The United Nations decision to expel Russia from the Human Rights Council has once again highlighted the commitment to active solidarity that autocrats from various parts of the world have forged. These despots are not afraid to support each other in crisis situations, they are fully aware of the evil they are doing, but they act in favor of the ally who is in danger, a behavior that political and social leaders who claim to defend democracy should imitate.
The Castroist foreign minister, representative of a dictatorship that has systematically and even institutionally violated the rights of its citizens for more than six decades, and to round it off, orchestrated an operation of subversion and generation of chaos throughout the continent, defended Moscow by proposing that Russia’s suspension does not favor a peaceful solution to the conflict in Ukraine, as if his client had not been the aggressor in a cruel and ruthless war that has caused thousands of human losses and detailed material devastation throughout the Ukrainian territory.
For his part, the satellite of Castroism that governs Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, said through his representative at the UN that his country rejected the decision to suspend Russia from the organization, although he could not vote due to the high debt that Venezuela has with the international body. The Castroists are debtors by trade.
Nicaragua, by the way, was not far behind, the dictator Daniel Ortega, who competes in number of political prisoners with his peers in Havana, Caracas and Bolivia, described the separation from Russia as a violation of human rights and an aggression against the peoples. Of course, in this brotherhood of human rights violators, the La Paz regime could not be absent, which with its decision to support the Kremlin demonstrated once again where its commitments lie.
That said, it is valid to reiterate that these Russian, Chinese and Iranian despots have worked with great efficiency for Latin American politicians and leaders and not a few Americans, otherwise it would be difficult to understand why the governments of El Salvador and Brazil abstained in the vote.
However, we must not overlook the fact that many analysts affirm that Vladimir Putin is paradoxically the hero of extremist politicians, whom in the recent past we identified with the left or the right, a case that, if true, would call into question the ability of those leaders. Mexico’s abstention was a surprise, many of us expected his vote in favor of Moscow.
For its part, the discreet ally of Russia, the People’s Republic of China, which has clear ambitions in Taiwan as evidenced by its aggressive military maneuvers, said that the suspension “was like adding fuel to the fire”, in a word, all these despots, including the not mentioned in this column, it seems they are demanding that the world help Russia gobble up Ukraine.
However, regardless of the United Nations sanction, a very great responsibility falls on the nations committed to democracy, particularly the Western powers, the United States in the lead, for tolerating and ignoring the flagrant violations that governments such as the of Moscow and Beijing, without overlooking the allies that these dictators have in our hemisphere.
In international relations, interests have prevailed over the values that some governments and international organizations claim to defend and where this situation is best appreciated in the entities committed to the defense of human rights.
For decades, the political prisoners of the Soviet bloc, including the Cubans, were victims of this omission. Entities defending human dignity only saw the crimes and abuses of military or right-wing dictatorships. Big headlines described the torture suffered by prisoners Luis Corvalan and Jesús Farías, among others, while Pedro Luis Boitel died on a hunger strike, Huber Matos was isolated, Kemel Jamis beaten in a brutal beating, the rest of the prisoners slept for years over thousands of pounds of dynamite ready to explode.
The aggressions come from where they come from, the human rights violations regardless of the government or the authority that commits them, must be sanctioned, and the complicity with the criminals punished.
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