Venezuelans protest Rio Treaty sanctions
Thousands of Venezuelans have flocked to the streets in the capital, Caracas, to decry a decision by parties to a Cold War-era regional defense treaty to impose sanctions on Venezuela.
The protest on Wednesday came a day after signatories to the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR) — known as the Rio Treaty — agreed to cooperate in pursuing economic sanctions and travel restrictions for Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s associates over accusations of corruption and human rights violations.
Waving Venezuela’s national flags, the protesters chanted, “Caracas will be the grave of fascism,” and carried banners that read, “Peoples reject Rio Treaty.”
Jorge Arreaza, the Venezuelan minister of foreign affairs, and Diosdado Cabello, the president of Venezuela’s National Constituent Assembly, attended the rally in Caracas as main speakers.
“Today a meeting is being held, a supposed legal meeting, when in fact it is an illegal meeting, of the foreign ministers of the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, which is a military treaty, of military assistance,” Arreaza said. “It has never been applied in its 72 years of history and they intend to apply it to the people of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela this year and next year.”
Cabello, for his part, denounced the agreement as an “obsolete and repressive mechanism that died the very time it was invoked.”
The member countries of the Rio Treaty decided to adopt sanctions against 29 Venezuelan government officials at a meeting in the Colombian capital of Bogota on Tuesday.
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