Washington Intensifies Its Collective Punishment of Venezuelans

By Kevin Young, NACLA

16 August 19

Despite previous sanctions leading to over 40,000 deaths in Venezuela over two years, the U.S. is escalating its economic offensive.

n August 5, the Trump administration issued an executive order escalating its sanctions against Venezuela. The order froze all Venezuelan government assets in the United States and threatened third parties around the world with punitive action if they trade with the Venezuelan government.

The next day, National Security Adviser John Bolton delivered a speech to a meeting of foreign governments in Lima, Peru. “We are sending a signal to third parties that want to do business with the Maduro regime: proceed with extreme caution,” he said. “There is no need to risk your business interests with the United States.”

In response, the Nicolás Maduro government cancelled its negotiations with self-proclaimed “interim president” Juan Guaidó, which had been scheduled for later that week in Barbados. The Venezuelan foreign minister plausibly speculated that Washington was “trying to dynamite the dialogue.”

The move is the Trump administration’s latest escalation of its coup campaign in Venezuela. In August 2017, Trump imposed sanctions that cut off the government’s access to U.S. financial markets. In January 2019, it recognized the right-wing Guaidó when he anointed himself president and imposed sanctions that prevented Venezuela’s state oil company from exporting to the United States.

The concrete impact of the new sanctions remains to be seen. Previous sanctions had already deprived the Maduro government of access to its foreign assets. And the Trump administration had already been threatening foreign firms with sanctions—and sometimes following through —for trading with Venezuela.

But the intensified threats against third parties may have substantial impacts. Two days after the the U.S. announced the sanctions, the Venezuelan government reported that a ship carrying soy imports was seized in Panama. Western Union responded to Trump’s decree by suspending all money transfers to Venezuela.

Previous U.S. sanctions have already had devastating impacts. While U.S. aggression alone did not create the Venezuelan economic crisis, it has made the situation far worse. Economist Francisco Rodríguez estimates that the 2017 sanctions cost the government $17 billion a year in lost oil revenues and that this year’s oil sanctions will cost it an additional $10 billion a year. Compared to those figures, the millions in “humanitarian assistance” that the United States has offered Venezuelan emigrants are a cynical drop in the bucket.

Killing Our Children and Elderly

U.S. officials usually claim, at least in public, that the sanctions punish only the government. The August 5 decree contains a vague exclusion for “food, clothing, and medicine intended to be used to relieve human suffering.”

Even if the claim were true, international law still forbids “coercive measures of an economic or political character.” And one might question how much moral authority resides with a government that operates concentration camps on its border, accelerates an environmental crisis that will kill millions of people, and supports regimes far more repressive than Venezuela’s.

But the claim itself is obviously false: The victims of the sanctions are the Venezuelan people. By strangling the state-run oil sector that accounts for 99 percent of export revenue and by freezing the government’s foreign assets, the sanctions deprive the country as a whole from obtaining the foreign exchange needed to import food and medicines. Francisco Rodríguez notes that “if you block Venezuela oil exports, you block Venezuela’s capacity to pay for food. Therefore it’s meaningless for you to let food into the country if you’re not letting oil out.”

Furthermore, capitalists have a tendency to “over-comply” with sanctions regimes. That is, they steer clear of economies ostracized by the Western powers even when investing there is legally allowed.

The sanctions thus amount to collective punishment of the Venezuelan people, which is illegal according to the Geneva Conventions. This past April, a study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that sanctions had led to over 40,000 deaths in 2017 and 2018. This year’s sanctions have surely raised that number. The report has received a total of one mention in major U.S. media, in the fifteenth paragraph of a Reuters story.

The impacts are clear to most Venezuelans. Even right-wing polling firms have found strong opposition to the sanctions. Over two-thirds say the sanctions harm them. Meanwhile, Guaidó and his team fully support the sanctions.

Jordania Lunar, a young working-class woman from Caracas, blames her government’s mismanagement for “50 percent” of the crisis. But she assigns the rest of the blame to the United States, since “Venezuela has to import its medicines,” and sanctions deprive it of revenue to do so.

