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Bolton Is Building a Confrontational Latin America Strategy
[FP] For the first time since entering office, U.S. President Donald Trump has managed to surround himself with a full complement of like-minded officials to develop and implement U.S. policy in the Western Hemisphere. In recent weeks, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton have welcomed Kimberly Breier as assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere and Mauricio Claver-Carone as senior director for the region at the National Security Council.

The recent appointments served as the backdrop for Bolton’s speech earlier this month at Miami Dade College, in which he began laying out the Trump administration’s priorities in Latin America for at least the next two years.

In large part, that will involve more aggressively confronting the region’s troublemakers‐Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua‐because, as he put it in an interview with the Miami Herald, the United States has "wider interests in the hemisphere that are threatened by all three of these three countries." Indeed, "This Troika of Tyranny," he said in his speech, "is the cause of immense human suffering, the impetus of enormous regional instability, and the genesis of a sordid cradle of communism in the Western Hemisphere." That’s why the United States, he continued "is taking direct action against all three regimes."

Bolton is not referring to military action (which he dismissed in his interview), but to more aggressive implementation of the policy tools at Washington’s disposal‐including economic and political sanctions, legal indictments, and support for civil society and democracy groups, among other measures‐to combat these outlier regimes.

The administration is right to call out the region’s rogues for their destabilizing behavior. The problems created by their utter disregard for democratic norms, rule of law, and the rights and welfare of their citizens, including organized crime and refugee flows, do not stay within those countries’ own borders. Rather, they spread elsewhere, including to the United States, whose security depends on its partners working in unison to keep the neighborhood peace. Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba are weak links.

To address the situation in Venezuela, Bolton announced new sanctions that target the country’s gold sector and bar U.S. citizens and entities from involvement in it. He said, "The Maduro regime has used this sector as a bastion to finance illicit activities, to fill its coffers, and to support criminal groups." With oil revenues in free fall, President Nicolás Maduro has desperately turned to mining Venezuela’s gold deposits and shipping the product to Turkey for refining to avoid pre-existing U.S. sanctions. (According to a senior U.S. Treasury Department official, Maduro has illegally exported more than 21 metric tons of gold to Turkey to date.)

Although Bolton did not announce new sanctions for Nicaragua in his Florida speech, he did say that unless President Daniel Ortega’s government holds "free, fair, and early elections," it "will feel the full weight of America’s robust sanctions regime." At present, the U.S. has sanctioned three Nicaraguan officials on human rights and corruption charges and revoked an unknown number of visas. After months of violently suppressing street protests‐resulting in the deaths of more than 300 people since April‐the Ortega regime has stabilized and retrenched. A new slate of punitive sanctions targeting Ortega’s family, his inner circle, and the military, combined with efforts to embolden the private sector to pressure Ortega for early elections, could once again enhance chances for a resolution to that crisis.
Posted by: Besoeker 2018-11-13
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=527551