U.N. sounds alarm over worsening human rights crisis in Venezuela
Civil and political freedoms in Venezuela have sharply deteriorated over the past year, according to the United Nations' top human rights official, who cited a wave of arbitrary arrests, disappearances and alleged torture amid growing political unrest.
In a presentation before the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said Friday that the Venezuelan government has intensified its crackdown on dissent, using vague anti-terrorism laws to detain opposition figures, activists and foreign nationals ahead of the country's contentious 2024 elections.
Türk also criticized the United States, expressing concern over the deportation of Venezuelans back to what he described as unsafe conditions.
'I repeat my call on the U.S. government to ensure compliance with due process … and to stop the removal of any person to any country where there is a risk of irreparable harm,' he said.
Deportation flights resumed this year as part of U.S. efforts to curb irregular migration. Rights groups warn that many deportees face retaliation or mistreatment upon return to Venezuela.
Türk's report details at least 70 politically motivated arrests in the lead-up to recent regional and parliamentary elections, including 17 foreign nationals. Following the vote, authorities announced the dismantling of a so-called terrorist network allegedly tied to humanitarian and rights organizations — claims Türk dismissed as a misuse of counterterrorism legislation.
The U.N. rights chief called for the 'immediate and unconditional' release of all individuals arbitrarily detained, naming several high-profile human rights defenders, including Rocío San Miguel, Javier Tarazona, Carlos Julio Rojas and Eduardo Torres.
According to the report, some detainees have disappeared without a trace, while others face legal proceedings without basic safeguards. At least 28 enforced disappearances were documented after Venezuela's July 2024 presidential election, including 12 foreign nationals who were reportedly denied access to consular support.
Since the election, more than 2,000 people have been arrested, including minors. Dozens of political opponents and protesters have been killed or have vanished. Victims include not only Venezuelan citizens but also foreign nationals, such as Colombian aid worker Manuel Tique and French-American tourist Lucas Hunter, both missing since late 2024.
The humanitarian crisis is compounded by Venezuela's crumbling infrastructure. Power outages and water shortages are frequent, and inflation has made basic goods inaccessible to much of the population. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, more than five million Venezuelans are facing hunger. Preventable diseases like malaria and measles are spreading amid a collapsed healthcare system. Public services have disintegrated, and violent crime — including kidnappings, armed robberies, and extortion — is widespread.
'My office documented 32 cases of torture and ill-treatment in detention,' Türk said, noting that nearly half involved minors. Inmates were allegedly held incommunicado and denied medical care, food and water — particularly after protesting prison conditions.
Türk also warned of increasing restrictions on civil society. A law passed in November regulating non-governmental organizations has made it nearly impossible for many advocacy groups to operate. Organizations now face unlawful registration demands, arbitrary fees and administrative barriers not clearly defined in the legislation.
Several non-governmental organizations 'have felt compelled to end their operations in Venezuela because of legal obstacles,' he said.
His report describes an atmosphere of fear that disproportionately affects women, marginalized communities, and LGBTQ+ individuals. Women remain underrepresented in public life, and victims of gender-based violence continue to face systemic barriers to justice. Abortion remains criminalized in all cases, including rape and incest.
LGBTQ+ individuals, Türk added, often face abuse while in custody, and many hate crimes go unprosecuted.
While focused largely on political rights, the U.N. report also highlights Venezuela's deepening economic collapse. With inflation worsening, the monthly minimum wage remains at just 130 bolívares — less than $1 — which has remained unchanged since March 2022. That's barely enough to buy half a carton of eggs, according to the report.
Public services have all but collapsed. School attendance plummeted in 2024 amid widespread teacher shortages and class suspensions. Hospitals are chronically under-resourced, with 91% of patients surveyed between January and July asked to bring their own supplies for surgery.
'The authorities' ability to fund essential public services is severely limited,' Türk said.
He urged Venezuelan authorities to end enforced disappearances and incommunicado detentions, to provide consular access to foreign detainees, and to repeal laws restricting civic and political participation.
Türk said he remains open to reengagement with the Maduro government — but only if U.N. human rights staff are granted full access to the country, a condition Caracas has resisted in recent years.
'I believe in engagement, and I am committed to it,' he said. 'But I do hope the authorities will fulfill the necessary conditions to ensure the full return of all my staff and the implementation of our mandate.'
