 organized. He's also an associate managing editor of the Journal Latin American Perspectives. Elmer received his master's degree in Southern Connecticut State University and his PhD at the University of New Mexico. All his degrees are in Latin American history. You have the floor Dr. Elmer. Thank you very much. Does everybody hear me? No problem? Okay. I'm in Venezuela where I have spent about half of my adult life. And I want to just begin by saying that there is a big gap between the stated purpose of sanctions and the discourse of those who defend sanctions on the one hand and what's actually happening on the ground. All international sanctions have exceptions. They're built into them. And those exceptions are typically food and medicine, for instance. Furthermore, there is a classification known as targeted sanctions, which means that the sanctions supposedly are directed only at individuals or individual companies. But it's a well-known fact that sanctions of any nature produce what is known as overreliance. That means that commercial, financial, manufacturing, enterprises, any place in the world, they fear that any transaction with that nation that's being sanctioned, that they'll be on the receiving end, that there will be secondary sanctions imposed on them as a penalty for having anything to do with that nation. And I think that the best proof, other people will talk about other aspects, negative aspects of the sanctions. But I think that the best proof of the nefarious effect of sanctions is that the vast majority of the citizens of those countries that are being sanctioned are opposed to the sanctions. Gallup polls indicate I'm an expert on Venezuela, but in the Middle East as well, you have the same kind of situation in which the majority people are opposed to sanctions. One of the leading members of the Venezuelan opposition who lives in Maryland told me in Maryland, where I'm also based, that with just a few exceptions, the leaders of the Venezuelan opposition, those who are opposed to the present government of Nicolas Maduro, they don't express support for sanctions in Venezuela. And that it's only in Miami where just the opposite takes place. In Miami, the moderate opposition leaders who are opposed to the sanctions, they don't dare support them because they would fear of being driven out of town. But in Venezuela, it's just the opposite. And all public opinion polls, all of them, indicate that 80% of the people of Venezuela are completely opposed to sanctions. And not only 80% of the general population, but the business sector, the Chamber of Commerce in Venezuela, known as Feddy Kameras, they're also opposed to the sanctions. The president of Feddy Kameras, Adan Cheles, as well as the past president, they've all talked about the devastating effect of overreliance. In other words, the term that we use in the States, overreliance being that those products such as food and medicine that are exempted end up not getting traded to Venezuela because of fear that any transaction with Venezuela will result in secondary sanctions. The past president of Feddy Kameras, Ricardo Cusano, talked about how difficult it is for Venezuelan business people just to open a bank account abroad. And Feddy Kameras, the Chamber of Commerce, has done a study that indicates that 17.5% of the effect of the sanctions has fallen on their shoulders, on the shoulders of business people. There's one exception in the case of Venezuela. And that's the current candidate for president, the president, the most important presidential candidate against Maduro, very controversial figure by the name of Maria Corina Machado, and she supports the sanctions. She just won the primaries that were held on Sunday. But just a few hours after those primaries were held, the leading pollster in Venezuela, a name that everybody in Venezuela knows, Luis Vicente León, he himself is openly identified with the opposition. And he stated that his surveys indicate that 70% of the people who support Maria Corina Machado, in other words, practically the only candidate that is supporting the sanctions against Venezuela, but 70% of the people who are voting for her are opposed to the sanctions. Naturally, with such a high percentage of people who are opposed to sanctions, the attitudes towards the United States are negatively affected. In a nutshell, US prestige has suffered throughout the world as a result of the sanctions, which people generally consider to be unjust. This is especially true in the Middle East. Gallup polls indicate that this is the case throughout the Middle East. Gallup poll in 2022 indicated that even more than any place else in the Middle East, in Iran, people hold the US responsible for their situation. That poll indicated in just last year that only 9% of people living in Iran who responded to that survey trust the US commitment to democracy. While 81% of people in Iran said the US is not serious about democracy, 82% responded that the US is not serious about improving their economic situation. These Gallup polls contradict what much of the US media is saying, namely that Iranians embrace pro-Western values and opinions. That might have been the case in the past, but the sanctions have changed that situation. And not only is our prestige being seriously negatively affected, but the possibility that countries fearing sanctions will move away from the US dollar. That becomes more and more of a threat every day. International sanctions against countries like Venezuela and Iran, and the possibility of sanctions being imposed on other countries that may have differences with the US because of cultural differences, political differences, just the possibility that sanctions will be opposed is enough to convince political leaders across the political spectrum to move away from the dollar as the nations of BRICS are currently doing. The BRICS consisted of five nations, now six new members, including Iran, have entered. So there are now 11 members of BRICS. And sanctions have become a driver for the declining use of the dollar in international transactions. At the last summit of BRICS in Johannesburg, President Lula of Brazil called for a BRICS currency, and he said the purpose of my proposal is not to displace the dollar, but to allow member nations to have an option. Now, why did Lula say that? Why did Lula frame the issue along those lines? I believe that the purpose of Lula's proposal was to give countries like Iran and Russia that are being sanctioned in any other nation in the future that gets sanctioned an opportunity, an option, to circumvent the sanctions. Some countries are arguing that the use of sanctions which are made possible by the use of the dollar as an international medium of exchange is an abuse of Bretton Woods, the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944, which never meant to confer in the United States political power of this nature. So just to summarize, I think I'm nearing my 10 or 15 minute limit. So just to summarize what I'm trying to say here, the U.S. is basically shooting itself in the foot by relying on sanctions to further its agenda. Its international prestige is taking ahead and its economic interests are being endangered. Thank you. We will have Dr. Richard Cohn, who is a professor at the University of Maryland's College of Agriculture. After working in Nicaragua with the Union, Congress, and Ranchers, UNAA, in the 1980s, he visited the country several times and now offers a winter term study abroad course in sustainable agriculture and environment in Nicaragua. His studies include evaluating and implementing methods to decrease adverse environmental effects from agriculture and the effects of U.S. sanctions on climate change. You have the floor for the court. You want to stand outside? I can see everybody. The first thing that we have to stand about sanctions is that developing countries' economies in our agriculture