How Opening Cuba Helped Isolate Venezuela
President Obama’s decision to reopen relations with Cuba is having an interesting side effect: It’s helping isolate Latin America’s other hardline leftist regime in Venezuela.
On Monday, Obama signed an executive order freezing the U.S. assets of seven mid-level Venezuelan officials over their handling of protests last year. In years past, many Latin American officials would have viewed it as more of the same from America, whose policy of punishing Cuba with sanctions was widely seen as anachronistic at best.
Now, thanks to the ongoing rapprochement between the U.S. and Cuba, Washington is less easy to ignore, especially on matters of morality and fair play. So it was that Monday’s executive order naming Venezuelan security officials turned out to be aiming what U.S. officials called “a spotlight” onto a government that other Latin American nations are also watching with concern.
“Until very recently, most countries in the region were reluctant to say anything about Venezuela,” says Daniel Wilkinson, managing director of the Americas division at Human Rights Watch. “If this is just U.S. sanctions, and the U.S. is doing it on its own, then it’s much easier for Venezuela to play the victim card. That’s why it’s really important for the U.S. government to be working with other democratic governments in the region to make this more of a collective.”
http://time.com/3737595/barack-obama-cuba-venezuela/