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San Francisco Chronicle
2 hours ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Trump is trying to turn California into a police state. Here's what's coming next
The stage is set for one hot summer on America's streets. Last week's U.S. Court of Appeals hearing on whether President Trump exceeded his authority — first, by unilaterally calling up thousands of California's National Guard troops to restore order in roughly six city blocks of Los Angeles and then by deploying hundreds of active-duty Marines specializing in urban warfare — was jaw-dropping. A Trump administration attorney argued before the court that his boss has the unreviewable power to call up the guard, not only as he has already done in the Golden State, but simultaneously in all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia. And to deploy, alongside these guard members, unlimited numbers of active-duty armed forces, such as the Marines, whose primary mission Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has repeatedly pledged will focus on 'lethality, warfighting and readiness.' The court signing off on this shocking authoritarian overreach was paired with Trump's recent comments suggesting that Los Angeles is just the beginning ('We are going to have troops everywhere'), and Hegseth's belligerent refusal in last week's Senate oversight hearing to answer the simple question of whether or not he had given the order authorizing 'live ammunition' (one might, reasonably, assume the answer is 'yes'). Outrage over the court's sanctioning of Trump's military deployments was quickly overwhelmed by his bombing of Iran. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement has continued its provocations in Los Angeles — including the apparent racial profiling and arrest of a U.S. citizen on her way to work — with military backing. National Guard troops were also deployed last week more than 130 miles away from Los Angeles to assist in the raid of a suspected marijuana farm in Riverside County. The 'legal rationale' the administration has thus far successfully floated to justify these actions was an obscure 1798 law whose Fox News-friendly statutory nomenclature has quickly evolved into a MAGA-embraced, immigrant-bashing, chest-pounding rallying cry: The wording fits perfectly with the outright lies told during Trump's presidential campaign, about how Haitian immigrants were allegedly eating everyone's cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, and how a Venezuelan street gang had somehow turned Aurora, Colo., (conveniently located near an ICE detention center) into a 'war zone.' The Trump administration will almost certainly ride the Alien Enemies Act train until it jumps the court-sanctioned tracks, then simply catch the next train and then the next until they/we/all of us arrive at their chosen destination: A police state. The term 'police state,' as we all know, gets tossed around a lot. But few have a clear idea of what it is. A country becomes a police state when the line between civil and military authority is rendered meaningless. We're not there yet. But here's one scenario of how we might arrive at that fate, using Los Angeles (as Trump is doing in real life) as a case study. The last time a U.S. president sent the National Guard somewhere to address civil unrest was, of course, Los Angeles in 1992 during the riots after police officers were acquitted of the Rodney King beating. The initial request for a federal response originated with the governor, rather than the president. Then, as it is now, local police, such as the Los Angeles Police Department, train and practice alongside National Guard soldiers under a federal mandate known as Defense Support of Civil Authority. These joint preparations occur during weekend training drills of National Guard and reserve units and help to identify possible weaknesses in the chain of command and in general operations. One illustrative example of how crucial a role this authority plays in emergency operations — and how quickly things can turn bad, quickly — comes from the Rodney King riots and their aftermath. As the disturbances were winding down, an L.A. police sergeant who had taken fire some days earlier returned to the scene where shots were fired. With him was a Marine Corps infantry platoon led by a young lieutenant. With the Marines stationed in front of the house, the police sergeant sent two of his men around back. Before starting across the street to investigate, the police sergeant told the Marine lieutenant to 'cover him.' The entire platoon opened up with automatic weapons fire. 'Cover me' means something very different to a Marine than it means to a police officer. To a Marine, trained only for combat, 'cover me' means opening fire when a member of your team begins to advance on a target. Most people have probably seen this in a movie, if not in a modern war video game. That, however, is not what it means to police; it's a request to raise weapons to be ready to fire should the need arise. Fortunately, no one died that day. But we may not be so lucky on today's streets, given the lack of coordination and cooperation endemic to Trump's style of leadership. Should such a tragic incident come to pass, we can expect more civil unrest — possibly even riots — and for Trump to weaponize that straight out of the fascist playbook, something he's already doing with his ICE provocations: Stir something up, wait for your loyal base to call on its dear leader to restore order. Send in more troops, provide that 'iron fist' for which your followers yearn, tighten your grip on power. Wrap yourself in the flag, flood the zone with propaganda, rinse/repeat. The aggressive actions in Los Angeles have not, as of yet, resulted in significant injury and harm to civilians or police. But other cities, other states might not be so lucky. As Trump almost certainly seeks to expand his operations in the coming weeks and months to New York or perhaps Chicago, Democratic governors likely to find themselves in the crosshairs would be well-advised to begin preparing now, while their National Guard is still under their command and control. Make no mistake, America: Our mettle and our intestinal fortitude are about to be tested. We hold out hope that the Supreme Court will issue an emergency ruling telling the president he has exceeded his powers. Especially if people start to die. This would put some daylight between what Trump is trying to pull and his actual official powers. If he then persists in issuing orders to the military, which the court has declared illegal, you can rest assured the military has ways, largely unfamiliar to civilians, to maintain 'good order and discipline' in its ranks. Arresting a superior officer (including a commander-in-chief) may be contemplated where his or her actions warrant such. Especially when that becomes necessary to fulfill their sacred oath to 'protect and defend the Constitution.' Semper fi. Brett Wagner, now retired, served as a professor of national security decision making for the U.S. Naval War College and adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. J. Holmes Armstead, now retired, served as a professor of strategy and international law at the U.S. Naval War College and as a judge advocate general, inspector general and civil affairs officer in the U.S. Army, Army Reserves and National Guard.