and our food systems are already broken before we get to start. The problem is that developing countries import their staple foods and export foods that are not essential to the United States, like coffee and fruit. They rely on imports and exports for their very survival. The sanctions on a country's exports or their imports are devastating and they basically cause hunger, which is what they're intending to do. Whether they're sanctions on gold or coffee or beef or food itself or medicine, they're intending, tired of it, is to make use of it, despite what the people who talk about these sanctions might say. Countries that try to escape from this model imposed on them by the United States are concerned with the threat to the security of the United States. The model that they're proposing is the idea that they have to get all their food from the United States and export specific things. So economic development, trade with other countries, domestic food production are all considered specific threats to the order. If there are elections where their militaries can't be manipulated easily and they're slated to regime change and the sanctions come to bring about an issue change, that is the goal of the sanctions. The sanctions push resistant countries like Cuba, Venezuela, and God, toward trade agreements with other countries. It's one of the things the US considers a threat. And they also push them to developing their own agriculture, their own food systems, so they can give themselves another threat. And so the US continues to map up the sanctions because they're completely felling and being careful of overthrowing the government and taking over the system. How did this come about? We learned long ago in the United States that agriculture does not work very well with pre-market capitalists. Agriculture is a very unpredictable business. You know, it may not rain one year if you have a drive, you don't have enough food. And so we intentionally made policies because even in a good year, if everybody produces lots of food, there's too much food and the price falls out and a lot of people go out of business. So we figured that it was very unstable and even to be stable. So we developed a system of price supports. So it's ag policy. We buy up excess food when there's excess food available in the United States. And then we don't have the price fall out. So we keep agriculture. That means every year we're producing more food than we need by design, unless we have a drive or some sort of catastrophic event. And we're still prepared that way just not. So we don't start. We have a clear stable ag economy. But the problem with this ag economy is that we're constantly producing too much food and it's not easy to store it. So what do we do with that extra food? Well, in the 1960s, JFK and then Nixon got this idea that there were countries where people were hungry, so we should just ship them our extra food. And so we started this practice of food for peace. But the problem with that is that when we had extra food, now the farmers in those countries could not keep. They couldn't provide produce for the people in the U.S. imports. And so they went out of business. And so now we have a system when there's some sort of problem, when you don't have good production, we are okay because we just don't have extra food. We just don't export it. Well, what about the countries that also don't have any food and they can't import it? So now the whole, all of the risk is put down. And so that is how we fell into this. And so even in the 1980s, Reagan deemed that one of his major objectives was to get countries like Guatemala and Nicaragua, which had massive starvation, hungry starvation, get them to produce more export crops like he said strawberries and asparagus, and import green from the United States. And then we had the free trade agreement in 2004, the CAFTA. And the idea was that U.S. companies would export our agriculture surplus and we would import more from Central America and Latin America and the Caribbean. So again, emphasizing that we're trying to keep this system alive. But the problem is that it doesn't actually work for most people in developing countries. Because what happens is the landowners get welfare and they make dollars, which they use to buy luxury items for their life. They don't use those dollars to feed their population of their country. And so hunger gets worse even though they're exploiting these crops. So the system doesn't work. And it gets to the point where you have a samosa or, you know, the case in Cuba, where people are literally hungry while they have this vibrant economy, export based economy. And some people are very comfortable with it. Welcome. So you have revolution. And when that revolution occurs, one of the things that they try to do is to help them produce their own food, give land to peasants so that they can produce them because they know how to do it. And those revolutions are exactly what we call in the United States, communist. So we have sanctions today. And it's a step, it's a step of war. We have propaganda to demonize every country that we want to overthrow in order to keep this system in place. So Nicaragua, well, let me give you some, some more background. Well, the long-term goal of sanctions is overthrow countries. It's not very good at that. We haven't been very successful in the cases where we've applied sanctions in Cuba or Venezuela. But it is good at the objective. So when you have goals, the broader long-term picture, then you have objectives to get to your goals. And one of the objectives is create suffering, starting medical issues, create all kinds of problems so that people won't like these governments, which they currently like. They are popular governments because of the fact they provide for people's health and food. So, you know, deny them the ability to do that. So for example, the sanctions on gold in the law itself, it says this is to deny the Nicaraguan government the ability to tax these, this industry, to destroy the gold, export the industry, is a way to keep the government from getting money. How does the Nicaraguan government use the money that it obtains? More than endless for social programs. And a lot of the rest could arguably be social programs as well, infrastructure to develop and make their economy more efficient. So we're talking about, you know, directly targeting their ability to do themselves. So we're good at the objective. They do make people suffer, but they don't pull it through a government's very offer. With the exception in 1990, so the US used sanctions and war, counter war, funding tariffs to attack the agricultural system in rural areas to destroy hospitals and healthcare clinics to make it so people would be afraid to live in rural areas. If they can't live in the rural areas, they won't farm. So to destroy their food system, they engaged in this counter war. And on top of that, use very, very restrictive sanctions. And of course, eventually broke the economy and people voted for the Nicaraguan government, but the United States wanted to be the core. And then all of our family, then it had six presidents who certainly were up, including the one the US court had written for, who supported the most So this family got power again, thanks to the US health and the sanctions that played an important role in doing that. So they're reaching their goal, but wasn't the right goal. Because after she came into power, the success of the liberal governments for 16 years, they cut education, they cut food products, they cut, so illiteracy with infrastructure fell apart. The government cuts in all sorts of programs and they took the land away from the peasants who had received the lag in the previous government. So again, they can't bring the spoon for themselves. The conditions got even worse after the war stopped, or at least they were just bad. They didn't do good. And so