Latin America and the new US colonialism

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APRIL 10, 2026

Trump is presenting his increasing interference in Latin America as part of his administration’s ‘war on drugs’. It’s not – and there are growing signs of resistance, argues Mike Phipps.

Last December, the United States published its new National Security Strategy. The document says: “The United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine.”

Originally declared in 1823, the Monroe Doctrine holds that any intervention in the political affairs of the Americas by foreign powers is a potentially hostile act against the United States. Now Trump has added a significant Corollary to the Doctrine, asserting US predominance in the whole of the Western Hemisphere. It’s in this context that Trump’s demand to take control of Greenland can be understood.

But it is in Latin America that the new approach is having most impact. Witness the bombing and killing of more than 150 fishermen in the Pacific and Caribbean. “This murder spree,” says Amnesty International, “is unconscionable and illegal.”

The New Year began with the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. The operation, a blatant violation of international law and transparently aimed at controlling Venezuela’s oil, resulted in at least 100 fatalities. Following Maduro’s seizure, the official State Department X account wrote, “This is OUR Hemisphere and President Trump will not allow our security to be threatened.”

Trump came to the support of the right wing Milei government in Argentina during last year’s parliamentary elections, by making a $20 billion financial assistance package available to the economically beleaguered regime mid-campaign.

Cuba has been the object of a harsh blockade, which imposes heavy tariffs on “any other country that directly or indirectly sells or otherwise provides any oil to Cuba.” The embargo has led to electrical blackouts across the entire country and hospital generators almost running out of fuel. There is every likelihood that Trump will increase further pressure on the island once the war on Iran dies down. “I can do anything I want with it,” Trump said last month.

In El Salvador, the US has worked closely with President Nayib Bukele over the Trump administration’s mass deportation of migrants from various Latin American countries and their warehousing in El Salvador’s overcrowded prisons. El Salvador’s four-year “State of Exception” and its multiple violations of basic liberties has been the subject of more than two dozen human rights investigations by national and international organisations.

In October 2025, Trump accused Colombian President Gustavo Petro of being an “illegal drug dealer” and simultaneously cut off diplomatic aid to the country. Many of the US attacks on fishing boats have been near Colombia’s coastline. When asked if he was considering a military strike in Colombia, Trump said, “It sounds good to me.”

A ‘war on drugs’

Indeed, much of the US expansion into Latin America has been in the guise of fighting a ‘war on drugs’. Last month, a US-backed crackdown on supposed drug cartels along the Ecuador-Colombia border sparked accusations that security forces bombed farms, burned homes and detained and abused villagers. The operation left at least 27 people dead.

On March 24th, the New York Times alleged that Ecuadorian soldiers had set fire to and then bombed a dairy farm near the border, according to local workers. Jahiren Noriega Donoso, a lawmaker in Ecuador’s National Assembly, posted: “Unequivocally, the war that [President] Daniel Noboa has launched is not a war against crime. It is a war against the poorest among us.”

“There are 27 charred bodies, and the explanation provided is not credible,” Colombia’s President Petro wrote on social media. “Bombs lie on the ground in close proximity to families — many of whom have peacefully chosen to replace their coca leaf crops with legal crops.”

US forces were also involved in Bolivia last month in the capture of a leading drug trafficker. The country’s new right wing President is an ardent Trump supporter. On taking office last year, he proposed cutting public spending by 30%, eliminating a range of taxes on the wealthiest and setting up at least ten ‘truth commissions’ to investigate the activities of previous left-led governments – a device aimed at barring them from office in future.

US Administration officials are clear that their control of Latin America is a top priority and the ‘war on drugs’ is the spearhead. “We are not going to cede an inch of territory in this hemisphere to our enemies or adversaries,” White House security adviser Stephen Miller said last month, adding the US was “using hard power, military power, lethal force, to protect and defend the American homeland.”

In one week alone last year, the US secured military deals with Paraguay, Ecuador, Peru and Trinidad and Tobago, following earlier agreements with Guyana, the Dominican Republic and Panama. The agreements range from airport access to the temporary deployment of troops. “And this has nothing to do with drugs,” says Jorge Heine, a former Chilean ambassador and a research professor at Boston University’s School of Global Studies.

