Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia replied that Washington was staging an "illegal theater of the absurd" by seeking to install opposition leader Juan Guaido as Venezuela's president. "We are seriously concerned about the fact that today's meeting may be exploited as a step for preparations of a real, not humanitarian, intervention ... as a result of the inability of the Security Council to resolve the situation in Venezuela"

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[Introduction: There is so much warranted hostility towards Trump and all of his policies that sometimes it spills over into large scale contempt for anything and everything he does internationally.

I have never observed anything like it in my lifetime, and I have had very extensive experience as a private individual consumer protectionist in dealing with Health Ministers and also Permanent Representatives of many nations at the United Nations.

Even the normally collegial and courteous exchanges that used to go on at OpEdNews have been ruptured into rants and raves, angry exchanges and harsh criticisms, no matter what you say. This makes any kind of journalistic effort twenty times more difficult.

This is really wearying when one is merely reporting the news. A journalist is expected to be part of the cheering section or the booing section, no matter what the issue. On Venezuela, for example, many readers want you to condemn Maduro or to condemn Trump or Maduro or to condemn Bernie Sanders for not condemning Maduro. It really is quite absurd, when you stop to think about it.

That is just the problem right there: not many folks are even stopping to think about any or all of this, not at all.

Thus, in this article I will focus on the wide ranging aspects of Venezuela news, and the only person I feel deserves condemnation is Trump's special envoy for Venezuela, Elliott Abrams; Abrams was condemned many years ago for his actions to destroy so much of El Salvador, and yes; in 2019, he is still condemned, if to no more than my own humble Buddhist conception of Hell.

Don't forget the underlying motivation for the US in all of this: OIL, and apparently, no amount of turmoil resulting from the hearings in the House of Representative seems to be slowing down Donald Trump and the rest of his entrenched Kletptocracy.]

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"Reeling in its own economic collapse, Venezuela has descended into a major political crisis when Guaido declared himself to be the interim president in January and that Maduro was no longer legitimate. Guaido heads the National Assembly and is now backed by more than 50 countries." The US and dozens of other nations have recognized Guaido as Venezuela's legitimate president, but Maduro still controls the military, state institutions and oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA), which provides 90 percent of the country's export revenue.

From the UK publication, the Guardian, please see also: click here

Plus Reuters coverage from Al Jazeera:

click here

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Today, Russia, China vetoed US measure on Venezuela in UN Council

Before the Security Council vote took place earlier this week, French UN Ambassador Francois Delattre, in support of the US-drafted resolution, said it "does not represent a legal basis for a use of force, nor an attempt to undermine the sovereignty of Venezuela."

Russia and China on Thursday vetoed the US resolution in the UN Security Council on addressing the crisis in Venezuela, while a rival draft put forward by Russia also failed to win enough votes. The failure to take action on the two drafts manifested the divisions among world powers over how to proceed in Venezuela, mired in its political standoff deepened by a severe economic meltdown.

Security Council Resolutions must garner nine votes to be adopted, with no vetoes from the five permanent members -- Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States. The US text called for new presidential elections in Venezuela and uninterrupted deliveries of humanitarian aid; this won the required nine votes at the 15-member council, but Moscow and Beijing joined forces to block it. France, Germany and Britain backed the US- proposed measure. South Africa voted no; Indonesia, Equatorial Guinea and Ivory Coast abstained.

Russia then countered with its own draft resolution, asking for settlement "through peaceful means" and insisting that all humanitarian aid be agreed by President Nicolas Maduro's government -- won only four votes: Russia, China, South Africa and Equatorial Guinea. Seven countries including the United States, European countries and Peru opposed the Russian measure and there were four abstentions.

After the double vetoes, US special envoy for Venezuela Elliott Abrams crowed at Russia and China, lamenting that countries "continue to shield Maduro and his cronies and prolong the suffering of the Venezuelan people," and expressing his personal satisfaction that "a clear majority of the council" had supported the US stance. "By voting against this resolution some members of this council continue to shield Maduro and his cronies and prolong the suffering of the Venezuelan people. This man-made crisis has extended well beyond Venezuela's borders and threatens to destabilize the region," Abrams told the council.

Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia replied that Washington was staging an "illegal theater of the absurd" by seeking to install opposition leader Juan Guaido as Venezuela's president. "We are seriously concerned about the fact that today's meeting may be exploited as a step for preparations of a real, not humanitarian, intervention ... as a result of the alleged inability of the Security Council to resolve the situation in Venezuela," he stated after the vote on the US draft resolution.

"The Venezuelan affairs should be decided by the Venezuelan people," China's Deputy UN Ambassador Wu Haitao said.

Speaking for the US, Abrams promised new sanctions against top members of Venezuela's government, requesting allies to freeze the assets of state-owned PDVSA (Petroleos de Venezuela SA).

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Despite the deadly clashes at the border over the past weekend, the Trump administration is running into increasing resistance. For example, Spain's Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, said on Wednesday that while it was clear Maduro had "no intention of negotiating", Spain was opposed to any foreign military intervention in the economically-strapped country. He "does not want sincere negotiations," said Spain's socialist leader, who earlier this month recognized Guaidó as interim leader of Venezuela after Maduro rejected pressure to call a snap general election. Sanchez, however, strongly rejected any foreign military intervention to topple Maduro, which the US has touted as a possibility. Sanchez stated: "We express our rejection of any non-peaceful solution, and particularly any foreign military intervention in Venezuela. There are some mistakes of the past that must not be committed again."

[Pedro Sanchez Perez-Castejón is a Spanish economist and politician serving as Prime Minister of Spain since 2 June 2018. He is also Secretary-General of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, holding office for the second time after winning a leadership election in June 2017]

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See also:

What Did Elliott Abrams Have to Do With the El Mozote Massacre?

Inadvertently, Ilhan Omar revealed that Trump may have picked the "right" man to implement his policy in Venezuela.

click here

Excerpted from article by Raymond Bonner

Author of Weakness and Deceit: America and El Salvador's Dirty War

"More than 900 peasants were murdered in and around several villages in the eastern province of Morazan. Most were old men, women, and children. At the Roman Catholic church in El Mozote, soldiers separated men from their families, took them away, and shot them. They herded mothers and children into the convent. Putting their American-supplied M-16 rifles on automatic, the soldiers opened fire. Then they burned the convent. Some 140 children were killed, including toddlers. Average age: 6.

My reporting and Susan's pictures appeared in the New York Times, and Alma's reporting in the Washington Post, in January 1982.

Immediately, the administration attacked us and sought to deny the stories, calling them guerrilla propaganda. The reports were not credible, Abrams said.

As Abrams put it, El Mozote "appears to be an incident that is at least being significantly misused, at the very best, by the guerrillas." So the murder of hundreds of children became a mere "incident."

A few months after the Archbishop Romero killing, a Salvadoran soldier had gone to the American embassy and told a young political officer, Carl Gettinger, that D'Aubuisson had presided over a meeting at which the assassination was plotted and soldiers had drawn straws to see who would carry it out.

This had been duly reported to Washington, and other intelligence placed D'Aubuisson "at the center" of death-squad activity, as a senior diplomat in El Salvador put it at the time. In this period, El Salvador was the top foreign-policy issue, and Abrams was a senior State Department official.

Years later, he called U.S. policy toward El Salvador a "fabulous achievement."

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Who, precisely, is Elliott Abrams?

He was a former U.S. diplomat convicted in the Iran-Contra scandal, mostly recently appointed as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's new special envoy for Venezuela. From a Reuters story last Friday: Pompeo told the press: "Elliott will be a true asset to our mission to help the Venezuelan people fully restore democracy and prosperity to their country."