there you have the problem that the Nicaraguan people are faced with. They can vote out, they can vote in the government the US wants and starve, or they can vote for the person in the government that they really want and starve because of sanctions. There's a one way or the other they lose, so they might as well lose, and it takes a lot. It's not like, oh, well, it's a little inconvenient for me. So I'm going to vote for this other government. No, it has to be extremely difficult before they're going to vote for the US backhand. So in each of these cases, all of these countries work together to try to achieve food supply. Nicaragua is 90% food supply today. So they produce 90% of their own food. They still rely on some thermalizers, things as in force, but they're doing less of that because of the food systems, the research that they're doing and things that they're into it. But that doesn't mean they're not, that the sanctions don't still have an effect. Because even the exports that are sanctioned, they can't sell the major monies to the United States, the industry department, that means they're not going to be able to give things that they can't use themselves, technology, for example, to modernize, to make things more efficient. So if you know the history of Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, the way people live there, you would understand that it'll take a lot, a real lot to make that goal of authoritarianist governance. And we really don't have a business doing that. Their determination isn't irrational. It's based on their knowledge, their experience. They lose either way. So they're taking the sanctions instead of signing with the government they want to put in place. And we lose as well, like that coffee over there. It's still legal to import it. It's sustainable to produce, has low impact on the environment, giving greenhouse gas effects, which prep us and the taste through and yield it. Those are the sorts of things that they're targeting. So the Chair of the Justice Department, the Justice Department, admitted that the Chair of Foreign Affairs, you know, Senator Mendes, was taking bribes in various regards in exchange for promoting policies, like these policies. And I wonder how many others are also taking these bribes for the display. You have to question, you know, any of these policies that somebody like that is promoting, you know, what is the basis for that? Who do they benefit? Because they only benefit the small, the land-holding elite, all of our families at the expense, and they benefit some U.S. companies at the expense of a lot of people. And that is ultimately, you know, the system that we have needs to be reconsidered. And we need to even look at PAUSE. And there are certainly ways we can manage our surpluses that wouldn't be judgmental to people who are developing countries. Thank you. Thank you very much. Next, we have Dr. Ann Faust, who is an expert in maternal and child health who has worked in a variety of countries. Dr. Faust is a neonatal surgeon and fellow with the Global Children's Health Program. She is a former World Health Organization surgeon and humanitarian worker, former U.N. Human Rights Investigator and current WHO code keeper. Ann is also a mother of four. You have the floor, Dr. Faust. Thank you very much. I'm also going to stand up because I don't know, it feels right. First of all, thank you very much for inviting me here. I'll address the elephant in the room. I live in Howard County, Maryland. And if you're going to say now, if I ever Howard County accent, this has to be the weirdest one. Obviously. I'm born in North Yorkshire, England, England, but not London up north. I've been calling this country my home for the last 20 years, yeah, 23 years and 10 days time to the day. This is important because if you are born into something, you don't realize how privileged to be in there. I chose this country to be my country. I chose to raise my children in this country. I'm an adopted American, so this is a privilege I'm aware of. My U.S. passport is a privilege. My children's U.S. passports are also privileges. And this is also something important. I would like them to know this power and use this one. But this is why it is important for me how U.S. represents itself abroad. I am mother of four. As I said, my connection to Nicaragua started funnily enough with a professor, Korn's wife. She's a clinician at the same place I work, keep my mother in baby clinic. And she just came to me and said that, oh, we're going to Nicaragua. It's a woman's delegate. And I just would you like to come? I mean, I think about Nicaragua. I always worked in Africa and Middle East and Far East. So I said, oh, yes, I mean, we're going in January, just it beats being in a Central American country, beats being in Columbia, Maryland, any day of January. So I said, yes. And I took my two younger sons at the time. They were nine and 12, I think. And my daughter who studied, still studies psychology and women and gender studies. Because it was a woman's delegate, I wanted to see, I wanted her to experience how the other woman lives in the world. And I went to Nicaragua with, I had no political agenda. I had no sociological agenda. I knew nothing about it. And if you have, I'm sure most of you experienced about Nicaragua and Central America, just I'm going to ask you to drop those along and walk with me the path I walked for the next 10 minutes or so. If you have any questions, please go ahead and ask. I'm more than happy to answer the best of my ability. So what I do, I've been a doctor for 28 years now, and I've been doing maternal child healthcare in various departments in various countries. And that was my main point of interest. What do they do? How do they think? Of course, I told my friends and family and they said, you're going to go to Nicaragua, you're going to take the children with you? But I paid for the tickets and from North Yorkshire, I'm going to go anyway. So here I am, we get in the plane, we arrive, people are incredibly pleasant at the entrance. And then from there to tax drivers, lovely, if we just arrive in the middle of the night, in this beautiful place, the birds are still chirping in the middle of the night. And in the morning, we ate and had to go. Rice is incredibly important in Nicaragua. They eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And if we go with the sanctions, one of the things you are going to take away from them is the rice. I'm going to talk as a mum here. I will never respect anyone who takes food away from my children's family. This is, if there's any parents in this room, I cannot imagine you'll think differently. What is U.S.'s achievement? What is our goal by implementing sanctions? Because if we want the government to change their ways, then we have to do our things, we have to change our methods. Taking food out of children, taking medication out of people is not the way to go. I will never respect just like any of you, I'm sure. If anybody takes from my family and my children. So, what have I seen in Nicaragua? They had an amazing way of doing medicine. What they have done, they started with the grassroots. You have got a neighborhood, you have got a neighborhood. I chose you, I chose you, or you come forward and I trained you. You are the first person to approach to that neighborhood for all health needs. This would be mental health, this would be physical health. Mental health is really, really important because I'm sure again, many of you are better experts than I have ever going to be. I had a lot of issues with women's beating up, domestic violence, all of those. So, if you live in this community, if your husband is beating you up, I'm going to know it because I live next door. So, even if you don't want to tell me, I'm going to come with a cup of coffee in your home in the morning and I'm going to say, what is going on? Do tell. It is