That was underlined by Trump’s pardoning last year of Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who was serving a 45-year prison sentence in the US on drug trafficking and weapons charges. Trump backed his right wing party colleague Nasry Asfura for the Honduran presidency and threatened to withhold much-needed aid if he lost.

America’s new colonialism takes other forms. On March 10th, Paraguay’s Congress “approved a bill that extends diplomatic immunity to all US military and civilian defence personnel,” writes Forrest Hylton. “It allows them to wear US military uniforms and carry US weapons, and travel the country’s roads with US drivers’ licences. US citizens will be subject to US, not Paraguayan law. The US had a similar deal in Iraq, as did the British in 19th-century China. It will be a first in South America.”

Plenty of precedents

Many see the behaviour of the Trump administration as a new form of fascism. As Professor Dan Hicks argued on this site recently, it might be more fruitful to analyse it as an enduring corporate-militarist colonialism.

On this basis, recent US interventions in Latin America are not so unprecedented. The US first destabilized and then promoted a coup to bring down the popular Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954.  The coups in the southern cone in the 1970s – Chile, Uruguay and Argentina – all had direct US backing. In 1983, the US invaded Grenada to topple the government and throughout that decade the Reagan administration funded the terroristic contras in Nicaragua, partly with money made from covertly selling arms to… Iran. In1989 the US militarily toppled the government of Panama, killing over 500 people. But in 1961, when the ‘liberal’ President Kennedy sent 1,400 CIA-trained Cuban exiles to bring down Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government, the attempted Bay of Pigs invasion ended in fiasco.

Weakened though the economy is by the US-led decades-long embargo, there is every sign that Cubans will fight to defend their sovereignty today. And despite the rising tide of conservative Trump-loving populists across the continent, there are also encouraging signs of pushback against the new colonialism. In Ecuador, voters rejected an attempt by the right wing President Daniel Noboa to allow the return of US military bases to the country by a hefty two-thirds margin – and voted too against other attempts to dismantle the country’s progressive constitution.

Not all left wing governments have been extinguished. Gustavo Petro in Colombia, Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico and Lula in Brazil are in charge of three of the region’s largest countries. Trump has been unsuccessful in trying to get Brazil’s previous President, the right wing Jair Bolsanaro, freed and has been forced to negotiate, while backtracking on tariffs and sanctions against a Brazilian Supreme Court judge.

Last month Trump hosted a ‘Shield of the Americas’ summit in Florida, with 13 heads of state present – and, significantly, the three above-mentioned countries absent. An assessment from Chatham House  – hardly a left wing body – disparaged the lack of detail in the official announcement at the end of the event, which failed to “address the root causes of insecurity and crime – poverty, weak states and corruption.” No new money was earmarked for the project, whose “openly partisan nature… hobbles it at the outset.”

On the ground, there are further signs of resistance. Chile may have elected its most right wing President since the Pinochet dictatorship, but within two weeks of Kast taking office, thousands of high school students have taken to the streets to protest against fuel price hikes and attacks on public education. Similar protests against fuel price rises have taken place in Bolivia.

Solidarity is urgent

It takes courage to stand up to Trump and his acolytes in countries riven by poverty and inequality, with limited access to world markets and where state violence is an everyday reality. Those who resist face the full wrath of the world’s mightiest superpower, led by a President who revels in war crimes and destruction. What kind of international solidarity should be on offer to those who put themselves in the firing line?

In the coming months, Latin America’s social movements and political activists will need the widest possible solidarity from supporters of democracy, human rights and progress in the West against the imperial ambitions of the Trump administration. Such solidarity should not be based on allegiance to particular regimes, which often brandish their anti-imperialist credentials while displaying the very authoritarian tendencies which undermine a genuine popular defence of their countries’ sovereignty. Instead, international solidarity needs to be based on the principles of national sovereignty, democratic and human rights and anti-colonial independence from external interference. A broad internationalist movement of real people-to-people solidarity will need to be built  – and time is short.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.