Elba Zapata, a 68-year-old woman who lives on the outskirts of Caracas, rejects the fallacy that the sanctions target only government officials: “This blockade, this despicable war they’re waging against us, it isn’t bringing down Maduro, it isn’t bringing down Diosdado Cabello [president of the Constituent National Assembly]. It’s bringing down us, the Venezuelan people. And all of it why? Because of a desire to get ahold of Venezuela’s resources.”

Elba’s great-granddaughter, Desiree, has a life-threatening disease of the lymph nodes and the family is unable to obtain the cure. The girl’s father, Jorge Tarazona, says that the sanctions “are killing us, our children, our elderly.”

When criticism of the sanctions appears in corporate media, it is typically limited to objections that they “will not work,” or that the coup strategy is too “simplistic.” Moral condemnations like those of Jordania, Elba, and Jorge are not permitted. 

Nor do most critics acknowledge the logic behind U.S. strategy, which follows an old playbook: inflict misery on civilian populations so that they’ll rise up against governments that the U.S. dislikes.

Soon after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, State Department official Lester Mallory wrote privately that “every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba,” to deny “money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” Thus, the economic embargo persists to this day.

When socialist Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile in 1970, Richard Nixon secretly ordered his underlings to “make the economy scream.” The same aim underlay the economic component of the U.S. terror war against Nicaragua in the 1980s, which John Bolton cited as a positive precedent in his August 6 speech.

U.S. policy toward Venezuela obeys the same logic. At a March 11 press conference, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo expressed optimism that Guaidó’s forces would soon “turn the tide.” In his words, “the circle is tightening. The humanitarian crisis is increasing by the hour…You can see the increasing pain and suffering that the Venezuelan people are suffering from.” In a similar vein, U.S. special envoy Elliott Abrams has threatened that “a Venezuela in recovery” is “not going to happen under the Maduro regime.”

A Test of U.S. Power

The coup push in Venezuela is, among other things, a test of U.S. power in an era when the empire’s economic hegemony has been challenged. The Trump administration is betting that, through a mix of persuasion and coercion, it can get the rest of the world to go along. 

It’s had some success. The governments of Haiti and several other small Caribbean nations have recognized Guaidó in exchange for promises of U.S. aid and investment. The coalition of 56 countries backing the coup also includes far-right ideological sympathizers in places like Brazil, Colombia, Hungary, Israel, and Poland.

The August 6 meeting in Lima was a reflection of this terrain. The central participants were the Lima Group, an alliance of right-wing Latin American governments seeking regime change in Venezuela. Whereas a decade ago, most Latin American governments sought to restrict U.S. influence, a succession of right-wing coups and electoral victories has rolled back that anti-imperialist tide.

Still, the limits of U.S. power have been very apparent. Most of Trump’s allies have opposed his threats of military invasion and have been more committed to negotiations than Washington has.

The big obstacles, however, are China, Russia, and India, which have refused to back the coup. China and Russia have extended loans to Venezuela, while China and India have bought much of Venezuela’s oil. On August 8, Venezuela and China announced a new joint venture to boost Venezuelan oil production.

Trump officials have tried to sway China and others by warning that Venezuela won’t be able to pay back their loans until the economy recovers—which they will not allow “to happen under the Maduro regime.” Now, they are stepping up threats of economic retaliation. But China and company may be too powerful to be bullied, as their defiance of Trump’s Iran sanctions also suggests.

Yet even if it lacks the power to impose regime change, the United States can still impose plenty of misery on Venezuelans.

Bleak Prospects

The sanctions will remain in place at least as long as Trump and Maduro are in office, making economic recovery almost impossible. And since most Democrats support the sanctions, a potential Democratic president after 2020 might even keep them in place.

In Venezuela the situation is grim. Though Guaidó’s prospects appear diminished since the start of this year, a successful coup is still possible. While it would bring an end to sanctions, it would usher in a new era of privatization, deregulation, austerity, and likely the mass persecution of leftists—what Guaidó supporters term “the wonderful Venezuela of old.”