much easier to talk to a friend than somebody else. But if you want to go to that somebody else, they did something, again, to me, incredibly amazing. They created these police stations, all for women, made out of women. I'm going to ask those who you identify yourself as a female. If you're in a stress situation, who would you like to go to talk to? A woman or a man? We all do. It doesn't matter how old you are and how do we do. The other thing that just strikes me is, the curb lands are really, really poor. I mean, really poor. Most of the houses I've visited has got soiled floors. Granted, it's cleaner than my kitchen floor, but nevertheless, most of them don't even have running water. However, guess what? They all have electricity, they all have internet. My earphone, who uses T-Mobile, has always been difficult. I work in what children they say in children's. I'd go to black spots all over the place. I can't reach my phone. I've never had any issues in the kind of work. It's up on the mountains where they were growing the coffee or down in the cities. Never had any issues because their government think this is one of the human rights, which it is. So we went to the hospitals. We went to the little clinics. Little clinics is about the second step of their healthcare system is the pharmacies. You can get a pharmacy pretty much at the end of every street corner. The third is the small clinics. The place we stayed actually was a sponsor of one of these such clinics in the neighborhood. We had a privilege to go there, talk with the nurses, talk with the doctors over there, and they all talking about how accessible they are. In here, when you try to make an appointment with your dermatologist, and we are one of the better countries, mind you, you have to wait about three months. Over there, this is not the issue. You need it. You pretty much would be seen within a couple of days, even if not necessarily with a dermatologist. At least you get your first appointment. They start you with something and they escalate your issues. The other thing they do this incredibly well in there, they don't expect you to come to them. Just like us, they also have to work hard. So for women's issues, especially, they have these massive buses, mammograms. I'm at that age now. I have to get my breasts squeezed. I'm telling you, if this was a man, this would have been changed by now for a long time ago. If you're a man, don't squeeze it away. It doesn't matter. And in which ways, they take the mammograms in these big buses into the big factories where most of the women work. So you don't have to take time off. You don't have to try to find a childcare. The healthcare comes to you. This is a massive deal. I mean, I can see some of you with just skeptics around you. You're with their friend here. I'm an absolute skeptic. So I called him putting a show for us because we're a group. They're taking us what they want to see. So what do I do? I take my sons. I take my daughter. I just walk away to just make him poor Jill, just sweat. Where did she go now? I go to the markets. I go to the talk to the woman on that. I speak no Spanish, mind you. My son speaks a little bit. Google Translate is wonderful. Hand gestures are wonderful. Willingness is even better than anything else you can talk to anybody in the world. So I talk with people. I buy things to eat on the thing. This lady, it just makes this the best tasting cornbreads, a patty kind of things there. This is her livelihood. She is happy. She's constantly loving. She's got her grandchildren over there just talking to other people. Other people are happy. So I haven't seen miserable people. I haven't walked around the downtown DC. Most of us, including me, we don't like our jobs. We don't like our... I have to work most weeks over 50 hours. I have a phone. I have an accessibility. I work about 100 hours a week. We don't have this. If you're a breastfeeding mom, you have a new baby, you start work an hour late. You go home an hour early and you get pumping rights. I had to work for this years in the US. We just passed this. And we have so many... We want women to work. We want women to work at home. We want women to be happy. Well, you have to give up one thing. You usually give up the happiness because that's the easiest. Well, I don't know if that's true. So this was one of the compounds of family thing. The other thing is just shocked me how their government was investing in the women and family. We went to different coffee places and I met with this amazing woman. One of them, I still can't get over her. She is... I mean, I'm short, as you see. She is shorter than me. She is thin, but fierce as a fire. These were all free women. They were all victims of domestic violence. And they reached... They have got a system of, you know, getting the men away from the immediate thing, training the men and they giving them another chance to involve with the family. This is also very important. They don't say men are bad and just you're out. They are training them. They're educating them and recuperating with the family. The men offends again, or women offends again, you know, less likely, but it is possible. Then they took them out and, you know, put them away. Well, again, I'm going to ask the woman amongst yourself, if you have issues with your partner, the number one fear of all of us, where am I going to go with my children? This is across the world, is say, in Nicaragua, in Oswana, in, you know, Sierra Leone, doesn't matter. Well, they find a solution. These three women, uneducated, mind you, they barely read and write. Approach to the government. We have children. We have, you gave us the house. Oh, that's another thing. If this happens, when you get married, house ownership becomes 50-50. And this 50-50, if you're imprisoned because of domestic violence, becomes 100% of the women's. Can you imagine that? I have a home. Rest of it, I can make it. But now I have to feed the kids. So this government gave them coffee and they give them a land and they taught them how to produce this coffee. This lady I'm talking about, she said, I'm going to learn how to read and write. She did learn how to read and write. She finished practical equivalent and she even went to university, which is free to everyone. And she studied, I can't remember what she did, but today they have an international coffee thing, which you can actually buy some of it here in DC, as well as in Baltimore. They were so, another similar group of five, six women were so impressed. Oxfam, some of you might have heard, is an international organization, gave them money to improve their abilities. Today, they don't just do coffee. They have got also wine. They have got also tea. They know how to do bio-dynamic agriculture. Of course, you know, Professor Korn would know better than me. But what they do is, their leftover production, it just turned to something else into feed the trees, they grow. So nothing is thrown away, nothing is just wasted. It's, they are enough for what they are. