MIGUEL TINKER SALAS: No, you don't. And the reality is that what's happening in Honduras is fundamental. You have an effort at privatization. You have layoffs of doctors and of professors and of teachers. And there's massive street protests happening in Tegucigalpa and all the major cities. And the attention is all on Venezuela. And the same thing is happening, in other contexts, for Central America, the immigration that's happening as a result of failed U.S. policies. As a colleague was saying earlier, the reality is this was tried elsewhere. The regime change that's being tried in Venezuela has been tried elsewhere in Latin America and has led to humanitarian crisis throughout Central America -- Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, in Mexico until very recently. So, again, we know the formula. We know it doesn't produce the change that most people want. And what it does is it aggravates conditions for the majority of the population. So, you have, in the case of Venezuela, mistakes made by the Maduro administration that are now exacerbated by the sanctions and that take a toll on humans and on the population of the country.
AMY GOODMAN: We've been showing, for our radio audience, video, just to let you know, of the tear-gassing of people in Paris and Honduras right now. Of course, Honduras is a U.S. ally. We're not getting as much coverage of this. Finally, I wanted to ask Jeffrey Sachs about this issue you raise of collective punishment, and saying that collective punishment of a civilian population, as described by both the Geneva and Hague international conventions, to which the U.S. is a signatory -- in that way.
JEFFREY SACHS: And, I would say, of the OAS also, which explicitly prohibits this kind of hostile action against another country. U.S. sanctions are now being imposed to bring down governments everywhere. You have, similarly in Iran yesterday, a big announcement of the collapse of the Iranian economy, and the IMF attributed it to U.S. sanctions. So, this is what the Trump administration is trying to do also vis-Ã -vis Nicaragua. Trump said yesterday, total blockade on Cuba, if they don't smart up. This is pure bullying. It is completely against international law. It creates havoc. It's hard enough to achieve economic progress, but when the U.S. is using its political power to break other countries, the results absolutely can be devastating.
And we see it in Venezuela, that it was the kick that pushed Venezuela into this catastrophic, spiraling decline and hyperinflation. It's always blamed in our press on Maduro, but people don't even look and understand how the U.S. has the instruments of sanctions blocking access to financial markets, pushing enterprises into default, blocking trade, confiscating the assets owned by the Venezuelan government, precisely to and with the design of creating this kind of crisis, because the idea is, if the pain is enough -- in the thinking of people like Bolton -- then there will be a military overthrow. So they're trying to create absolute disaster.
Well, what's so stupid about these American policies, these neocon policies, is they do create disaster, but they don't achieve even the political goals of these nasty people like Bolton. It's not as if they're effective and nasty; they're completely ineffective and totally nasty at the same time. But Congress, in our country, nobody looks. It's unbelievable that you have this basically one-man show of Trump doing damage, rampaging around the world. There is no oversight at all. And in the international institutions, like the IMF, the Inter-American Development Bank, people are scared to even say the truth, that this bully, of the United States, especially with the kind of president we have right now -- no one wants to speak the obvious facts of how much damage is being done, how many lives are being lost, how much suffering is being created, how many refugees are being created -- deliberately. And then, of course, you get The New York Times or someone else saying it's Maduro's whatever, because they don't even look at the obvious process.
AMY GOODMAN: And you Democratic leaders, as well, in Congress saying the same thing. And so, we're going to turn right now to a Democrat in Congress. We want to thank Jeffrey Sachs, who is a leading economist, director of the Center for Sustainable Development, Columbia University.
We'll link to your report that you put out with the Center for Economic and Policy Research headlined "Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela." And, Miguel Tinker Salas, thanks for joining us, professor at Pomona College in California.
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