Image: https://picryl.com/media/trump-uncle-sam-bcd82e. Licence: Public Domain Mark 1.0 Universal PDM 1.0 Deed

 

Natural disasters trigger 69% surge in public protests across Latin America, new research finds

Study covering five major economies finds smaller communities face the longest economic recoveries, with damage persisting for up to four months

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BUENOS ARIES, April 7, 2026 - When a natural disaster strikes a Latin American community, the damage doesn't stop at downed power lines and flooded streets. A new study finds that disasters trigger a 69% spike in public protests in affected districts, a social fallout that emergency planners rarely account for and that current disaster response systems are not designed to address. 

A forthcoming study in the journal Risk Analysis is among the first to measure the local economic and social impact of natural disasters across five of the region's largest economies: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico. Where most previous research has relied on country-level data collected annually or quarterly, this study uses monthly satellite measurements of nighttime light emission to track economic activity district by district, capturing community-level disruption that official statistics often miss. 

“What we found is that the economic toll of a natural disaster does not fall evenly; smaller communities absorb the hardest hits and take the longest to recover,” said study author Fernando Antonio Ignacio González of the Universidad Católica del Norte and the National Scientific and Technical Research Council in Argentina. “Understanding exactly when and where impacts are felt is essential for directing the right resources to the right places at the right time. One-size-fits-all disaster response is not enough. Small communities and flood-prone regions need dedicated, faster-acting systems.” 

Key Findings: 

• During the first month following a natural disaster, economic activity drops immediately and measurably. Nighttime luminosity (the amount of artificial light generated on the Earth’s surface in the evening), fell by 18% on average and is an indicator of economic activity.  

• Protests spike 69%, yet governments do not crack down. Public protests surge in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, with no corresponding increase in government use of force, including curfews, mass arrestor physical confrontations indicating a need for more integrated disaster management.  

• Disaster type determines the timing of damage. Floods and other hydrological disasters cause immediate economic disruption, knocking out roads and shutting down businesses within the first month. Storms and droughts work through slower channels, with agricultural losses accumulating over months and the economic toll only becoming visible two to three months after the disaster begins. Earthquakes and other geophysical events showed no statistically significant economic decline in the data, a finding that González attributes, in part to the speed with which essential infrastructure is restored after seismic events. 

• Chile leads in disaster exposure but is one of the leading countries in speedy recovery. More than a third of Chilean districts were affected during the study period, yet Chile rebounds more quickly than any other country studied.  likely attributed to the county’s strict building codes, mandatory insurance requirements, pre-positioned emergency resources and macroeconomic stability that allows the government to deploy funds quickly. This contrasts in Argentina, where economic damage does not appear until roughly three months after a disaster but then persists for up to five months, a pattern linked to recurring fiscal crises, challenges in cross-governmental coordination and rapid urbanization that has concentrated populations in flood-prone areas. Brazil, Colombia and Mexico showed no statistically significant economic decline in the data. Long with other parameters, such as type of disaster and people affected. Monthly satellite measurements of nighttime light emission provided insights on development patterns and local economic activity. And lastly, protest and coercion variables were pulled from the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone Project. 

The study covered thousands of districts across the five countries and applied an event study design with an estimator built to handle the staggered and varied timing of disaster occurrences. 

Recommendations for Regional Policymakers 

• Develop disaster response systems tailored to the type and timing of each event, rather than applying uniform protocols across all disasters. 

• Invest in resilience-building in small districts which face the longest recoveries and are least equipped to respond on their own.  

• Incorporate conflict prevention and community engagement strategies directly into emergency management protocols to address the social tensions that follow disasters. 

• Prioritize macroeconomic stability and fiscal preparedness as foundations of disaster resilience. The study's findings suggest that a government's ability to respond effectively depends heavily on whether it has the borrowing capacity and institutional resources to act quickly when disaster strikes. 