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but they still have the important rights for it today, over the summer. Right. I mean, so what are we going to take away from these people? By taking away their rights, because this is one of the sanctions, it's a food sanction in there. What are we going to take away from these people when we take away their medicine? I have seen this, I have seen this happening. I have seen the children passing out on the stretchers, because there is no anesthesia, because there is no x-ray. We just thought that, oh, they can be used to make. I have seen it in Sierra Leone, Syria. And lately, actually on the border, well, in Palestine, it just only about a week ago. This is a seven-month-old baby was in a stretcher. There were no humanitarian aids were going in. And it was terrible. I mean, seven-month-old child lost the left foot, passed out on a stretcher. We are better than this. I would like my children to be better than this. I would like my children to, when they go to other country, the other country, people wouldn't look at their passport and say, oh, you're American. I don't want them to lose. I chose this country to come here. I would like my children to be as proud as I am. They're born into it. They may not know the privilege they are in. But I would like them to know. I would like your children to know this because it is a big privilege. And I would like my country to do better. I would like my country to be like Finland, where my father is from. No Finnish person would ever worry about it just when they go with their passport. I would like the United States to be like that. As I said, I'm not a politician. I don't know how to best achieve this. If you're a politician, please find a different way than taking children and medicine for people. So they shouldn't be using a white vinegar to sterilize things. Doctors shouldn't be just going around your arm. We're just broken from three different places. Try to fix it with just my feeling. This is what I come to ask from you. This is my experience from Nicaragua. If you have any questions, I'm more than welcome to answer you. Best of my ability. Thank you. Now we'll hear from Dr. Scott Hadelman, Friends of Latin Earth. I grew up in a pop exchange in Chicago's inner city. And so when I heard about sanctions, it really is home. We heard at the introduction of this one, the policy that many people think of sanctions as being less violent, less violent. Intervention. And sanctions are concerned by many to be a blunt instrument. But they're pointed as the effect those who are unseen and without a voice, like I was born of, the poor, the elderly, the disabled, the infirm, and our infants and our children. I'm going to read Reflections of Communion in the Arab world. I was born and raised in Cuba and moved to the United States with my husband over 20 years ago. I love my family and the opportunity to live among so many generous, open-minded, and kind people. We have two precious children aged 8 and 10 years old. They're starting to try to understand the wider world we live in, beyond our family, friends, schools, and neighbors. The last couple of times we visited my family in Cuba, they saw people at the bottom lines waiting to shop in grocery stores, only to come out with shopping bags that were not very full. They have noticed that people are thin, more worried about making men's feet, worried about simply finding the food and medicine they need. The people of Cuba have experienced more electricity back ends and cannot drive their cars, very kind of worried for fear of finding our guests. My children see this and then later hear that this person, who they know, is no longer living in Cuba, but has moved to the United States because they find being lost home of the situation. When they ask me why, I have to tell them that the US has sanctions, has many sanctions, has had sanctions against Cuba for over 60 years, and that under the last two US administrations, even more sanctions have been given that it is impossible for Cubans to live much better under such circumstances. They ask, why the sanctions? I tell them that the US government says that it is to help the Cuban people and they ask, how does this help? What am I to tell my children that unfortunately, I don't think the US government really wants to help Cubans, that the US and Margo are giving them this itself, the greatest violation of Cubans right to live, a violation of those very same people that the US government says that is trying to help? And then they ask me, why would they lie like that? My own children, there is nothing to explain, really. That the US government doesn't like the Cuban government. My oldest son responds he's ten years old. Then the Cuban government should sanction the US too and treat them the same way. My son, I tell them that the US is a much bigger country than Cubans even if they could. Know that the US people are not to blame for what the US government is doing, that they would not approve of the people that my daughter says. That is bullying. Just the Cubans who are bigger, you should not keep on protecting the people and small the people. What do you say to children when they ask about the US government? Why does the US government have to make so many people suffer in the world? In the name of supposed values and ideals that it is proving to not really care about? Why does it keep doing this to the Cuban people for the longest time? With no positive results, only families broken and people dead because of irregular migration. You must know what everyone with a free heart and free life knows that sanctions cause hardship and suffering of entire occupation. The truth is it will change. Our unjust must be illegal and don't produce any positive results. They heard both peoples, the conscience of the people of the US whose aims, the sanctions are imposed and of course the people of Cuba who then suffer under those sanctions. I ask you, how much longer do we have to wait for the US government to do the right thing? I mean both the people of Cuba and the people of the United States, how much longer do we have to wait? President Obama seemed to understand this. President Biden showed two, he promised this campaign with a strong public pen. President Biden can alleviate a lot of unnecessary suffering for millions and millions of people and bring hope again. But I fear that he is only listening to the people and if they're from the sanctions and the conflict of both countries, you can urge President Biden to at a minimum take Cuba off the state sponsors of the terrorism list. Wave title three of the health spurts and gaps. Left many of the other 240 sanctions imposed by President Trump is helpless. I hope you know we're dependent. Thank you. I think I was chosen because I've been an activist for a number of years and I've been there around six times and when I went first I saw a country forward in Cuba that I had previously seen. I saw a country where the children had to carry their chairs down the street to wherever school was being held because there were no facilities and their parents if they could would send them to school if they couldn't afford the small fee which was small but these public schools, you know fee they meant children didn't know. We're worried about the Senate Bill 1881 because as we have heard it will prohibit imports. Also investments of an American company that would want to invest in Nicaragua or Cuba or Venezuela. I'm worried about Honduras which is next door and probably the most dangerous probably the most dangerous country in Central America or all of Latin America because of extortion because of the cartels. I go to the immigration court, is that the proper name, in Baltimore to help interpret for people who were there because they tried, they hoped for amnesty and they tell stories that I'm supposed to try to keep a straight face, not cry when they're telling some of the abuse they've suffered. Honduras and other countries have have some Hondurans and other peoples of Central and Latin America have many reasons to try to come here but we're not talking about immigration today. If we destroy the ability for Nicaragua to belong to CAFTA, the DR, CAFTA that changes their role in their their relationships with their neighbors. They've been good neighbors regardless of the politics of the countries around them and of course we are all worried about more immigration for many reasons for what costs psychologically and physically to get here and live through the process of walking but also because we don't know what to do with all of them and most of them would be happier to stay home but they can't live either they can't make it because of a dry corridor where they can't farm climate change is changing their ability