Corporate Coup by Anya Parampil;

Author:Anya Parampil;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POL057000
ISBN: 9781682196168
Publisher: Lightning Source (Tier 4)
Published: 2024-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

HUMAN RIGHTS, HUMAN WRONGS

In his memoirs, Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko wrote that as he and fellow dignitaries endeavored to establish the United Nations in the aftermath of World War II, he voted for it to be headquartered in New York for a special reason.

“Moscow wanted to make sure Americans did not lose their interests in international affairs,” Gromyko recalled telling US vice president Nelson Rockefeller.1

“We were afraid the USA would revert to isolationism,” the Soviet diplomat, who served as foreign minister for nearly three decades (1957–1985), explained.

The US vice president’s father, John D., ultimately donated the plot of prime Manhattan real estate where the UN General Assembly gathers to this day—a “charitable” gesture Gromyko interpreted as a possible ploy to increase the value of Rockefeller family property in the surrounding neighborhood.

Washington quickly assuaged Moscow’s fears that it would withdraw from global affairs, adopting a decidedly interventionist foreign policy ever since the Second World War. Rather than disengage from the UN, US officials have instead treated it as a projector for their own worldview, as displayed when Trump’s vice president Mike Pence addressed the Security Council in April 2019 to demand that it formally recognize Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s leader (Besheer 2019).

While Venezuela and other targets of Western hybrid war maintain confidence in the UN system and lean on it for legitimacy, the US and Europe’s ability to manipulate the organization is transparent. The UN’s limits are particularly clear in light of the increasingly politicized behavior of its Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, or OHCHR.

When it came to Venezuela, the OHCHR walked a fine line—maintaining official ties with Maduro’s UN-recognized government while providing critical assistance to Washington’s regime change offensive. Most notably, the OHCHR issued consequential reports in 2019 and 2020 that conveniently parroted Washington’s anti-Maduro narrative, accusing Venezuela’s government of “crimes against humanity” while completely overlooking abuses committed by the country’s US-backed opposition.

The OHCHR reports fed a renewed wave of attacks on Venezuela’s human rights record in the wake of Guaidó’s coup. They were issued under the watch of a human rights commissioner who had suffered torture at the hands of a right-wing, US-backed dictatorship herself. Upon taking over the OHCHR in Geneva, however, she proved a begrudging servant of the Washington Consensus.

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