Yes, the Venezuelan case is a paradigm about that and about what the work of the organization is about.
We face a basic problem, which is to try to apply high principles to the lowest people and to the lowest dictators. Of course these dictators will not be able to open themselves to the highest principles, to the highest values. We'll have to work very hard. To convince them is not a matter of political action, as we have seen in the past.
If we look at the past to see how dictators used to end up in the Caribbean region and the Central American region, this past shows us that dictators were falling because a revolution would bring them down, as happened with Batista and Somoza. There might be a coup d'état against the dictatorship, as happened with Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela. Sometimes it was a murder of the dictator, as happened with Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. Sometimes the dictator ends his life in bed with one hand grabbing power, as happened with Fidel Castro, or a military intervention occurs, as happened with Noriega in Panama.
These 20th century mechanisms to put down a dictatorship are not so easily recognizable in the 21st century. So far in the 21st century, the mechanism that we have provided in order to resolve a political crisis or a dictatorship like this is our responsibility to protect or humanitarian intervention. The problem is that sometimes this responsibility to protect is not used in the right way, or the humanitarian intervention was anything but humanitarian, so we have had some troubles with the antecedents, with what is coming from the past, in order to implement it for the future.
I think we shouldn't be ashamed of what was wrong in the past in order to do the right thing in the future. The problem happens when we don't do anything, as happened in other parts of the world—let's say the genocide in Rwanda or the massacres of Pol Pot. It's very hard to do a counter-factor explanation based on the mess that would be avoided and the mess that would be created. If we could have known, of course, that hundreds of thousands of Rwandans would be killed, we would have acted immediately after 10 were dead, let's say, or 100.
I think that in the Venezuelan case, we already have a problem that has affected millions of people, that is killing millions of people, that has killed people just because they had kidney disease and they couldn't do dialysis or because they had diabetes and they don't have insulin or because they had cancer and they didn't have the carnet de la patria so they don't receive any kind of treatment. Sometimes that happened even for people who had the carnet de la patria.
The only antecedent we have in the region to deal with a rogue state, a criminal state, a mafia state, is the case of Noriega in Panama. The intervention there, of course, took place to protect democracy and to protect human rights, and it's the one that the democracy of Panama today is based on. Without that, we would not have democracy in Panama maybe even today.
The thing is that we have to act according to international law. The tools that are provided by international law are the responsibility to protect and humanitarian intervention. We have to do it always as a way to prevent further disasters for the people and to prevent the destabilization of the region that already exists. It is to prevent the aggression that we have mentioned, the aggression by Cuba in kidnapping the democracy of Venezuela, of putting down the democracy of Venezuela, and the aggression also coming from Venezuela through organized crime with drug trafficking and through diseases, some of which were eradicated for years in the continent.