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About Society for Risk Analysis 

The Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) is a multidisciplinary, global organization dedicated to advancing the science and practice of risk analysis. Founded in 1980, SRA brings together researchers, practitioners, and policymakers from diverse fields including engineering, public health, environmental science, economics, and decision theory. The Society fosters collaboration and communication on risk assessment, management, and communication to inform decision-making and protect public well-being. SRA supports a wide range of scholarly activities, publications, and conferences. Learn more at www.sra.org. 

 

Media Contact: 

Emma Scott 

Media Relations Specialist 

Emma@bigvoicecomm.com 

(740)632-0965 

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Elite Cynicism, the Eros Effect and the Future of Resistance Movements

George Katsiaficas

 April 3, 2026

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Vincent Bevins is a journalist of considerable talent. His first book, The Jakarta Method, provided long overdue insight into the 1965 United States manipulation of Indonesian army and Islamic officials that led to the murder of as many as one million people, perhaps even more. For years, US agents provided names and addresses of ‘suspected communists’ and other ‘undesirables.’ Americans were the driving force behind the massive purge. As Bevins points out, Indonesia was a much bigger prize for the United States empire than Vietnam, which cost more than 58,000 American lives and billions of dollars, only to end in absolute failure.

His second book, If We Burn, The Mass Protest Decade And The Missing Revolution, takes as his subject matter contemporary liberation movements in the 2010s. Unlike revelations of government atrocities in The Jakarta Method, If We Burn is quite limited in its breadth of understanding. The subtitle reveals the central problem of his analysis. There was no single ‘mass protest decade.’ Beginning in the 1960s, waves of massive mobilizations have without end swept the world across every decade, from the disarmament movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s, to the concurrent anti-nuclear plant movement in the United States and Germany, the Gwangju People’s Uprising of 1980, which helped usher in the wave of Asian uprisings from 1986 to 1992—the Philippines (1986), South Korea (1987), Burma (1988), Tibet and China (1989), Nepal and Bangladesh (1990) and Thailand (1992)—to the overthrow of Eastern European Soviet regimes, the alter-globalization insurgency from the Zapatistas (1994) to Seattle (1999) and beyond, and to the massive anti-war mobilization of February 15, 2003 when up to 30 million people self-mobilized against the second Iraq war even before it began.

All these insurgencies prepared the ground for the 2011 Arab Spring, which however disastrously it may have ended, helped to ignite Occupy Wall Street in more than 900 cities around the world, as well as Movements of the Squares in Spain and Greece. The continual renewal of rebellions, revolts and revolutions culminates today with Gen Z revolts that have occurred in more than 17 countries and smashed 3 regimes (Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal). This latest episode of the Eros Effect reached a crescendo in September 2025 when insurgents took to the streets in at least 11 countries. These instances of the Eros Effect occur as revolts nourish and inspire each other, increasingly resulting in simultaneous uprisings.

The activation of the Eros Effect is one of the features of the continuing movements since the 1960s. During these magical moments, long-held values (patriotism, hierarchy, patriarchy) suddenly are superseded by emergent values such as cooperation instead of competition, human solidarity in place of nationalism, horizontal forms of decision-making not elite power, and attempts to overcome normally unquestioned dimensions of everyday life such as ethnic prejudice and patriarchal authority. Bevins understands the transcendental experiences of street actions, but only in individual terms. As he discovered, one female participant in Tahrir Square arrived in a state of depression and departed as if a “different universe” had transformed her, something that was “profoundly, unimaginably, beautiful.” An insurgent struck hit in the head by a tear gas canister went to the hospital, where he fixed his eyes on a nearby wounded man, unfamiliar to him, “but in that moment, they were brothers, the feeling was transcendent, and far more powerful than the pain in the back of his skull.” Bevins understands the erotic cathexis in the streets, but only in terms of individuals, not in terms of the crystallization of emergent group identities, of inspiration for future movements.

Bevins is not alone in his failure to comprehend uprisings’ connections to each other. Much of contemporary history and media similarly understand them as separate and discrete events, as unrelated to each other. Seldom does anyone connect the dots. Bevins’ book is not a macro-history. Using his journalistic credentials, he delves into activist circles that congealed after Occupy Wall Street (which he curiously omits) in ten places, including Brazil, Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, Brazil, Ukraine, Hong Kong, and Chile.

