Iran is playing important role in unifying Latin America, West Asia: Journalist

By Syed Zafar Mehdi

By helping to unify Latin America and West Asia, Iran is playing an important role in building a larger Global South bloc dedicated to development, according to a Latin American journalist and analyst.

Ben Norton, a journalist and political commentator based in Nicaragua, in an interview with the Press TV website, said many countries in Latin America and West Asia “share common development goals” and have faced “similar forms of imperialist aggression by Western colonial powers.

“By working together, they can learn from each other and build strength in unity,” he said, as Iran’s President Ebrahim Raeisi, accompanied by a high-ranking government delegation, touched down in Cuba on the last leg of his three-nation tour of Latin America on Thursday.

“For centuries, Western colonialist countries have tried to economically subordinate the Global South in order to extract its resources and exploit its wealth. If the countries of the South want to develop and free themselves from this neocolonial exploitation, they have to unite, forming new alliances and trade blocs, building their own institutions,” Norton told the Press TV website.

President Raeisi on Thursday met Cuban counterpart Miguel Diaz-Canel and said the two countries would work together in electricity generation, biotechnology, and mining, among other areas.

"The conditions and circumstances in which Cuba and Iran find themselves today have many things in common," Iran’s president was quoted as saying. "Every day our relations grow stronger."

Prior to Cuba, President Raeisi visited Venezuela and Nicaragua – countries sanctioned by the US.

"Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and Iran are among the countries that have had to heroically confront sanctions (...) threats, blockades and interference by Yankee imperialism and its allies with a tenacious resistance”, Diaz-Canel was quoted as telling his Iranian counterpart in Havana.

Norton, speaking to the Press TV website, said the US has imposed “illegal unilateral sanctions” on countries “representing more than one-third of the global population and more than one-quarter of the global GDP”. 

“This has, ironically, set off an international rebellion against the hegemony of the US dollar and the Washington-dominated global financial system,” he asserted, adding that countries that have been sanctioned are coming up with “new alternative institutions, challenging the SWIFT inter-bank messaging system, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund”.

“US sanctions have caused extreme human suffering, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths in countries like Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, Syria, Zimbabwe, Iraq, and the DPRK, devastating their economies,” Norton said, noting that Washington’s “addiction to waging economic warfare all around the world has also dug the grave of its own hegemony”.

President Raeisi’s landmark Latin America visit has drawn widespread reactions worldwide, including from American officials, who have expressed serious concern over it.

The Nicaragua-based journalist said North Americans “should be worried” about their own government, which is “waging wars around the world and spending trillions of dollars on death and destruction” but can’t provide affordable healthcare at home and grapples with nearly $2 trillion of student debt.

“North Americans should be worried about their own government spending billions more dollars on covert operations to try to destabilize and overthrow independent governments all around the world, while inside the US homelessness gets worse every single year, with more than half a million people living on the streets,” Norton told the Press TV website.

He hastened to add that the US has spent decades “disrupting and even destroying the lives of countless Iranian civilians”, and instead of complaining about Iranian diplomacy should “pursue its own diplomacy for once and end its wars on Iran and all other countries”.

On the swift transition from the unipolar to multipolar world order, Norton said Washington refuses to accept that the US-led unipolar world order is over.

“In a desperate attempt to cling on to its hegemony in an increasingly multipolar world, Washington has accelerated its aggression against the Eurasian powers of China, Russia, and Iran, while also expanding its anti-democratic interventions in Latin America”, he noted.

“In the past two decades, the United States has sponsored numerous coups, coup attempts, and destabilization operations in the region, targeting the leftist governments in Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Honduras, Brazil, Mexico, Ecuador, and Paraguay”.

He further said that this year (2023) marks the 200th anniversary of the colonial “Monroe Doctrine”, and that right-wing US politicians still “invoke this ugly doctrine to justify meddling in Latin America”.

The US empire, Norton remarked, will “always seek to undermine the independence and sovereignty of the revolutionary left-wing movements in Latin America”, because American foreign policy “is driven by the capitalist interests on Wall Street”. 

“The US system of government is not a democracy; it is an oligarchy controlled by billionaire oligarchs, whose corporations want to control Latin America's resources and exploit its people for cheap labor,” he stated, noting that this system must be replaced with a “true people's democracy”.

“That is precisely why regional unity inside Latin America and international unity with other parts of the Global South is so important because when these countries are united, they can defend themselves against imperialist aggression”.

Press TV’s website can also be accessed at the following alternate addresses:

www.presstv.co.uk