to farm in Guatemala and Nicaragua, I don't know about other places so they can't make a living or they're scared or their grandmother has been threatened or their mother's been killed in their ultra-living closet. So this is going to enter immigration because it can't be it can't import food they need, drinking the rice beans and rice is callo binto and this is my shirt about callo binto those are the main ingredients are very popular dish but in addition to seeing children walking with their chairs to somebody's house to have school there was there was an electricity for two or three hours a day if you were lucky and because they got their water by poop in the city where I go to visit which is the nine and gone to the border to get their water luckily because there's pumping system but not there's no electricity so you're out of electricity and water but this is back in the early 90s after the federal government has been elected so those are the wonderful things they bought in addition to increasingly the rate of whatever that word it was illiteracy so it had gotten better during the first time the Mista government and then during the male-level government the literacy rates rose greatly and now under the Santa Mista government again it's way way way down but what I was fascinated and struck by in the summer of 2022 was the changes that are happening in the latest Santa Mista government that's the one we're opposing and we talked and talked about the medical situation they they had trained 1700 specialists and different medical specialists most of them in Nicaragua feel that they've sent out for training they have they have a system of something called Casa Cuna where a woman who this far from a hospital in the countryside somewhere can go and stay a couple weeks before she's expecting you probably heard about those before she's expecting to have to the birth of her child so that she's being cared for for those couple of weeks and fed and then she's close to some city with that with the medical care so another thing that it's happening is small loans usually given to women you know banks in Costa Rica or El Salvador or wherever you any other country that I won't know anything about big banks don't like to give $200 loans you know so people that need just a little bit of money for their farming and especially women can get those loans why women because it's been shown that they're all responsible for the money that they're loaned so how did all this change happen how come there's so many more hospitals how come education is everywhere hospitals are everywhere or health care clinics how did this change happen the road the highway that we used to take to our community of my life used to take three hours because it was full of rocks and it was mostly dirt and now it's a it's a super highway got there in an hour where did all the money come from for all this infrastructure a beautiful bridge that the people are so proud of the bus that I used to take would have to go through you know for the creek was a river except then big rains and then you wouldn't go if you just don't go I was astonished until we learned from ministers of government many of whom are women by the way we met with six or seven ministries and most of the women most of the people that had the cabinet positions were women it's the Central America Bank the Central America Bank officially is called the Central America Bank of Economic Integration Island they that's one bank that can loan to if this Senate bill 1881 passes they won't be able to access that of course the World Bank doesn't want to own American banks wouldn't dare own so it's very hard for them to get the money that they need to do all these things that they've been doing since 2007 and they have a great record of paying these loans back so they continue to get the loan after they pay the previous ones so this is what is keeping people alive this is what is keeping people fed this is what's keeping medical care and education for all of my go outwards and I was very very pleased to have experienced last year last but not least we have Leonardo Flores of the Venezuela Solidarity Network thank you so much Lucy and I also want to take a second to thank Jill and Michelle and sanctions still organizing this so I'm going to speak briefly a little bit about the consequences sanctions on Venezuela before moving on to talk about the deal that was recently signed between Venezuelan government opposition as well as the sanctions where we thought by the United States about a week and a half ago and then finish up on what we're really looking for for congress in upcoming months okay so the Trump administration imposed sanctions again because its first sanctions on Venezuela in august 2017 according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research CEPER in between august 2017 and august 2018 those sanctions led to 40 000 excess deaths in Venezuela so that's 40 000 people who died because of the Trump administration sanctions by 2020 march 2020 a UN special rubber tour upgraded that figure to 100 000 in Venezuela due to sanctions so how do people die from sanctions well in the case of Venezuela these sanctions led to a 99 decrease in government revenue and we're talking about the government that routinely spent around 80 of its budget on social spending the bulk of it going to help education and other programs so without suddenly you lose all of that funding and the health care system completely collapsed there was a huge increase in maternal mortality a country that had really met almost every single millennium development goal suddenly lost about 15 to 20 years of development so now so now the country that was middle-income country becomes a low income country you saw food insecurity skyrocket from 22 percent in 2013 to 14 percent by late 2018 2019 the economy in over three years it lost 194 billion dollars so that had a massive impact on the population of course we went from a country that had the highest minimum wage in latin america to one of the lowest and this of course is one of the main drivers of migration outside of venezuela we're feeling that migration here in the u.s. now but initially that migration went to other latin american countries columbia epigore peru brazil specifically but then the pandemic came and those countries really responded poorly to the pandemic and not only that but the informal economy were what meant were many of these venezuelan migrants were employed were devastated so these migrants then returned to venezuela some with money with enough money to pay for these basically human smugglers to take them to cross the daring gap and take them by hand from venezuela to the border in texas and that's why we've seen so much increased migration in venezuela from venezuela to the u.s. over the past couple of years so moving beyond these consequences you know i think finally we saw people in congress take a stand against these sanctions and to start drawing the connection between sanctions and migration and that really put some pressure on the viden administration's offer sanctions relief as well as courses as gas prices in the oil market in general which has been shaking which you know i think the viden administration is particularly concerned about especially hitting into the next year's elections and particularly what the summer 2024 made brand for oil and gas prices so last week about a week and a half ago there was a deal reached between the venezuelan government and a coalition of opposition parties uh basically it was an electoral guarantee deal and as a result of that deal the united states offered temporary sanctions relief uh really it's more accurate to say it's not exactly sanctions the lifting of sanctions because what the the u.s. did was that they basically issued general licenses the treasury department issued general licenses so that companies can deal on the venezuelan oil