In both of his books, Bevin’s narrative uses a few individuals whom he believes are key “leaders” of movements to encapsulate the movements as a whole. Because these ‘leaders’ fail to realize their own dreams, he believes the movements are failures, that the ‘missing revolution’ never happened. Looking at today’s Gen Z uprisings, we cannot fail to note their continuity with past movements in their spontaneous and joyful eruptions, autonomy from existing political parties, and international solidarity. Continually-regenerating insurgencies in dozens of countries are part of a long-term process, one which will hopefully one day birth a world-historical revolution.

Bevins idea of ‘instant coffee’ revolution leads him to lament “the missing revolution.” His cynicism is quite evident in his dismissal of one of the great outcomes of the Indonesian revolution, the birth of the Third World non-aligned movement. To this day, the conservative government there adheres strictly to an anti-war stance in international relations (although tragically not for domestic aspirations for independence). In a 2025 article, he recalls that the 1955 Bandung Asian-African Conference occurred as “Countries across Asia and Africa threw off the colonial yoke, pushed for a transformation of the global economy and inspired civil rights movements in the US and South Africa. ‘But it all came to nothing of course,’” he says quoting a conservative observer. “By 1965, the pioneers of the Afro-Asian movement had all been cleared out of the way. Sukarno in Indonesia, Nkrumah in Ghana, Lumumba in Congo, all deposed or even murdered.” Again, individual leaders were murdered and marginalized, so does that mean “it all came to nothing.” Pardon me, “nothing”?

Bevins has proven himself capable of detailed research, of accurately portraying events, yet he also allows himself the luxury of speaking authoritatively without doing the necessary research. By creating individual narrators through whom he enunciates his own analysis, he projects onto them his beliefs without having to take responsibility. He quotes one activist who believes the 1960s SDS (Students for a Democratic Society in the US) was created from the media spotlight, that it “didn’t actually exist outside the media.” I beg to differ. For years, SDS built itself from the grassroots. When SDS dissolved itself in 1969 due to internecine differences, it had between 30,000 and 50,000 members, possibly as many as 100,000. When the central office in Chicago was closed down, it had file cabinets stuffed with unopened letters. Local chapters abounded, sometimes more than one even in small cities. The mass media was a factor, but not the primary one.

The jacket of Bevins’ book claims that “From 2010 to 2020 more people participated in protest than at any point in human history.” He selected the Arab Spring, Turkey’s Taksim Park, Ukraine’s (Victoria Ruland-directed uprising, sometimes called) Euromaiden, and movements in Chile and Hong Kong. He devotes a scant four superficial mentions to Occupy Wall Street, despite the participation of hundreds of thousands of people in over 900 cities in 82 countries. Except for one brief mention, he omits the 2014 Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, which involved more than 15 million people (a minimal estimate). He fails to deal with Rojava, arguably one of the most strategic initiatives of the decade, he considers, and all but ignores the Zapatistas. He correctly footnotes international synchronicity and connections, but does not afford them much importance. After Michael Brown’s 2014 murder in Ferguson Missouri, activists across the USA held up both arms chanting “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!” he mentions that Hong Kong protesters made the same gesture.

In his own words, he understands that “Protest, after all, are communicative events aimed at existing elites.” His misunderstanding of protests as being aimed at elites explains why he does not understand how protests influence each other, how uprisings take off from the successes and failures of previous ones. To give just one example, the savagery of the Korean War interrupted the unification movement in South Korea that had been so robust in 1961 that a US-backed coup d’etat was enacted to stop it. As soon as the U.S.-backed military dictatorship was overthrown decades later, the reunification movement immediately and massively reignited.

Elsewhere, Bevins claims that “the decision to take to the streets and pour huge numbers of people into highly visible public spaces, which can be seen primarily as a media action.” It is incomprehensible to him that protests, rebellions, and uprisings transforms the participants themselves and affect others who are witness to these events. These are some of the primary impacts and effects, not their influence on billionaires and their media. As a professional journalist who worked for several mass media outlets like London’s Financial Times, the LA Times, and Washington Post, Bevins focuses on novel and dramatic actions but overlooks less conspicuous dimensions.