Hamilton Spectator
2 hours ago
- Hamilton Spectator
Chamber of Commerce GM shares findings from recent Washington visit
Before heading to Washington, D.C. for the Canadian Chamber of Commerce's U.S. mission, Stratford and District Chamber of Commerce general manager Aaron Martin shared with the Times that he was focused on getting perspective. Gratefully, over the two-day trip on June 10-11, Martin got just what he was looking for. After the chamber's annual general meeting on June 19, Martin shared what happened over the course of the mission to the chamber's membership. Because most events were held under Chatham House rules (a governing set of rules that dictates that members can talk about what was discussed but couldn't attribute what as said to specific people), most of what he said was in generality. Still, the mission provided answers to some of the questions Martin and the wider local business community had. One startling fact was that most of the U.S. proponents were quite open about the fact that economically the trade measures the current U.S. administration has implemented (like across the board tariffs) are not helpful for either the U.S. or its partners, though it played well with U.S. President Donald Trump's base and that was the main driver for why they were implemented. 'The Americans want a sacrificial lamb,' Martin said. 'And the two things that kept coming up was timber and dairy … If they did attack either timber or the dairy bit, they wouldn't economically benefit from it, but the political basis that they get from it – they want to make sure they're getting a win for their loggers, they're getting a win for their farmers. And that's where they're really going for this. 'The American public also hasn't felt the impacts of tariffs yet,' Martin went on to say. 'So when this was all started … a lot of companies started doing front loading, where essentially they would buy everything they could and stock up their warehouses. A lot of people estimate that'll last for around a year, after which point you'll start to see issues in pricing. Prices will rise because the tariffs will actually come into effect. 'This can be an opportunity for the Canadian government to get a better negotiation with this. As the American consumer feels the squeeze more and more with the tariffs, they'll have more political pressure pushing the other way … If the Canadian government can hold out to then there's a real chance that (Republicans) will lose the House (of Representatives).' One point that Martin said was agreed upon across the table was China's abuse of the current trade system, using it to pit countries against each other. China, while not necessarily a boogeyman of the mission, was prevalent in every discussion that was had. Martin also said that there was more than one representative from Alberta in Washington during the mission that openly expressed support for secession. This was aside from the purpose of the chamber's mission, but Martin felt it was something worth sharing with the group. 'I think that's something that's been brought up in the media, that this is a non-issue. Nothing's ever going to happen. We have to ensure that Albertans, the average Albertan, doesn't feel they're getting the raw deal that they are feeling, that Confederation is to their benefit and that they want to be a part of it. We need to be unified here. And I think belittling the way they're feeling isn't the way to go forward.' Overall, Martin called the experience very eye-opening and encouraged anyone with further questions to reach out to him and the chamber, which continues to monitor the international situation and its local impacts in Perth County and area. Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request. There was a problem with the recaptcha. Please try again. You may unsubscribe at any time. By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google privacy policy and terms of service apply. Want more of the latest from us? Sign up for more at our newsletter page .
