Could one of the few pockets of resistance to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and its myriad other war crimes, be about to fall?
Last Tuesday (December 9), Bolivia’s Foreign Minister Fernando Aramayo and his Israeli counterpart signed a joint declaration in Washington to formally reestablish diplomatic ties between their two countries. Ambassadors will be appointed in the near future, Saar said.
Bolivia was the first country in Latin America, and one of the first in the world, to sever ties with Israel over its still-ongoing, now-UN-formalised genocide in Gaza. The then-Luis Arce government justified the decision, taken on November 7, 2023, as a necessary response to Israel’s “aggressive and disproportionate” military actions in Gaza.
Now, that decision is in the process of being undone by the administration of Rodrigo Paz Pereira, Bolivia’s first right-wing government in 20 years.
Hamas described President Paz’s decision as a “retreat in the honorable step taken by the previous Bolivian government to cut relations with the occupation in the face of the genocide committed against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip”:
“We renew our call on all countries and organizations to continue to isolate the Zionist entity and hold it accountable for its crimes against our people and their grave violations of international law and human values.”
Israel’s Biggest Con Trick
Media accounts hold that since October 2023, the Israeli army has killed over 70,000 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, and wounded more than 171,000 others in a relentless assault that has left the enclave in ruins. Those are the official numbers, however, and they are not remotely accurate.
As Jonathan Cook points out in his substack, “the biggest con trick Israel has managed to pull off over the past two years is imposing entirely phoney parameters on a ‘debate’ in the West about the credibility of the death toll in Gaza, now officially standing at just over 70,000”:
Israel has successfully penned us all into a “debate”, one entirely divorced from reality, that relates only to those killed directly by its bombs and gunfire.
The truth is that far, far larger numbers of people in Gaza have been actively killed by Israel not through these direct means but through what statisticians refer to as “indirect” methods.
These people were killed by Israel destroying their homes and leaving them with no shelter. By Israel destroying their water and electricity supplies and their sanitation systems. By Israel levelling their hospitals. By Israel starving them. By Israel creating the perfect conditions for disease to spread. The list of ways Israel is killing people in Gaza goes on and on…
None of these kinds of deaths are included in the figure of 70,000. And all precedents show that many, many times more people are killed through these indirect methods than directly through fatal injuries from bombs and bullets.
According to a letter from experts in this field to the Lancet, studies of other wars – most of them far less destructive than Israel’s on the tiny enclave – indicate that between three and 15 times more people are killed by indirect, rather than direct, methods of warfare.
The authors conservatively estimate an indirect death toll four times greater than the direct death toll. That would mean, at a minimum, 350,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza through Israel’s actions.
A Thorn in Israel’s Side
Depressingly few of the United Nation’s 193 Member States can hold their heads high over their response (or lack thereof) to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Most of them did little or nothing as the world’s most televised genocide unfolded on all of our screens.
The Arab States paid lip service to the suffering of Gaza while doing nothing to relieve it. Many BRICS members, including China and Brazil, not only continue to trade with Israel but have raised it to higher levels since October 2023.
China and Russia failed to use their veto power in the UN Security Council to block the adoption of Resolution 2803, which formalised the Trump administration’s post-war neo-colonial arrangements for Gaza while doing little to stop the genocide.
The few countries that can hold their heads up high include Iran and its evolving axis of resistance in the Middle East (the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon…) as well as the US’ axis of evil in Latin America — Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua — which Washington hopes to regime change in the near future.
In fact, Latin America was arguably the region of the world that made the most noise (at the governmental level) against Israel’s actions. Some countries even went from words to actions. By doing so they became an annoying thorn in Israel’s side.
Nicaragua cut its diplomatic ties with Tel Aviv in November 2024 and even filed a suit against Germany at the International Court of Justice. Nicaragua alleges that Germany failed to prevent genocide in Gaza, failed to ensure respect for international humanitarian law in Gaza, and was complicit in the commission of genocide and the violation of IHL in Gaza. The case is ongoing.
Meanwhile, the governments of both Cuba and Venezuela, which had already cut their ties with Tel Aviv long before Oct 7, have been constant critics of Israel’s genocidal behaviour. The US and Israel’s traditional client state in the region, Colombia, went even further by attempting to impose sanctions on Israel:
Despite concerted pressure and criticism from Israel, Washington (under both Biden and Trump), the Jewish community and the domestic and global media, Colombia’s Gustavo Petro government has not only spoken out against Israel’s naked criminality in Gaza from the very start; it has consistently turned those words into actions. And in so doing, it has put much of the rest of the world to shame.
The Petro government severed formal ties with Israel in May 2024. It then imposed a ban on the export of Colombian coal to Israel in late August of the same year as well as on the purchase of Israeli weapons, becoming one of the first, if not the first, country in the world to impose unilateral sanctions on Israel since the genocide began.
This is in a country that itself has been described as the “Israel of South America” due its close ties to Washington as well as the presence of US forces at at least seven military bases. Colombia is also historically closely aligned with Israel. According to the Mexican-Lebanese geopolitical analyst Alfredo Jalife, the Israelis control Colombia’s spyware and help train its soldiers and paramilitaries — a situation that had been going on for decades.
Colombia-based reader Edgui also recently pointed out that Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, has 13 agreements with high-level entities in Colombia (the Air Force, the Ministry of Defense, the Criminal Investigation Directorate and Interpol of the National Police, etc.) — all of which had the Israeli company as the sole bidder.
Yet despite all that, Petro has taken one of the strongest positions against the genocide in Gaza of any international head of state. However, Petro will be leaving office in March, 2026 (Colombian presidents are currently only legally able to serve one term). That hasn’t stopped President Donald J Trump from threatening Petro in pure gangster fashion.
“He’s been fairly hostile to the United States,” Trump said. “He’s going to have himself some big problems if he doesn’t wise up.”
“Colombia is producing a lot of drugs. They have cocaine factories. They make cocaine, as you know, and they sell it right into the United States. So he better wise up, or he’ll be next. He’ll be next. I hope he’s listening. He’s going to be next because we don’t like people when they kill people.”
You heard that right: the US government, arguably the biggest gangster state of all time which has spent the past two years supporting, financing and enabling a genuine, real-life genocide, doesn’t like it when people kill people.
The good news for Trump, and by extension Netanyahu, is that Latin America is seeing a new wave of right-wing leaders and governments come to power that are desperate to bend the knee to Washington as well as support Israel in whatever it does…
Nick Corbishley 