Pompeo said Abrams would accompany him to the United Nations on Saturday for a Security Council meeting on Venezuela. According to Reuters, Abrams told reporters the current situation in Venezuela-where current President Nicolas Maduro faces massive opposition protests-"deep, difficult and dangerous."

Going back a few years, Abrams was convicted of two counts of "withholding information from Congress" during the Iran-Contra scandal while working as assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration. He was later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush, and worked for President George W. Bush as a national-security advisor.

This, despite his complicity in the destruction of so much in El Salvador in that troubled time in 1981, replete with right wing death squads killing whole villages, and leading up to the (probably US sanctioned) assassination of Archbishop Romero while he was saying Mass, and that led to full scale Civil War.

Earlier this week, in discussions leading up to today's vote, speaking for the US, Elliott Abrams, the Trump administration's special representative for Venezuela, called on the members of the Security Council to "pressure the illegitimate regime to peacefully step down", accusing Maduro of preferring to "block and burn donated medicine and bread than see it in the hands of Venezuelan children."

Russia's representative to the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia, countered by painting US-backed efforts to deliver aid at the weekend as "an attempted illegal state border crossing for the delivery of unknown cargo", adding that the aid had not been requested by the Venezuelan government.

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UN Security Council officials argue over 'politicized' aid to troubled country as peace-building chief warns of 'grim realities' The Guardian's Peter Beaumont, Wed 27 Feb 2019

Briefing the UN Security Council, the UN's political and peace building chief, Rosemary DiCarlo (Obama's UN Permanent Representative, later elevated by the Secretary General to the position of Under-Secretary General for Peace Keeping) described the almost complete collapse of Venezuela's health system, warning that 40% of medical staff had departed Venezuela and that hospital medical supplies had dropped to 20% of minimal level. She stated the "protracted crisis" in the country had led in recent weeks to an "alarming escalation of tensions." DiCarlo warned of the "grim reality" facing a country where citizens are dying of preventable causes and 3.4 million people have fled the worsening conditions. DiCarlo stated the UN was coordinating efforts to deliver assistance as close as possible to Venezuelans in need, and that aid delivery should be free "from political objectives and delivered on the basis of need." DiCarlo stated that Russian and Chinese supplies have entered the country, in coordination with the Venezuelan government, but that US and other nations' contributions have been piled up at the Colombian and Brazilian borders.

The politicization of aid efforts has caused widespread alarm in the international aid community. Many have watched with dismay as supporters of both sides have sought to funnel aid to the advantage of one or other of the rival parties, some trying to back the government of Maduro, others the opposition led by Juan Guaidó, the self-declared interim president, who is championed by the US.

DiCarlo's presentation to the Security Council followed violent clashes at the weekend that focused on failed efforts to deliver aid to the Venezuelan opposition. Quoting Colombian and UN human rights officials, DiCarlo blamed the involvement of pro-government armed elements in the violent attacks on protestors at Venezuela's borders that left four dead and 285 injured.

[DiCarlo graduated from Brown University with a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in comparative literature. She speaks French and Russian. Before joining the Foreign Service, DiCarlo was a member of the Secretariat of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. DiCarlo became a career member of the Foreign Service and has held overseas assignments in U.S. Embassies in Moscow and Oslo.

As Director for Democratic Initiatives for the New Independent States, she oversaw an initiative to promote democratization in the former Soviet republics. She also held the position of U.S. Coordinator for the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe at the Department of State. Following appointment by President Barack Obama in 2010, DiCarlo served as Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations with the rank and status of Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary from 2011 until 2014. In that capacity, she represented the United States at the Security Council, General Assembly and other United Nations bodies. In July 2013, she served as President of the UN Security Council.

Following her career in government, DiCarlo served as the President and Chief Executive Officer of the nonprofit National Committee on American Foreign Policy. She took up this role in August 2015. She was a senior fellow and lecturer at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, where she taught "Multilateral Institutions in the 21st Century," a class offered to Yale graduate students. On March 28, 2018 DiCarlo was named Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs of the United Nations by Secretary-General António Guterres, the first woman to hold that post.]