Atlantic
2 hours ago
- Atlantic
A Reboot for Capitalism's Operating System
The world economy is like a supercomputer that churns through trillions of calculations of prices and quantities, and spits out information on incomes, wealth, profits, and jobs. This is effectively how capitalism works—as a highly efficient information-processing system. To do that job, like any computer, capitalism runs on both hardware and software. The hardware is the markets, institutions, and regulatory regimes that make up the economy. The software is the governing economic ideas of the day—in essence, what society has decided the economy is for. Most of the time, the computer works quite well. But now and then, it crashes. Usually when that happens, the world economy just needs a software update—new ideas to address new problems. But sometimes it needs a major hardware modification as well. We are in one of those Control-Alt-Delete moments. Against the background of tariff wars, market angst about U.S. debt, tumbling consumer confidence, and a weakening dollar watched over by a heedless administration, globalization's American-led era of free trade and open societies is coming to a close. The global economy is getting a hardware refit and trying out a new operating system—in effect, a full reboot, the likes of which we have not seen in nearly a century. To understand why this is happening and what it means, we need to abandon any illusion that the worldwide turn toward right-wing populism and economic nationalism is merely a temporary error, and that everything will eventually snap back to the relatively benign world of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The computer's architecture is changing, but how this next version of capitalism will work depends a great deal on the software we choose to run on it. The governing ideas about the economy are in flux: We have to decide what the new economic order looks like and whose interests it will serve. The last such force-quit, hard-restart period was in the 1930s. In the United States, the huge liquidity crunch caused by the 1929 Wall Street crash combined with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 to kill commercial activity and trigger the Great Depression. Bank failures swiftly turned into a mass failure of firms and industries; wages tumbled and unemployment shot up, in some areas to a quarter of the workforce. Despite the state interventions of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal program, the economic situation stabilized and returned to sustained growth only in the '40s, when wartime re-armament delivered a huge industrial stimulus. The computer built for the postwar period was solving to avoid a repeat of the '30s. The software update was a new governing idea of full employment. Achieving that aim as the central raison d'être of the economy also entailed several hardware modifications. One was a policy of forcing wealth owners to use their capital locally by limiting their ability to move it out of the country. To maintain their profits, they were obliged to invest in technology that would increase productivity. In this virtuous cycle, high productivity allowed for high wages, which the state could then tax to fund social transfers. Combined with the government-spending power of revenues raised by high marginal taxes, America's welfare state was born. Labor unions were seen more as partners in business enterprises, and political parties needed to appeal to the median, middle-income voter. These changes produced a political system in which the two main parties competed over a centrist consensus so bipartisan that people struggled to see the difference between Democrats and Republicans. The New Deal did indeed avoid a repeat of the '30s, but its software had a bug. If full employment meant running the economy hot to keep unemployment down, then eventually employers' ability to keep their profits up by augmenting productivity would fail as workers' demand for higher wages outstripped firms' ability to pay them. By the mid-'70s, profits were falling as wages and inflation rose, so the U.S. investor class reached for the reboot switch. Holders of capital founded political-action committees, funded think tanks and media outlets to promote free enterprise, and helped get Ronald Reagan elected in 1980. Reagan busted unions and deregulated markets, accelerating the movement of capital from union strongholds to 'right to work' states, which was effectively an onshore tryout of offshoring. Simultaneously, the Federal Reserve under Paul Volcker raised interest rates to almost 20 percent to squeeze inflation, a measure that induced a harsh recession, which disciplined labor further by raising unemployment. As all of that implies, full employment ceased to be the governing economic idea. The software rewrite of this era instead made price stability, capital mobility, and the restoration of profits via globalization the new priorities. The hardware modification was to make central banks more independent—the better to enforce price stability and enable the recovery of profits. These new priorities were justified by Margaret Thatcher's famous nostrum that 'there is no alternative.' This reboot has come to be known as neoliberalism. The computer was humming along again when I arrived from Scotland to attend graduate school in New York in the summer of 1992. The U.S. had entered a period that Ben Bernanke, then a Federal Reserve governor (and later Fed chair), called the 'Great Moderation.' Globalization was good; finance was the future. Central banks had delivered sustainable prosperity, and the investor class saw its profits restored on a transnational scale. Once again, however, the system had a bug. The increase in profitability came not only as a result of improved domestic productivity but also at the expense of once-stable industrial regions of the U.S., as jobs, skills, and capital flowed out. Meanwhile, the authorities had presided over the deregulation of financial markets, which supplied the economy with copious credit. But one effect of this credit was to mask a chronic lack of wage growth and a rising level of inequality. That turned out to be a major