For its part, the Maduro government has been inept in its handling of the economy, leading to widespread disenchantment. Even among progressive Venezuelans there is growing disillusion. Maduro has not taken adequate action to protect victims of right-wing violence, and in many cases, state forces have harassed and impeded the country’s grassroots democratic forces. Imperialist hostility has predictably contributed to the constriction of political space, including for leftist criticism of the government.

New negotiations are necessary, but what they can produce is unclear. For meaningful negotiations to happen, the Trump regime would need to acknowledge that its coup strategy has failed. To date, it has spurned proposals for compromise. Fair negotiations would also require the prior lifting of the sanctions.

In other words, the immediate prospects are bleak. Trump’s need to appeal to right-wing émigrés in Florida, his vindictive and narcissistic masculinity, and bipartisan complicity in Congress will likely prevent any softening of the sanctions. Venezuelans will continue to pay the price.

How the US Created the Central American Immigration Crisis

By Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch

16 August 19

 

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Here’s just a small reminder of the country you now live in. On his Twitter account, Patrick Crusius, the 21-year-old white-nationalist killer of 22 people at an El Paso Walmart including local Hispanics and eight Mexican citizens, reportedly “liked” a tweet that had first been posted elsewhere in 2017. It featured a photo of the name T-R-U-M-P spelled out with rifles and pistols. Recently, Crusius picked up his own AK-47-style assault rifle and extra magazines of ammo, harboring a desire (as he later told investigators) to “kill as many Mexicans as he could.” He then headed south, “invading” a city ranked sixth among the “top 10 safest” in America. He left behind a four-page white nationalist screed that spoke of a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” It certainly reflected the president’s endlessly invasive rhetoric, not to speak of the moment at a rally in El Paso last February when he intoned the line “murders, murders, murders. Killings, murders!” while speaking of undocumented immigrants, as the crowd chanted “build the wall!” (Of course, few even remember anymore, historically speaking, who was in Texas first and who invaded what then.)

In case you’ve forgotten how we got to this grim moment, think back to June 2015 when Donald Trump descended a Trump Tower escalator into the presidential race to the tune of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.” Here’s part of what he said:

“The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems... When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you... They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people… It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably -- probably -- from the Middle East.”

The “invasion” followed. It would, in fact, be a Trumpian invasion of America’s borderlands, which the president has worked incredibly single-mindedly to militarize and turn into contested territory. As Guardian reporter and author of the book Amexica Ed Vulliamy pointed out recently, it was a sign of the times that the terror, the horror, when it finally arrived in El Paso, didn’t come from the other side of the border, “It arrived from the opposite, northerly, direction.”

Today, TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon offers another kind of reminder of the strange upside-down nature of this increasingly terrifying world of ours. She reminds us that those mainly Central American immigrants crossing the border in large numbers whom the president has raged against since 2015 are, in fact, the desperate victims of a set of decisions made not in Tegucigalpa, Guatemala City, or San Salvador, but in Washington over more than half a century.

-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

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What Happens in El Norte
Doesn’t Stay in El Norte

t’s hard to believe that more than four years have passed since the police shot Amílcar Pérez-López a few blocks from my house in San Francisco’s Mission District. He was an immigrant, 20 years old, and his remittances were the sole support for his mother and siblings in Guatemala. On February 26, 2015, two undercover police officers shot him six times in the back, although they would claim he’d been running toward them with an upraised butcher knife.

For two years, members of my little Episcopal church joined other neighbors in a weekly evening vigil outside the Mission police station, demanding that the district attorney bring charges against the men who killed Amílcar. When the medical examiner’s office continued to drag its feet on releasing its report, we helped arrange for a private autopsy, which revealed what witnesses had already reported -- that he had indeed been running away from those officers when they shot him. In the end, the San Francisco district attorney declined to prosecute the police for the killing, although the city did reach a financial settlement with his family back in Guatemala.

