffective international system that, with their misconduct, has delayed the end of dictatorships.

The existing international obligations proclaimed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights made mandatory by the Pact of San Jose or American Convention on Human Rights, the United Nations Charter and the Organization of American States, made unavoidable by the Inter American Charter, required by law as mandated by the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute, made inexcusable by the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime AKA The Palermo Convention, and more … all identify, typify, and describe 21st Century Socialism dictatorships as part of Transnational Organized Crime.

At the end of this year 2024, the Cuban dictatorship will celebrate 66 years of being in power, Venezuela’s dictatorship will celebrate over 25 years, Nicaragua’s dictatorship will celebrate over 17 years, Bolivia’s dictatorship nearly 20 years, and Ecuador that had a temporary dictatorship that lasted for over 10 years, was saved thanks to the extraordinary vision of President Lenin Moreno, who continues fighting to dismantle the organized crime’s narco-State that Rafael Correa had established there. Twenty-First Century Socialism has been able to internally sustain its dictatorships through State-terrorism, and an unexplainable paralysis of the international system.

All dictatorships from the Americas are in a terminal crisis. Cuba and Venezuela in situations of extreme misery, Bolivia and Nicaragua in mystified crises caused by the simulation and manipulation of information that does not change their reality. All, bar-none, have stripped their narrative, no one believes in the -formerly venerated- Cuban revolution. Repudiation is total against Venezuela’s so-called Bolivarian revolution, Nicaragua’s Sandinism is synonymous to crime, and the Plurinational Process represents the narco-State that Bolivia has become. Peoples are in a state of civil resistance and the only thing that subjects them is the extreme violence an international complicity.

The most determinant component of the 21st Century Socialism dictatorships is the fact they have no options; popular repudiation is total. They cannot survive dependent on, or as an appendix of, extracontinental dictatorships, they cannot salvage the productive structure they wreaked, their system is based on crime with activities that range from their nature as narco-States to the perpetration of common crime. They have been exposed and sustain themselves through extreme internal violence and by breaching democracy’s obligations that -ironically- are their victims on the international theater.

In 2024, dictatorships from Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua have repeatedly committed crimes against humanity, violations of human rights, transnational crimes such as; narcotics’ trafficking, human trafficking, and other common and abhorrent crimes without exception. Actors, such as; the Castro’s and Diaz-Canel, Maduro-Cabello-Padrino Lopez, Ortega-Murillo, Arce-Morales and their appointed inner groups consisting of ministers, military and police commanders, prosecutors, judges (the Judicial’s hit-men), electoral officials, and more have committed all, bar-none, sorts of crime. Evidentiary proof is the existence of political prisoners, those who have died while imprisoned, those tortured, persecuted, exiled, and the existence of functional oppositions.

The nations of Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua persevere in their active civil resistance and continue to be imprisoned and massacred. The international system has not gone beyond declarations or merely enunciative sanctions that instead of ending dictatorships have helped them politicize their crimes. As long as dictators are not bestowed with the condition of being subject to international law, we will continue to be accepting organized crime as part of the system that should remove them from power, try, and condemn them, instead of coexisting with them.

There are unexplainable behaviors that are only covered by someone else’s shame. The attitude of Pope Francis dealing with the violations of human rights, torture, assassinations committed by 21st Century Socialism dictators, the direct attacks against members of the Catholic church; the stalemate of the Prosecutor from the International Criminal Court in the case against Nicolas Maduro and his dictatorship that has even resulted in the resignation of a well-known Advisor on human rights; the position of the Para-Dictatorial Governments of Lula in Brazil, Pero in Colombia, and Lopez-Obrador/Sheinbaum in Mexico, and the non-compliance of their international obligations by many more.

To be an accomplice is to be a “collaborator, participant, co-author, pal, helper, supporter, of crime.”

*Attorney & Political Scientist. Director of the Interamerican Institute for Democracy.

Translation from Spanish by Edgar L. Terrazas

Published in Spanish by infobae.com Sunday December 29, 2025