March 12, 2024 (EIRNS)—The monstrous crisis in Haiti today is but the “most terrible example” of the severe harm which the United States inflicted on the entire Ibero-America and the Caribbean region when it imposed crushing economic sanctions on Venezuela, Venezuela’s Vice President Delcy Rodríguez charged on March 11. That crisis then created the pretext for yet another invasion of Haiti which, as the Vice President said, is now being prepared.
“Laying siege to Venezuela has hit our region, and not only South America but also … the other countries which were part of PetroCaribe, and the most terrible example, from the humanitarian point of view, we see today in Haiti….
“Where is Haiti today? Whose responsibility is it that Haiti is the way it is and that now constitutes the pretext which warrants a military intervention into Haiti? Because it is an invasion into Haiti that is planned. Who is the principal party responsible for this? Those who sanctioned and laid siege to Venezuela; those who stopped the PetroCaribe program. That is where the immorality lies.”
Venezuela had provided $4 billion in humanitarian support to Haiti before U.S. sanctions against Venezuela made it impossible for Caracas to help any country, she reported. The main pillar of support had been through Venezuela’s PetroCaribe” program through which the country sold oil to the Caribbean countries at a discounted price and on generous repayment terms.
Rodríguez stated that biting truth in her address to an international seminar in Bolivia on a “New Regional Financial Architecture.” She urged the nations around the world which have been affected, either directly or indirectly, by the more than “26,000 unilateral coercive measures” which the United States and Europe have imposed, to work on creating a new international financial structure. “Unilateral coercive measures, wrongly called sanctions, [are imposed] as a means of extortion” against countries, and are “the central axis of Washington’s war policy,” she said. She gave her country as an example, where the 930 coercive measures imposed on Venezuela had taken “almost $700 billion” out of its economy, and when it was cut off from SWIFT, it lost in “one second” more than 77%” of its international banking correspondents.
RT reported that she urged countries “to start saving, trading and financing themselves with their own currencies, because if they decide to continue to be `subjected to U.S. domination over trade relations,’ it will be `very difficult’ to establish the new financial architecture `that we want’ and that `we have to create.’” She told the conference participants that “exclusion from the economic, commercial and financial life of the world leads us to rethink our path.”
