Remigio Ceballos, Strategic Operational Commander of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces , said that the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance is a threat to the stability of Venezuela, this by the meeting that took place in Colombia with the assistance of countries who make up the Lima group.
These statements were offered during a act of imposing medals to professionals who graduated from the Bolivarian Military University of Venezuela.
In that sense, Ceballos said “Reason Commander Hugo Chávez had, in withdrawing from that treaty, that what he seeks is to generate instability and support invasions.”
The medal imposition ceremony was in charge of the general Pablo Pérez Villamizar, director of the Bolivarian Military University of Venezuela and president of the IAESEN, who decorated doctors, magister and postdoctors who graduated from that House of Higher Studies to forge true patriots in defense of the country.
It should be noted that this event was framed on the Day of the University Teacher and Academic Doctorate and Master’s Degree of the Institute of Higher Studies of National Defense (IAESEN), which was held from the Theater of the Military Academy in Caracas.
The Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (commonly known as the Rio Treaty, the Rio Pact, the Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, or by the Spanish-language acronym TIAR from Tratado Interamericano de Asistencia Recíproca) was an agreement signed in 1947 in Rio de Janeiro among many countries of the Americas. The central principle contained in its articles is that an attack against one is to be considered an attack against them all; this was known as the “hemispheric defense” doctrine.
In september 2019 Organization of American States activated the TIAR Treaty procedures earlier this month after twelve member-states approved a Colombian resolution classing Venezuela as a “clear threat to peace and security in the region.” The move stoked fears of foreign military intervention in the Caribbean country.
Venezuela and a number of fellow left-leaning governments withdrew from the TIAR treaty in 2012.
The measure was immediately condemned by the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, its regional allies and social movements across the continent. The foreign ministry of Venezuela denounced in a statement the “despicable decision of a small group of governments of the region that, aligned with the interests of the supremacist Government of the United States, invoked the activation of such a disastrous instrument of the history of our continent as the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR).”
In the statement, Venezuela also highlighted the historical legacy of the TIAR in Latin America and the Caribbean: “It is necessary to remember that the TIAR was imposed on our region by the United States within the framework of the Cold War, whose purpose was to legitimize military interventions in Latin America for ideological reasons. This happened in Guatemala in 1954, in Cuba in 1961, in the Dominican Republic in 1965, in Grenada in 1983 and in Panama in 1989. It is also important to underline that when there was a real aggression of an extra-continental power against a Latin American country, as in the case of Argentina in 1982 by the United Kingdom, the United States betrayed the continent and ignored its activation, aligning with its partner of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).”
With this history in mind, they condemned the fact that “the countries that were invaded by US troops and whose peoples were slaughtered due to the implementation of the TIAR today endorse a similar crime against a brotherly country.”
The ministry of foreign affairs of Cuba also released a statement rejecting the qualification of Venezuela as “a threat to the peace and security in the hemisphere,” and highlighted that it is the interventionist Monroe Doctrine used by the US, the hostility towards Venezuela and the use of this treaty for those means what actually put the regional peace and security at risk. Cuba also called on the governments and people of Our America and the world to oppose the measure “which seeks to justify, through an artificial legal protection, the intervention in the internal affairs of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, which is unacceptable.”
Many social movements across Latin America and the Caribbean have spoken out against the Cold War era treaty and have rejected the latest desperate attempt of the US and the Venezuelan opposition to destabilize the country and overthrow Maduro. The platform Social Movements of ALBA said in a statement, “Today, we call on the people of the world to remind these eleven governments, that the responsibility of a military aggression against Venezuela falls on them, as well as the infamy of violating the international principles of sovereignty and self-determination in order to bring a war to our region, which will only benefit one country, the US, while it will hurt all of our people, without mentioning all of the miseries that it will mean for Venezuela.