gas and gold and they basically unblocked the central bank of venezuela and the biggest bank in venezuela which is called bank of venezuela from financial sanctions for six months this is of course the very cause of step as you know finally the administration seems to be understanding the harm that sanctions have caused the venezuelan people and also the harm that they've caused to u.s. interests particularly u.s. economic interests and of course the migration issue but given that the sanctions are so temporary i think what we can expect to see is a very limited economic impact because companies are going to be very wary of reinvesting in venezuela if they can run a foul of sanctions in six or 12 months so i think that's that's one of the big issues that we really need to push on is to ensure that the buy-in administration doesn't lift these temporary sanctions however we're already seeing kind of the some backtracking on the part of buy-in administration there's a bit of in a bit of a disconnect between the venezuelans and the u.s. regarding the steal i was signed and when i say the venezuelans here i mean the venezuelan government and the opposition parties because when they signed a selectable guarantee deal it was clear that it would not include the lifting of the disqualified candidates that they those candidates would still be disqualified but in the immediate aftermath of this deal you had secretary blinkin and you had Juan Gonzales of the national security council they both suggested that the sanctions could be reimposed if they those candidates weren't allowed to run uh their their main point of concern is might be aporina muchado who won these so-called primaries uh last sunday honestly those were easily the least transparent elections in venezuelan over the past 25 years since primaries they were they were boycotted by several office parties in the run-up to those primaries the organizers several of them quit because of the many problems so they're not really exactly trustworthy results and beyond that when we're talking about money everybody in a muchado she's someone who called for an invasion of venezuela she's someone who's repeatedly called for sanctions against venezuela so if you think that for example that trump shouldn't be allowed to run here in the u.s. then certainly i think it's being coherent you would have to understand the money at venezuela and then just to move on to what we're looking for today when we're visiting congressional offices and for the staffers that are here with us we want we'd like to ask for continued support for the dialogue between the u.s. and venezuela while ramping up some of that pressure to ensure that the sanctions are not reimposed because if you have this idea that you know the sanctions might be reimposed if maduda wins the elections in roughly the late 2024 then that's really tantamount to electoral interference because you're holding a population hostage to this idea oh we're going to be sanctioned again unless we change our vote and vote for someone else and another issue i really want to talk about is this fact that in november 2022 again the government in opposition reached this wide-ranging deal on humanitarian needs and there were going to be 3.2 billion dollars in frozen funds then as well as money that had been frozen in council overseas that money was going to be released to the united nations for the un to administer the funds and spend it on health education and the electric grid and other pressing social needs for the venezuelan people the by administration seemed to be on board with that but they've been driving their feet it's already been 11 months and that money has not been released by the by the administration so we'd really like to ask congress to press the by administration to release these funds as well and finally i'm talking about the issue of migration you know one of the big problems that we have here as venezuela migrants when i myself my family came about 40 years ago is that we don't have consular representation here so that implies significant problems for any venezuelan who has say almost the law or who has family in venezuela that they need to send money to or you name it consular representation is totally necessary and conversely u.s citizens in venezuela including people in prison they also have no consular representation so we'd like to see congress push the by administration to reestablish consular relations this doesn't mean that they have to become best friends with the local government or anything of the sort but this is a very basic you know step that the u.s engages in on a daily basis with even countries that are considered greater adversaries in venezuela right there are very few countries that have no consular representation in the united states and i think north korea venezuela uh or ron perhaps or do they have a consular they do not so it's very few countries that don't have consular relationship representation that's a very key uh demand from the venezuelan diaspora in the united states i think i'll leave it at that in case folks have questions thank you we now have a few minutes for i have a question is um is professor elner still on the line yeah yeah i wanted to ask professor elner and professor cone if you could tell us well uh leonardo just touched on it but if you could tell us a little bit more about um uh the impact of sanctions on migration and uh we haven't heard as much about do you think there could be any spillover effect into the rest of central america with the sanctions on the garaguan if i can speak first yes there is no question about the fact that the deterioration of economic conditions in venezuela is such that there is a massive uh outflow of the venezuelan population especially young people who are going abroad because they just aren't the opportunities students graduate high school they graduate universities um i'll just give you one example a personal example i'm a retired professor i have taught uh many years in venezuela and i retired uh about 10 years ago and my pension which is the same as the salary that an active professor uh makes um was really good by lat american standards even by u.s standards at this point i am receiving about 30 a month that that is that is my salary that's my pension and that's the salary of full-time university credit i was a full professor the highest you know raking professor i was making the maximum in terms of salary and now that is down to just three thousand months so students who graduate universities and no full will that is professionals they're not going to make enough to make ends meet they're leaving the country in massive numbers some of them returning now uh because of difficulties abroad but i i just want to say that there are so many ways that venezuela is adversely affected by the sanctions and i'll just give you one example as a u.s citizen um i go back and forth because my wife is venezuelan i i still have a working relationship with my university here in venezuela so i go back and forth now i return to venezuela in august with my wife we had to buy two tickets to get here and two tickets to return because the united states government doesn't allow uh u.s companies but also companies anyplace else in the world we we came down here on copa which was a pan panamanian airlines and copa is not allowed to sell direct tickets um or not allowed to sell you a ticket in which you go from washington you know i'm based in mariland so i go from washington to venezuela and in the past we would fly washington panaman venezuela but it would be just one ticket now you have to purchase two tickets because the u.s government doesn't allow copa to sell a ticket in which the uh end stop is in venezuela so they sell your ticket from washington to panaman and then they sell you another ticket in other words it's double the price um that's just one example and it's not a particularly