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Zorro

(15,691 posts)
Sat Jul 2, 2016, 07:28 PM Jul 2016

In Venezuela, Political Prisoners as Pawns

Political arrests are a rare growth industry in Venezuela. When Nicolás Maduro became president after Hugo Chávez’s death from cancer in 2013, there were about a dozen prisoners of conscience, according to Foro Penal, a local nongovernmental organization. Today, the number hovers at around 100, and some 2,000 people are the subject of politically driven judicial prosecutions.

The government’s latest targets are Francisco Márquez and Gabriel San Miguel, two civil servants working in a mayor’s office who were summarily arrested at a highway checkpoint in a remote area of northern Venezuela on June 19. Along with hundreds of other activists, they were traveling that day to help collect signatures to petition for a referendum to remove Mr. Maduro from office.

The recall process, as this kind of referendum is known, is explicitly protected by Venezuela’s Constitution. The secretary general’s office of the Organization of American States, the archbishop of Caracas, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have all denounced the arrest of Mr. Márquez and Mr. San Miguel as politically driven and violations of both international and Venezuelan law.

Once in custody, the two men were kept incommunicado and interrogated without counsel by the feared Cuban-trained secret police forces. They were charged with “inciting violence” and money laundering, crimes that can carry jail terms of more than 15 years. Instead of being kept in a special pre-trial holding facility, they were sent to one of the country’s notoriously dangerous penitentiaries, among convicted criminals.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/02/opinion/in-venezuela-political-prisoners-as-pawns.html

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