Still, this isn’t really an article about Amílcar, but about why he -- like so many hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans, Hondurans, and El Salvadorans in similar situations -- was in the United States in the first place. It’s about what drove 225,570 of them to be apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol in 2018 and 132,887 of them to be picked up at or near the border in a single month -- May -- of this year. As Dara Lind observed at Vox, “This isn’t a manufactured crisis, or a politically engineered one, as some Democrats and progressives have argued.”

It is indeed a real crisis, not something the Trump administration simply cooked up to justify building the president's wall. But it is also absolutely a manufactured crisis, one that should be stamped with the label “made in the U.S.A.” thanks to decades of Washington’s interventions in Central American affairs. Its origins go back at least to 1954 when the CIA overthrew the elected Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz. In the 1960s, dictatorships would flourish in that country (and elsewhere in the region) with U.S. economic and military backing.

When, in the 1970s and 1980s, Central Americans began to rise up in response, Washington’s support for right-wing military regimes and death squads, in Honduras and El Salvador in particular, drove thousands of the inhabitants of those countries to migrate here, where their children were recruited into the very U.S. gangs now devastating their countries. In Guatemala, the U.S. supported successive regimes in genocidal wars on its indigenous Mayan majority. To top it off, climate change, which the United States has done the most of any nation to cause (and perhaps the least to forestall or mitigate), has made subsistence agriculture increasingly difficult to sustain in many parts of Central America.

U.S. Actions Have Central American Consequences

Scholars who study migration speak of two key explanations for why human beings leave their homes and migrate: “pull” and “push” factors. Pull factors would include the attractions of a new place, like economic and educational opportunities, religious and political liberties, and the presence there of family, friends, or community members from back home. Push factors driving people from their homes would include war; the drug trade; political, communal, or sexual violence; famine and drought; environmental degradation and climate change; and ordinary, soul-eating poverty.

International law mandates that some, but not all, push factors can confer “refugee” status on migrants, entitling them to seek asylum in other countries. This area of humanitarian law dates from the end of World War II, a time when millions of Europeans were displaced, forcing the world to adjust to huge flows of humanity. The 1951 Geneva Convention defines a refugee as anyone who has

“a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country...”

Almost three-quarters of a century later, that legal definition still theoretically underlies U.S. policy toward refugees, but this country has always welcomed some refugees and not others. In the 1980s, for instance, Salvadorans fleeing U.S.-supported death squads had almost no hope of getting asylum here. On the other hand, people leaving the communist island of Cuba had only to put a foot on U.S. territory to receive almost automatic asylum.

Because of its origins in post-war Europe, asylum law has a blind spot when it comes to a number of forces now pushing people to leave their homes. It’s unfortunate that international law makes a distinction, for instance, between people who become refugees because of physical violence and those who do so because of economic violence. A well-founded fear of being shot, beaten, or raped may get you asylum. Actual starvation won’t.

Today, a number of push factors are driving Central Americans from their homes, especially (once again) in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Key among them are political corruption and repression, the power of the drug cartels, and climate change -- all factors that, in significant ways, can be traced back to actions of the United States.

According to World Bank figures, in 2016 (the latest year available), El Salvador had the highest murder rate in the world, 83 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. Honduras took second place with 57 per 100,000, while tenth place went to Guatemala, with 27. Mexico wasn’t far behind with 19. (By comparison, with 5.3 per 100,000, the United States was far down the list.)

By any measure, the three Central American nations of what’s sometimes called “the Northern Triangle” are dangerous places to live. Here’s why.

Political repression and violent corruption: Honduras, for example, has long been one of Central America’s poorest and economically most unequal countries. In the 1980s, the United States supported a military-run government there that routinely “disappeared” and tortured its opponents, while the CIA used the country as a training ground for the Contras it backed, who were then fighting the Sandinistas across the border in Nicaragua (who had recently deposed their own U.S.-backed dictator).

By the turn of this century, however, things were changing in Honduras. In 2006, José Manuel Zelaya became president. Although he’d run on a conservative platform, he promptly launched a program of economic and political reforms. These included free public education, an increased minimum wage, low-interest loans for small farmers, the inclusion of domestic workers in the social security system, and a number of important environmental regulations.

