CASTROCHAVISM IN THE MIDST OF CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC: MORE VIOLENCE, FALSE INFORMATION AND INTERNATIONAL CONSPIRACY

Carlos Sánchez Berzaín
 June 8, 2020

(Interamerican Institute for Democracy) Prior to the Coronavirus pandemic, Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua’s 21st Century dictatorships were already in extreme crises.  Their features of transnational organized crime, institutionalized violation of human rights and their nature as narco-states linked to terrorism, had placed them in a terminal situation of being spurned by their people and sanctioned by the international community.  In the Coronavirus pandemic they are doing what they know best to do; they increment internal violence, falsify data and information, and escalate their conspiracy to destabilize the region’s democracies.

The Coronavirus pandemic could be used to prolong the permanence in power of Castrochavist dictatorships, but it could also determine their quicker demise and the ending of the disgrace they represent.   The result will depend on; the internal attitude of the leadership who, when confronted by this situation, must distance themselves away from the suspicion of being “functional oppositionists” and from an international perspective, on the firmness of democracies to maintain and increase measures that have -as their sole objective- the removal of the dictators.

The on-going worldwide crisis is being taken advantage of by Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua’s dictatorships to exert more internal violence incrementing the violations of human rights, instilling fear, trafficking and extorting with famine, misery, and the lack of medical resources that they themselves had produced.  The growing repression in Cuba, the killings in Venezuela’s jails and neighborhoods, and the intimidation to physicians and relatives of those who died because of the Coronavirus in Nicaragua, are irrefutable proof.  In the virtual forum of the Casla Institute titled “Justice is not in a Quarantine” the unanimous conclusion was that “Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua’s regimes use the pandemic to repress their people”.

The falsification of information is noticeable and abhorrent.  Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua falsify -on a daily basis- data regarding the number of infected, treated, or deceased people due to the pandemic.  The so-called “White Book” of Nicaragua’s dictatorship is an example of how far the falsehood can reach.  Prior to the pandemic data on; the food situation, basic services such as potable water and of health systems, all in deplorable conditions and much below minimum standards, are the best proof that the numbers quoted by the dictators are a sham to coverup their crimes.

Internal dictatorial acts could be surmised as “more of the same”; more violence, more crime, and more manipulation, are aggravated by the dictatorships’ greater promotion of “human trafficking and enslavement” that Cuba practices with physicians and health-care personnel taking advantage of the Coronavirus, pretending, besides getting the ill-obtained income, to be acts to enhance their image with the fallacy of the success achieved by their medicine that they now offer for exportation but that it does not exist for their own people.  The manipulation and dictatorial use of international cooperation conditioned so that it can be managed as one other instrument of oppression is another crime.

Castrochavism has increased its conspiratory actions against all of America’s democracies.   Quarantines, crises, fears, and the conditions of abnormality the Coronavirus pandemic has produced, generate internal unrest that are promoted, incremented, and manipulated to destabilize and topple governments by operators of the “Forum of Sao Paulo” who end up virtually adjusting their plans in the social media by the extended arms of the dictatorships, by radical groups, and by actions directed from embassies, diplomatic installations, and consulates from Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.

Continuing with actions started in the second half of 2019 and reactivated, with the opportunity the pandemic now provides them, currently in the Americas there are conspiratory efforts with coups d’ etat underway in, at least, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Brazil.  There is also a resurgence of the destabilizing agenda in Chile, Colombia, and Peru.  Every democratic government of the Americas must only look at its internal situation and it will find the criminal hand of Castroism with 61 years of expertise operating with the new model built with the elimination of freedom and Venezuela’s wealth gifted by Chavez that we now call Castrochavism.

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

Translated from Spanish by; Edgar L. Terrazas, member of the American Translators’ Association, ATA # 234680.