By helicoptering into several locations at discrete points in time, Bevins comes to the conclusion that he has uncovered a missing ingredient for revolution: centralized leadership. Sadly, he did not pause to consider the outcome of the Bolshevik revolution, of their suppression of the popular movement for the benefit of rule by the Party. More importantly, he seems unaware that in order for people to live in a free society, we must first free ourselves from ingrained patterns of domination and passive acquiescence to power. Indeed, as Marcuse pointed out, we must liberate ourselves even from instinctual needs before a genuine revolution is possible. Ongoing uprisings are an important means to free ourselves. The transformation of human beings involved in insurgencies is one of their most significant outcomes. The self-formation of the human species proceeds through labor and art, yet uprisings are also an important dimension of this process.

Bevins’ role as an outsider, a professional journalist making his living by writing about movements, is evident when he concludes that they were “strange events of the decade.” Strange? Or beautiful?  For sometime now, journalists, celebrities, and academics have sought to influence movements according to their outsider understandings. Nearly all such celebrities condemn militant street actions as counterproductive or even harmful. Perhaps the most extreme of such critics is Chris Hedges, whose outbursts are notorious. As recent Gen Z uprisings have shown, militant tactics have accomplished more in days than many movements have achieved in decades. So long as we allow our insurgencies to be influenced by celebrity outsiders, their cynical judgments will negatively impact our resistance.

George Katsiaficas is the author of The Subversion of Politics. 

Leftist Journalist Owen Jones Vindicated in Libel Case Over BBC’s Biased Coverage of Gaza Genocide

The BBC has long been accused of centering Israel and dismissing the humanity of Palestinians in its coverage of Gaza.


Journalist Owen Jones (right) is seen leaving the Royal Courts of Justice in London, where he was being sued by Raffi Berg for libel, on March 6, 2026.
(Photo by Yui Mok/PA Images via Getty Images)

Julia Conley
Mar 12, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

British journalist Owen Jones on Thursday celebrated a UK High Court judge’s ruling in his favor in a libel lawsuit that a BBC editor brought against him—and said that should the editor choose to move forward with his case despite the decision, he was looking forward “to defending my article in court.”

The High Court ruled that Jones was expressing an opinion when he wrote an article for Drop Site News in December 2024 titled “The BBC’s Civil War Over Gaza,” in which he spoke to BBC staffers about Middle East online editor Raffi Berg’s influence over the news outlet’s coverage of Israel and Palestine.

The court also said Jones had expressed his opinion and that of his sources based on concrete examples of Berg’s editorial role and journalism.




Jones’ article described staffers’ allegations that “internal complaints about how the BBC covers Gaza have been repeatedly brushed aside” as Berg “sets the tone” for the outlet’s online coverage of Israel’s onslaught in the exclave, where more than 75,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 2023 in what’s been called a genocide by top Holocaust scholars and human rights groups.

It noted that the BBC failed to report on Amnesty International’s finding that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza and displayed an on-screen chyron reading, “Israel rejects ‘fabricated’ claims of genocide.’”

“Journalists expressed concerns over bias in the shaping of the Middle East index of the BBC news website,” wrote Jones. “Several allege that Berg ‘micromanages’ this section, ensuring that it fails to uphold impartiality.”

The BBC has long been criticized for centering Israel and “dehumanizing” Palestinians, as more than 1,000 artists said in a letter last year when they condemned the network for refusing to air a documentary about the impact of Israel’s attacks on children in Gaza, on the grounds that it featured the child of the exclave’s deputy minister of agriculture—suggesting “that Palestinians holding administrative roles are inherently complicit in violence.”

The article also pointed to Berg’s own history of pro-Israel coverage, including a 2002 story “that presented young [Israel Defense Forces] soldiers as courageous defenders of their country while failing to mention the occupation and settlement of Palestinian land or the widespread allegations of crimes” documented by human rights groups and the US government.