In 2009, however, a military coup deposed Zelaya, installing Porfirio Lobo in his place. Four of the six officers who staged the coup were graduates of the U.S.’s notorious School of the Americas, where for decades Latin American military officers and police were trained in the ways of repression and torture.

Washington may not have initiated the coup, but within days Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had given it her seal of approval, supporting that power grab in defiance of the Organization of American States. Since then, murder rates have skyrocketed, while corruption and drug trafficking have flourished as the drug cartels and local governing bodies as well as the national government melded into a single countrywide nightmare. In a recent New York Times report, for instance, Sonia Nazario detailed what this has meant just for public transportation where anyone who operates a taxi or a bus must pay a daily tax (double on special days like Christmas) amounting to 30% to 40% of the driver's income. But this isn’t a government tax. It goes to MS-13, the 18th Street gang (both of which arose in the United States), or sometimes both. The alternative, as Nazario reports, is death:

“Since 2010, more than 1,500 Hondurans working in transportation have been murdered -- shot, strangled, cuffed to the steering wheel and burned alive while their buses are torched. If anyone on a bus route stops paying, gangs kill a driver -- any driver -- to send a message.”

The police, despite having all the facts, do next to no­thing. Violence and corruption have only become more intense under Honduras’s current president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who returned to office in what was probably a stolen election in 2017. Although the Organization of American States called for a redo, the Trump administration hastily recognized Hernández and life in Honduras continued on its murderous course.

The drug business: Along with coups and Coca-Cola, Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, is another U.S. import to Central America. Although Donald Trump likes to cast most refugees as dark and dangerous gang members from south of the border, MS-13 had its roots in Los Angeles, California, among Salvadorans who had fled the U.S.-backed dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s. When young people who grew up in Los Angeles returned to El Salvador at the end of that country’s civil war, MS-13 went with them. What had begun as a neighborhood street gang created to protect Salvadoran youth from other gangs in that city has now grown into a vast criminal enterprise of its own -- as has the 18th Street gang, or Calle 18, which also came out of Los Angeles, following a similar path.

Without a major market for their product, drug cartels would have vastly less power. And we all know where that market lies: right here in the United States. Fifty years of this country’s “war on drugs” turn out to have provided the perfect breeding ground for violent outlaw drug cartels, while filling our own jails and prisons with more inmates than any other country holds. Yet it has done next to nothing to stanch addiction in this country. These days, if they remain in their own lands, many young people in the Northern Triangle face a stark choice between joining a gang and death. Not surprisingly, some of them opt to risk the trip to the U.S. instead. Many could have stayed home if it weren’t for the drug market in this country.

Climate Change and Environmental Degradation: Even if there were no corrupt regimes, no government repression, and no drug wars, people would still be fleeing Central America because climate change has made their way of life impossible. As what the New York Times calls the biggest carbon polluter in history, the United States bears much of the responsibility for crop failures there. The Northern Triangle has long been subject to periods of drought and flooding as part of a natural alternation of the El Niño and La Niña phenomena in the Pacific Ocean. But climate change has prolonged and deepened those periods of drought, forcing many peasants to abandon their subsistence farms. Some in Guatemala are now facing not just economic hardship but actual starvation thanks to a heating planet.

All along a drought corridor that runs from Nicaragua through Guatemala, the problem is a simple lack of water. The Guardian’s Nina Lakhani reports that, in El Salvador, many people now spend their days in search of enough water to keep their families alive. Even where (unsafe) river water is available, the price -- in money or sex -- extracted by the gangs for using it is often too high for most women to pay, so they are forced to rely on distant municipal taps (if they even exist). While El Salvadorans live with strict water rationing, the U.S.-based multinational Coca Cola remains immune to such rules. That company continues to take all the water it needs to produce and sell its fizzy concoction locally, while pouring foul-smelling effluvia into nearby rivers.

