[News] Unilateral Coercive Measures and the War on Women
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Thu Mar 20 10:54:29 EDT 2025
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*Unilateral Coercive Measures and the War on Women: The Twelfth
Newsletter (2025)*
Alejandra Laprea (Venezuela), /El acuerpamiento de las mujeres es
nuestra estrategia de defensa/ (Women’s Embodied Solidarity Is Our
Defence Strategy), 2022.
Dear Friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=044632561a&e=d206d0a40d>.
In 1945, when the United Nations Charter
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was drafted, its authors and those who first adopted it carefully
crafted language on how to deal with armed conflict in the world.
Between the signing of the charter in June and its coming into force in
October, the United States dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities:
Hiroshima, on 6 August, and Nagasaki, on 9 August. It is hard to digest
the fact that as the charter’s solemn preamble was being formalised,
setting out to ‘save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,
which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind’, the
United States armed forces were preparing to destroy two civilian cities
in a country already on the brink of surrender.
Nonetheless, the authors of the charter thought long and hard about the
problem of belligerent states and produced Chapter VII, which outlines
two approaches to prevent war. The first approach was to use as many
non-military methods as possible (Article 41) before the United Nations
could authorise violence against a belligerent state (Article 42). The
charter noted that the UN Security Council (UNSC) ‘may decide’ to call
for the ‘complete or partial interruption of economic relations and of
rail, sea, air, postal, telegraphic, radio, and other means of
communication, and the severance of diplomatic relations’. The only time
that the UNSC has used the full weight of Article 41 has been against
the racist government of Southern Rhodesia from 1968 (UNSC Resolution
no. 253
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to 1979 (UNSC Resolution no. 460
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with near full use of the article against Iraq from 1990 to 2003 and
Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1995. The most important thing about this
resolution is that the use of sanctions (a word that does not appear in
the charter) must be authorised by the UNSC. One state can apply its own
sanctions on another state in a bilateral dispute, but it cannot legally
force other states to abide by them. To do so is a violation of the UN
Charter.
Valentina Machado and Valentina Lasalvia (Uruguay), /Untitled/, 2021.
The last point is pertinent because the United States currently imposes
sanctions (a form of Unilateral Coercive Measures) against about forty
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countries without a UNSC mandate. And these have been increasing: from
2000 to 2021, the last period reviewed by the US Treasury Department,
the number of US sanctions increased
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by a remarkable 933%. The reason why US sanctions, which would be legal
if they were merely bilateral, are illegal is that the United States
chastises and punishes third countries that violate them and transact
normal commerce with sanctioned countries. Because the United States is
at the centre of the international financial system (with the dollar,
the SWIFT global payments system, and its veto power in the
International Monetary Fund), it is able to strangle countries that
otherwise would be able to compensate for the loss of trade with the US
by trading with the rest of the world.
The use of the word ‘strangle’ is not innocent. It is important to
understand how these sanctions work: there are primary sanctions on
targeted countries; secondary sanctions on firms or countries that trade
with the targeted country; and tertiary sanctions on firms or countries
that face secondary sanctions. This is endless. It is what has garrotted
Cuba since 1962. Study upon study shows
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that they hurt the poorest of people in the societies under attack. They
are as ‘targeted’ as the ‘smart bombs’ that destroy entire
neighbourhoods and wipe out entire families. The gap between these
unilateral coercive measures (UCMs) and a war with bombs is certainly
great since the latter are far more destructive to the /material/
infrastructure of the target country, yet the essence of the assault is
the same: two forms of war, one with the harshness of blockades and the
other with the viciousness of bombs. Sometimes people in power openly
acknowledge the devastation. When US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was
asked in 2019 by the Associated Press’s Matt Lee about the UCMs imposed
on Venezuela, Pompeo replied
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‘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’. What do these illegal UCMs do?
They create /pain and suffering/.
We have ample evidence of the impact of illegal UCMs on society. Since
she took up the post in 2020, the UN special rapporteur on the negative
impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights
Alena Douhan has produced
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an important body of work documenting the effects of UCMs from Syria to
Venezuela. In 2021, Douhan told
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the UN Human Rights Council that the impact of UCMs ‘is especially
severe for vulnerable groups’, including women and children as well as
‘indigenous people, people with disabilities, refugees, internally
displaced persons, migrants, people living in poverty, the elderly,
people affected by severe diseases, and others who confront particular
challenges in society’.