Berg also presented Israeli settlers in the West Bank as “victims seeking ‘a better quality of life’ and did not mention the fact that the settlements have been repeatedly deemed illegal,” and wrote about the Mossad “in glowing terms” in a book he wrote with extensive cooperation from the Israeli intelligence agency.

He also posted a photo on social media showing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a copy of Berg’s book on his bookshelf, Jones reported.

Berg’s lawyer said last year that Jones’ reporting attacked Berg’s “professional reputation as a journalist and editor,” and led to death threats.

In order for his case against Jones to proceed, Berg would now need to prove in court that “Jones did not genuinely hold the opinion he expressed in his reporting, or demonstrate that the opinion is not one an honest person could hold on the basis of any fact that existed at the time of its publication,” Middle East Eye reported.

“I am proud to stand by my journalism,” said Jones Thursday.

 

“How On Earth Do You Justify That?”

Laura Kuenssberg’s Selective Empathy

by Media Lens / March 12th, 2026

Seyed Ali Mousavi, the Iranian ambassador to the UK, with Laura Kuenssberg

On 8 March, on the BBC politics programme, Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, the former BBC political editor put these impassioned words to Seyed Ali Mousavi, the Iranian ambassador to the UK:

‘Since we last spoke, your government has killed thousands of its own people in the streets who had the courage to stand up to protest against the suffering that they have been experiencing at the hands of the regime. Thousands of people were killed. How on earth do you justify that, Ambassador?’

Clearly feeling deep emotion, Kuenssberg continued:

‘Just this morning, I looked at many of the images and watched some of the videos from what happened to protesters in your country in January. I looked at images and videos, verified independently [sic] by our colleagues at BBC Verify, that show body bags littered over the courtyard of a mortuary, the Kahrizak Forensic Medical Centre in Iran. I saw images of young, old, teenagers, people killed by your government, beaten faces, bloodied bodies, gunshot wounds.’

In a strongly accusatory tone, she confronted him:

‘How on earth do you justify that and sit there today saying, “Our people have some complaints”? Your government killed thousands of their own people and the world saw that’.

When has Kuenssberg ever expressed such heartfelt revulsion at the genocide being committed by Israel in Gaza, with likely in excess of 100,000 Palestinians slaughtered?

Has she expressed similar horror for 175 schoolgirls, staff and parents killed by the US in a ‘double-tap’ attack on a primary school in Minab in Iran? It seems some victims matter more.

On the same politics programme last year, Kuenssberg said this about the genocide in Gaza:

‘Often when it comes to the debate about Gaza, it gets very binary and very aggressive very, very quickly and there’s no room for nuance.’

What possible nuance could there be about genocide?

Her tone then was light, devoid of outrage for the tens of thousands dead Palestinians, the mangled and bloodied corpses, many of them babies and children, ripped apart by brutal Israeli firepower.

Kuenssberg also aggressively challenged Mousavi about Iran’s supposed drive towards a nuclear weapon and how Iran could not be trusted to stick to international agreements.

Mousavi pointed out that, on the contrary, Iran is a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, whereas Israel is not. Moreover, as we noted in our previous alert, in 2015, Iran signed up to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), an agreement to limit the Iranian nuclear programme in return for lifted sanctions. Trump tore up this agreement when the US unilaterally withdrew from it in 2018.

It should be obvious that to state such salient facts is not to side with the Iranian regime, nor to excuse its crimes.

Journalist Peter Oborne, the Daily Telegraph’s former chief political commentator, reports that Iran stuck completely to the JCPOA agreement until the US withdrew in 2018. Until the US and Israel began their attacks, Iran was negotiating in good faith in order to avoid any war. The Omani foreign minister, who was involved in the negotiations, stated that Iran had agreed that they would never have the material needed to make a nuclear bomb, adding:

‘There would be zero accumulation, zero stockpiling. And full verification. Even United States inspectors will have access.’

Oborne spelled out what happened next:

‘Iranians were negotiating really hard to avoid a war. They’d actually offered a better deal than they’d signed off on in 2015. That was on the table and that, of course, is when America and Israel struck.’