In Honduras, on the other hand, the problem is often too much water, as rising sea levels eat away at both its Atlantic and Pacific coasts, devouring poor people’s homes and small businesses in the process. Here, too, a human-fueled problem is exacerbated by greed in the form of shrimp farming, which decimates coastal mangrove trees that normally help to keep those lands from eroding. Shrimp, the most popular seafood in the United States, comes mostly from Southeast Asia and -- you guessed it -- Central America. Whether it’s shrimp or drugs, the point is that U.S. desires continue to drive devastation in Central America.

As the Trump administration does everything it can to accelerate and deepen the climate crisis, Central Americans are literally dying from it. Under international law, however, if they head for the U.S. in an attempt to save their lives and livelihoods, they don’t qualify as refugees because they are fleeing not physical but economic violence and so are not eligible for asylum.

No Asylum for You

These days, even immigrants with a well-founded fear of persecution who perfectly fit the Geneva Convention’s definition of “refugee” may no longer get asylum here. The Trump administration doesn’t even want to offer them a chance to apply for it. The president has, of course, called such groups of migrants, traveling together for safety and solidarity, an “invasion” of “very bad people.” And his administration continues to take a variety of concrete steps to prevent non-white refugees of just about any sort from reaching U.S. territory to make such a claim.

His early efforts to deter asylum seekers involved the infamous family-separation policy, in which children who arrived at the border were taken from their parents in an effort to create the sort of publicity that would keep others from coming. An international outcry -- and a federal court order -- brought an official end to that policy in June 2018. At the time, the government was ordered to return such children to their parents.

As it happened, the Department of Homeland Security proved largely incapable of doing so, because quite often it hadn’t kept decent records of the parents’ names or locations. In response to an ACLU lawsuit listing 2,700 individual children living without their families in this country, the administration acknowledged that, in addition to named children, thousands more fell into that category, lost in what can only laughingly be called “the system.”

You might think that, if the goal were to keep people from leaving their homes in the first place, the Trump administration would do what it could to improve life in the Northern Triangle. If so, however, you would be wrong. Far from increasing humanitarian aid to El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, the administration promptly slashed those funds, ensuring yet more misery and undoubtedly forcing yet more to flee Central America.

Its most recent ploy: to require refugees to apply for asylum in the first country they come to after leaving their own. Because Guatemala lies between Mexico and the rest of the Northern Triangle, that means Salvadorans and Hondurans will officially have to apply there first. President Trump even used the threat of new tariffs against Guatemalan goods to negotiate such an agreement with that country’s outgoing president Jimmy Morales to secretly designate his nation a “safe third country” where migrants could apply for asylum.

There is something more than a little ironic in this, given that the Guatemalan government can’t even offer its own people anything like safety. Significant numbers of them have, of course, been fleeing to Mexico and heading for the U.S. border. Trump’s solution to that problem has been to use the threat of tariffs to force Mexico to militarize its own border with Guatemala, in the process frustrating the new administration of president Andres Manuel López Obrador.

On August 1st, a federal judge in San Francisco issued an injunction against that “safe third country” policy, prohibiting its use for the time being. For now (at least theoretically), migrants from the Northern Triangle should still be able to apply for asylum in the U.S. The administration will certainly fight the injunction in the courts, while doing everything in its power to stop those immigrants in any way it can.

Meanwhile, it has come up with yet another way to prevent people from claiming asylum. Historically, family members of those persecuted in their own countries have been eligible to apply, too. At the end of July, Attorney General William Barr announced that “immigrants fearing persecution because of threats against their family members are no longer eligible for asylum.” This is particularly cruel because, to extort cooperation from their targets, drug gangs routinely make -- and carry out -- threats of rape and murder against family members.

A Real Crisis

There is indeed a real crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. Hundreds of thousands of people like Amílcar are arriving there seeking refuge from dangers that were, to a significant degree, created by and are now being intensified by the United States. But Donald Trump would rather demonize desperate people than deploy the resources needed to attend to their claims in a timely way -- or in any way at all.

It's time to recognize that the American way of life -- our cars and comforts, our shrimp and coffee, our ignorance about our government’s actions in our regional “backyard” -- has created this crisis. It should be (but in the age of Trump won’t be) our responsibility to solve it.

Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. Her previous books include Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States and Letters from Nicaragua.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.