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More from the Guardian:

Medical view: Infant mortality in Venezuela has doubled during crisis, UN says; Venezuela crisis threatens disease epidemic across continent; Collapse of Venezuela's healthcare system could fuel spread of malaria and other diseases across region

Experts have warned of an epidemic of diseases such as malaria and dengue on an unprecedented scale in Latin America following the collapse of the healthcare system in Venezuela. Continent-wide public health gains of the last 18 years could be undone if Venezuela does not accept help to control the spreading outbreaks of malaria, Zika, dengue and other illnesses that are afflicting its people, experts have warned in a report published in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases.

Venezuela was once a regional leader in malaria control, but as healthcare has collapsed there has been a mass departure of trained medics, the report says, creating a public emergency "of hemispheric concern". "These diseases have already extended into neighboring Brazil and Colombia, and with increasing air travel and human migration, most of the Latin American and Caribbean region (as well as some US cities hosting the Venezuelan diaspora, including Miami and Houston) is at heightened risk for disease re-emergence," says the paper.

Dr. Martin Llewellyn, based at the University of Glasgow, has called for global action.

"The re-emergence of diseases such as malaria in Venezuela has set in place an epidemic of unprecedented proportions, not only in the country but across the whole region," he said. "Based on the data we have collected we would urge national, regional and global authorities to take immediate action to address these worsening epidemics and prevent their expansion beyond Venezuelan borders." He said that the figures were probably an underestimate because the Venezuelan government had shut down the institution responsible for collecting data for the World Health Organization. "Venezuelan clinicians involved in this study have also been threatened with jail, while laboratories have been robbed by militias, hard drives removed from computers, microscopes and other medical equipment smashed," he said.

Malaria cases, in a country certified to have eradicated the disease in 1961, rose by 359% between 2010-15, from 29,736 to 136,402. They surged 71% from 2016-17, to 411,586, because of a decline in mosquito control and a shortage of antimalarial drugs. The epidemic has been supercharged by the rise of illegal mining in the jungle near the southern border with Brazil, where reservoirs of the disease survived despite its official elimination nationwide. Venezuelans had flocked to the area in recent years to dig and pan for gold in wildcat mines, as the economy collapsed and hyperinflation eroded salaries for professionals and workers. Stagnant water in pits and unsanitary camps provided a perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes, and malaria was soon endemic at many of the mines. Some miners and their families have endured dozens of bouts of the disease.

One woman working near the town of Tumeremo said her four-year-old had already had 13 bouts of malaria. After the last one, doctors warned her: "You have to choose - your daughter or the mine." She moved to a different pit, but the family cannot afford to leave the area. The transitory nature of mining work means the area's problems have gradually affected vast swathes of the country, as infected workers took the disease home with their gold, reintroducing malaria to areas where it had been eradicated.

"I've never been to the mines," said David Guevara, a 39-year-old builder queuing for malaria treatment in the industrial port of Ciudad Guyana, nearly 125 miles (200km) from the nearest mining camps. It is his second episode of the disease. "There are no controls [on malaria] now," he said. "And it's the children who are paying for this."

There was rarely any malaria in the city before 2015, but now the government clinic where he is seeking medical help is always busy. "It's an epidemic here now. It's a lie that you have to go to the mines to get it," said Marina Gutierrez, a 25-year-old who has had eight bouts of malaria over the last year and was at the clinic to seek help for her daughter. "She had only just finished treatment two weeks ago. She got rid of it and then it came back."

Geraldine Flores blames a serious case of malaria for her son's premature birth. She went into labor with Yelbi Josue after she came down with the disease when she was seven months' pregnant and working at the mines.

Chagas disease, one of the leading causes of heart failure in Latin America, may be resurgent, says the review. Dengue has risen more than five-fold between 2010 and 2016. Six increasingly large epidemics were recorded between 2007 -16, compared with four in the previous 16 years. Chikungunya and Zika outbreaks have epidemic potential, say the authors. There were an estimated 2 million suspected chikungunya cases in 2014, more than 12 times the official estimate.