hardware issue: Neoliberalism's financialized solutions to economic problems became liabilities when the next crash came, in 2008, as a tsunami of credit became an earthquake of debt. The hardware modification of the era—independent central banks—saved the system with colossal bailouts of the private sector, paid for by the public sector in the form of ever greater debt and more stringent fiscal policies. This liquidity dump enabled the economy to stagger on through the slowest-ever recovery from a recession—but only by pushing the bulk of the costs of those bailouts onto those least able to bear them. Signs of profound public disaffection in Western countries started to show in 2016: first with the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, then with Donald Trump's rise in the U.S. Trump has acted as a catalyst for the next reboot. His hostile takeover of the Republican Party was leveraged by a new, more working-class electoral coalition based on a populist politics of resentment. His antipathy toward China may lack analysis, but by articulating a sense that American workers had lost out in the neoliberal era, it gave voice to authentic grievance. Trump's chaotic first term made only limited progress in forcing another reboot, but his second term seems likely to foreclose on the Biden administration's interim solution of keeping the neoliberal system running with a limited New Deal–like reindustrialization in new sectors such as renewable energy. The Inflation Reduction Act was a significant reinvention of industrial policy, something not seen for decades outside a national-security context, but Trump is abandoning this sort of intervention. Instead, he has chosen tariffs as his singular tool for reshoring industry. To the extent that the Trumpian approach coheres, the economy's new goal is to benefit native workers by restoring carbon-heavy industrial jobs while removing immigrants from the labor pool and encouraging women to have more children and become homemakers. This is not so much the building of a new computer system as the retrofitting of several old ones—a version of what a critic of Thatcherism once called ' regressive modernisation.' The MAGA economic ideal derives from a blend of the 1950s, which saw a huge expansion of manufacturing jobs for men, and the '40s, when women were pushed out of the wartime jobs and back into the home, and immigration was tightly restricted. This boost for the native labor force is in turn yoked to a 19th-century, mercantilist 'spheres of influence' foreign policy. This hodgepodge of historical impulses speaks to the unsettled nature of Trumponomics. No new economic order is discernible, because the governing idea is still contested. The national-conservative movement, which seeks to rebrand the GOP as a workers' party, has one vision, but other forces are also trying to shape this moment. The 'Dark Enlightenment' wing of the tech sector is a player, too. Overinvested in AI and keen to grab government funding that was earmarked for elite research universities, the Silicon Valley billionaires imagine an economy that runs not as a return to hard-hat industry's glorious past but as a posthuman future of automation and space exploration. The problem with such projects is that we cannot go back, any more than we can leap into the future; we can live only in the present. The populist-right reset will fail because tariffs may spur some reindustrialization, but robots will be the main producers, not working-class men on an assembly line. And little suggests that most women will relish the return to hearth and home that is planned for them. The techno-futurist update has nothing to offer the great mass of humanity and would benefit only the tech lords most invested in its realization. So we seem to be stuck, which is why this moment is so perplexing. The system upgrade is pending: The right is offering its regressive modernization as the update. The left has yet to figure out which one of three paths it wants to take. One possibility is to stay put with the gerontocracy of the Democratic Party and wait for Trumpism to implode. That might happen, and the Democrats' current position as the party of the institutionalist status quo makes this the most likely path. But this will be a losing proposition if no reversion to the mean of the pre-MAGA American politics occurs. The effort by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders to rally an anti-oligarchy movement advocates for a second option, of left-wing populism. But whether this appeals to young men who have been drawn to Trump, as well as young women who poll as more progressive, and can create a broad-enough coalition remains to be seen. A third approach is the 'abundance' agenda, promoted recently by Ezra Klein and The Atlantic 's Derek Thompson, which proposes a progressive political program based on lower-regulation, pro-growth policies as a spark for renewed economic growth—though critics on the left accuse this approach of failing to confront corporate power. To develop an alternative to the regressive modernization underpinning Trump's reelection, the left must come up with a governing economic idea that can compete. Technocratic fixes of the old system look very unlikely to inspire a broad-enough coalition to defeat the potent, if unstable, electoral alliance that reelected Trump. The most promising avenue—one that could address the needs of millions of Americans who feel shut out of growth and prosperity and alienated from America's governing elite—might be a fusion of AOC/Bernie populism with a more political, less technocratic version of abundance. Regardless of whether such a project can materialize, we have to accept that a transformation is under way. A new economic order is forming—which means that it is not yet fixed and can still be shaped. But time is running out. As jumbled as the regressive modernization is, it could win the day if we do not come up with a different governing idea of what the economy is and whom it is for. And we need enough people in our democracy to agree that this new purpose is the right one. The ideas are there to be found. They just need politicians with the courage to try them.