important example when it comes to the starvation wages of venezuelans as a result of the sanctions um and i also want to just reaffirm what leo florida said about the upcoming elections you know we are imposing sanctions supposedly in the name of democracy and yet how democratic is it that venezuelans will be going to the polls this agreement that was just reached uh last week uh in which the venezuelan government made several concessions to the opposition and one of them was accepting the date the approximate date that the opposition wanted for holding presidential elections which will be at the end the second half of 2024 those elections venezuelan voters and i've spoken to a number of them both people who support the government people are independent people are apathetic people are opposed to the government and they all tell me the same thing when they go to vote they're they're going to have the feeling they have a gun pointed uh at their head if they vote for maduro who's the president actual president the current president who's running for reelection they know full will that sanctions will be maintained if they vote for the opposition candidate they know full will that the next day the sanctions will be lifted now that's not democratic that's not democratic that is blackmail that's blackmailing the venezuelan voter into voting for the candidate the united state supports so i just wanted to make those comments thank you yeah i have a few more questions immigration and when the sanctions on nicaragua have us building projects that feel america yeah so immigration is a bit exaggerated but they are actually trying to get people to leave nicaragua especially the u.s. government but they have they have um sometimes people repost these things on twitter where the state department puts out statements about how their avenues to come to the united states and available to the province to make it easier to call it a probationary period to try to increase the immigration while they tell the people of the united states that they're trying to stop the immigration you know they're talking out of both sides they're not literally there but there was quite a bit of immigration for a while especially as it was around 2000 when they started to one of the other things they did is they made it possible for a lot of people to migrate legally so many people who have already been in costa rica have been living there it will give them basically recognition and so it looks like a huge number all of a sudden but the numbers have been 2000 or 2021 um i'm sorry 2020 yeah 2020 so um you might have just a decade or two down so so the the numbers at times are bad and it's due to unemployment it's due to you know all the all these problems but one thing when we're talking about venezuela cuba and nicaragua they're all in different stages of sanctions so the thing is that you can look at the caravan you can look at it in a pretty nice place but the reason it is is that the sanctions haven't really hit that hard yet the sanctions aren't as bad yet but they want to move it to where venezuela and people are um and that is the important thing to understand that isn't venezuela's fault or cuba's fault but they have that they're struggling in some of these areas because the sanctions have been in place so long and there's so much more stringent but in the caravan they're starting to have an effect and you know certainly they lost billions of dollars and funding for new projects for you know more hospitals and things like that so that that development it's not going to be a defensive space um but the the real effects of the of the blocking of the loans takes a while for that to affect the other part of the question was on chonduras so u.s. nicaragua's eating trading partner chonduras is number two nicaragua exports beans a lot of beans to honduras so the actual food that the most important source of protein in their diet and so when you the u.s. the latest rounds of sanctions they're trying to disrupt the calf to agree cut nicaragua out so that nicaragua won't be able to meet food shipments to honduras because that's supposed to be the domain of the united states by the food when we want and also the u.s. isn't real happy with the government the current elected government of honduras they had supported a coup government for since 2009 until recently and they eventually just could not keep that that uh illusion that government empowering longer people had just turned too far against them and so they gave up and they said well you know we still have a military base we can still reverse things when we need to but they allowed this more left-leaning president take place but she's walking the title between the drug candidates that represented the old government and they still have a lot of influence in the society so the u.s. is not really sure you know at any point they could impose sanctions on honduras as well so but the real immediate effect is cutting you know blocking the economy nicaragua from being able to trade with that huge impact that under so then we'll see the conditions there we're seeing that they're not the second poorest country in the hemisphere um we used to be nicaragua's but now they've changed places a little bit um you know this these are very very poor countries and there's already a huge amount of immigration from honduras from outside of there as well and another thing you trade inside any other questions and so you know comment on that the the world bank they require a lot a lot of reporting and so they end up getting very good data and they're very very critical and they found that one of the most uh the best kind of having some of the most some of the best executed projects in the world that they were very very happy with their uh with their reporting in fact uh la prensa one of the cia that newspapers that was operating in nicaragua claimed that the world bank was cutting funding to nicaragua because they're sending these the same confidence and the world bank actually responded and wrote you know rather saying that no actually they are extremely competent very happy with everything they've done they've always met all the important things and you know but we're kind of having fun but they haven't got the funding because of the u.s. pressure that that is required and i say another game yes i'm wondering um do you think that the congress people are going to be this thing believed as several of you have said that sanctions are really the reason for them is to lead to regime change well you might turn around and ask about i mean it's something in the in the 1881 it actually said that we change it they call it pre-elections where gambler made it is because okay remember recently as long as we get rid of the bell cash throw everything will be fine we'll be enough we'll go cash withdrawing before the president's pass we're still on fuel boat right it wasn't the bell cash when it's not Daniela tega it's the party it is their sovereignty that they're post so they say they want to overthrow replace Daniela tega and they want to do away with the law that prohibits u.s. companies u.s. government from funding their elections those are the two things so one is maybe one objective but obviously it's really a change they're looking for all of it i would solve with that i think there are three people in congress who might not agree with the regime change goals and some of these cases but they will still vote for sanctions because they see it as a lesser and i think that's one of the things that sanctions kill we've really been trying to press is that it's not a lesser even still causes tens of thousands of deaths still i think we can resume conversation and formally but i just want to thank everyone for coming thank the presenters and uh we will close this portion uh but of course everyone is welcome to stay and talk yeah we have we wrote to the people and