Our latest dossier, /Imperialist War and Feminist Resistance in the
Global South/
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(March 2025), highlights the use of UCMs to attack states and societies
that – by their very existence – defy the Global North. Our study on the
impact of UCMs reflects what Douhan found in 2021, which is that these
mechanisms harshly strike the most vulnerable groups. These groups, the
‘vulnerable’, lead the fight against UCMs: far from defenceless, they
are at the forefront of mobilising against and resisting the cruelty of
the hybrid war.
This dossier is largely focused on Venezuela, where we spoke with
leaders of peasant and worker organisations such as Heroines Without
Borders Organisation (Organización Heroínas sin Fronteras) and
Venezuelan Housing Assembly Jorge Rodríguez Padre (Asamblea Viviendo
Venezolanos Jorge Rodríguez Padre). Forced to hold together families in
distress due to the atrocity of UCMs and the patriarchal obligations for
women to overwhelmingly carry out the work of social reproduction,
working-class and peasant women formed a variety of mutual aid groups as
a way to build political power in their society. When they did not have
running water or medicine, or indeed food, they set up collectives of
clinics and food banks that had some state support but were largely the
work of the women themselves.
In December 2021, I visited the Altos de Lídice Commune, where I met
with a group of women who had gathered to confront the difficulties of
the COVID-19 pandemic. The commune is made up of more than 6,000 people
who are organised into eight communal councils (/consejos comunales/).
Built on democratic assemblies, Venezuela’s communes (/comunas/) are
envisioned as local spaces of self-governance and the building blocks
for the construction of socialism. Mobilising the population, rather
than just solving problems bureaucratically, is part of their
philosophy. The women I met that day talked about the clinic they set
up, which drew doctors from nearby hospitals to provide consultations
and free medicine (sent from connections they had built with a women’s
hospital in Chile). Women led this work; ‘we utilise the men’, said a
leader of the group, Alejandra Trespalacios, in jest. One of their most
moving and effective campaigns was an /arepazo/, where arepas (a round,
stuffed cornflour patty)**were distributed to the most vulnerable in the
community. They would weigh children and the elderly every three months
and give an arepa to anyone who was underweight as a symbol of their
commitment to every person in the community; the data allowed them to
know where to channel the food support in the neighbourhood. ‘These are
times of struggle’, Trespalacios said. The /arepazo/**was part of the
commune’s struggle against malnutrition and hunger.
At the same time, our dossier notes that there must also be serious
thought about how gender ‘reinforces the sexual division of political
labour’ in important efforts such as these. ‘While women have an
important presence and leadership role in community organising, this
does not necessarily extend to other spheres of political representation
and state management’. The struggle to ensure that women leaders move
from the community level to greater responsibility and power is part of
the essential fight of working-class and peasant women.
At the age of twelve, Olga Luzardo (1916–2016) joined a Marxist group in
the northwestern city of Maracaibo. In 1931, she became one of the
founders of the Communist Party of Venezuela (Partido Comunista de
Venezuela, PCV). A young Luzardo taught at the PCV’s Ho Chi Minh School
and brought her ‘travelling school’ across Venezuela to take Marxism to
the people. In 1937, she participated in the Congress of Women of
Venezuela (Congreso de Mujeres), which emerged out of the PCV’s women’s
cultural groups. Arrested during the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez
Jiménez, Luzardo was exiled to the Soviet Union and then returned to
Venezuela in 1958. She had several pseudonyms, such as ‘Jorge’, which
she used in her fight against the Venezuelan bourgeoisie, and
‘Petrovna’, inspired by the October Revolution, under which name she
built a reputation for herself as a journalist and poet in her desire to
craft new language for rebellion. While in prison between 1950 and 1952,
she wrote the poems that later appeared in the 1998 collection /Huellas
frescas/ (Fresh Footprints), one of which urges her daughter Iguaraya
Pérez, and indeed all girls, to be a ‘soldier’, a fighter for justice:
My daughter: I want you to be a soldier.
May your blood soak the
many-coloured flags that wave around the world
if it becomes necessary for our cause.
May peace, impossible as long as
there are nations and borders,
never find you dreaming idly
and without a good rifle on your back.
For the day when we all
have a weapon and a desire for a different life,
the entire Earth will become one homeland.
In order for there to be peace, my daughter,
the poor of the world must take up arms.
And, for this reason, I want you to be a soldier.
Warmly,
Vijay
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