Note, also, that in the very same programme on Sunday when Kuenssberg asked propagandistic, emotion-laden questions of the Iranian ambassador she had nothing to say about the Gaza genocide when interviewing Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog. She did not say to him:

‘Since we last spoke, your government has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in what human rights organisation and genocide scholars have said is a genocide. How on earth do you justify that, Mr President?’

What does it say about the state of politics and news that the president of a genocidal and apartheid state was given carte blanche to proclaim that in attacking Iran and Lebanon, ‘we are doing this for the entire free world’?

Empathy by a prominent BBC journalist for one set of victims – Iranian – is permitted, even required. Permitted, that is, when the finger of blame points the right way. But as the Minab school bombing shows, not when it points the other way; in this case, conclusively towards the US.

‘Unpeople’ And ‘Unworthy’ Victims

British historian Mark Curtis, co-founder and co-director of Declassified UK, has applied the concept of ‘Unpeople’ as a framework for understanding Western foreign policy. In his 2004 book, Unpeople: Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses, and in his earlier work, Web of Deceit, Curtis argued that the political system separates victims into two categories: those whose deaths matter (‘People’) and those whose lives are considered expendable (‘Unpeople’).

The concept of ‘People’ and ‘Unpeople’ has its roots in the work of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in their classic 1988 book, ‘Manufacturing Consent’, where they discuss examples of ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ victims.

Worthy victims are people who are killed or oppressed by Official Enemies of the West, such as the Soviet Union (and now Russia), North Korea or China. These victims garner considerable media attention in the propaganda system, marked by sympathy, indignation and fury. Their suffering is humanised, described in detail, and used to generate moral outrage directed at the offending regimes or governments, often as part of a concerted attempt to topple them for the benefit of Western geostrategic interests.

‘Unworthy’ victims, by contrast, are people who are killed or whose democratic aspirations are crushed by the West or ‘our allies’; such as Suharto’s Indonesia in the 1960s, Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s, the US-backed Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975, and Israel in the present day. These victims are less prominent, even absent, in western media coverage or are often discounted as ‘collateral damage’: a lesser kind of human, robbed of their individuality, their life stories; even their names and faces.

Herman and Chomsky’s analysis focused on the treatment of ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ victims in the propaganda system. Curtis has expanded the discussion by examining declassified UK government files, released under the ‘Thirty-Year Rule’, showing how the British state structurally ignores or downplays the importance of those it regards as ‘Unpeople’.

Curtis highlights a prominent example occurring right now:

‘In the case of Gaza, Palestinians are seen as unpeople since supporting them holds little merit or gain for British planners. What does Palestine have to offer Whitehall in comparison with Israel?’

Curtis continues:

‘In supporting Israel, Whitehall can demonstrate British subservience and usefulness to its major ally, the US. Israel is a buyer of British arms, a strategic ally to police the region and an increasing, albeit still fairly small, trade partner.

‘And a quarter of the UK’s entire parliament of MPs has received funding from the Israel lobby, buying an influence over UK policy-making that is way beyond anything the Palestinians can induce.’

The fact that there is a well-funded Israel lobby in the UK parliament is beyond the pale for the ‘mainstream’ media to discuss and analyse. To do so would almost inevitably lead to the insidious and often fake charge of ‘antisemitism’. Is it really antisemitic to point out, as Declassified UK did in 2024, that fully half of Keir Starmer’s Cabinet were funded by the Israel lobby?

It is highly doubtful that an in-depth investigation into the Israel lobby in the UK, such as the 2009 Channel 4 Dispatches programme by Oborne, would ever be aired today.

And so there remain approved sets of victims that the ‘mainstream’ media will systematically highlight; and there are other groups of victims that are to be regarded as dispensable.

Laura Kuenssberg’s paired interviews with the Israeli president and the Iranian ambassador, on the same BBC programme, no less, are a case study in the selective empathy required by high-profile corporate journalists.

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Media Lens is a UK-based media watchdog group headed by David Edwards and David Cromwell. The most recent Media Lens book, Propaganda Blitz by David Edwards and David Cromwell, was published in 2018 by Pluto Press. Read other articles by Media Lens, or visit Media Lens's website.