"We call on the members of the Organization of American States and other international political bodies to apply more pressure to the Venezuelan government to accept the humanitarian assistance offered by the international community in order to strengthen the buckling health system. "Without such efforts, the public health gains achieved over the past 18 years could soon be reversed," said Llewellyn.

(Article changed on March 2, 2019 at 17:27)

(Article changed on March 2, 2019 at 18:43)

(Article changed on March 3, 2019 at 09:45)

Authors Website: https://www.facebook.com/groups/592985284186083/

Authors Bio:

Early in the 2016 Primary campaign, I started a Facebook group: Bernie Sanders: Advice and Strategies to Help Him Win! As the primary season advanced, we shifted the focus to advancing Bernie's legislation in the Senate, particularly the most critical one, to protect Oak Flat, sacred to the San Carlos Apaches, in the Tonto National Forest, from John McCain's efforts to privatize this national forest and turn it over to Rio Tinto Mining, an Australian mining company whose record by comparison makes Monsanto look like altar boys, to be developed as North America's largest copper mine. This is monstrous and despicable, and yet only Bernie's Save Oak Flat Act (S2242) stands in the way of this diabolical plan.

We added "2020" to the title.


I am an art gallery owner in Santa Fe since 1980 selling Native American painting and NM landscapes, specializing in modern Native Ledger Art.


I have always been intensely involved in politics, going back to the mid's 1970's, being a volunteer lobbyist in the US Senate for the Secretary General of the United Nations, then a "snowball-in-hell" campaign for US Senate in NM in the late 70's, and for the past 20 years have worked extensively to pressure the FDA to rescind its approval for aspartame, the neurotoxic artificial sweetener metabolized as formaldehyde. This may be becoming a reality to an extent in California, which, under Proposition 65, is considering requiring a mandatory Carcinogen label on all aspartame products, although all bureaucracies seem to stall under any kind of corporate pressure.


Bills to ban aspartame were in the State Senates of New Mexico and Hawaii, but were shut down by corporate lobbyists (particularly Monsanto lobbyists in Hawaii and Coca Cola lobbyists in New Mexico).


For several years, I was the editor of New Mexico Sun News, and my letters to the editor and op/eds in 2016 have appeared in NM, California, Wisconsin, New York, Maryland, the Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, and many international papers, on the subject of consumer protection. Our best issue was 10 days before Obama won in 2008, when we published a special early edition of the paper declaring that Obama Wins! This was the top story on CNN for many hours, way back then....


My highest accomplishments thus far are

1. a plan to create a UN Secretary General's Pandemic Board of Inquiry, a plan that is in the works and might be achieved even before the 75th UN General Assembly in September 2020.


2. Now history until the needs becomes clear to the powers who run the United Nations: a UN Resolution to create a new Undersecretary General for Nutrition and Consumer Protection, strongly supported ten years ago by India and 53 cosponsoring nations, but shut down by the US Mission to the UN in 2008. To read it, google UNITED NATIONS UNDERSECRETARY GENERAL FOR NUTRITION, please.


These are not easy battles, any of them, and they require a great deal of political and journalistic focus. OpEdNews is the perfect place for those who have a lot to say, so much that they exceed the limiting capacities of their local and regional newspapers. Trying to go beyond the regional papers seems to require some kind of "inside" credentials, as if you had to be in a club of corporate-accepted writers, and if not, you are "from somewhere else," a sad state of corporate induced xenophobia that should have no place in America in 2020!

This should be a goal for every author with something current to say: breaking through yet another glass ceiling, and get your say said in editorial pages all over America. Certainly, this was a tool that was essentially ignored in 2016, and cannot be ignored in the big elections of 2020.


In my capacity as Editor of the Santa Fe Sun News, Fox interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev: http://www.prlog.org/10064349-mikhail-gorbachev