VenEconomy: A Thorn in the Side of the Venezuelan Dictatorship From the Editors of VenEconomy Latin American Herald Tribune November 21, 2014
November of 2014 will definitely be remembered in the history of Venezuela for the grotesque advance of its dictatorial regime.
On the one hand, 28 decree-laws (only 16 have been revealed so far) were passed all at once as the special legislative powers granted by the Parliament to President Nicolás Maduro for 12 months last year reached their expiration date this week. All of these decree-laws clearly violate constitutional provisions and ignore economic and citizens’ rights.
And on the other, the Government is giving clear signs that it won’t have any respect either for the Constitution, or the political plurality of a democracy or the ideological diversity of participatory citizens to form a Supreme Court of Justice and a National Electoral Council, both autonomous and independent from the Executive Branch. Quite grotesque are all the dirty little tricks and manipulations of the processes for the selection of candidates that will take part of these two institutions that are key to the survival of democracy and the system of freedoms in Venezuela.
Just as serious are the violations to human rights that have already been exposed not only before the eyes of the Venezuelan people, but those of international bodies such as the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, the Committee against Torture (CAT), the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the Federation of Latin American Mayors, Amnesty International, and a large group of Latin American presidents. They have all received extensive information on reported cases of torture and cruel treatment recorded in Venezuela since 2002, and the existence of political prisoners whose due process and their right to presumption of innocence have been violated, while there have been intentional procedural delays, isolation and spurious trials, among other violations of civil rights. Among the most outstanding cases are María Lourdes Afiuni (a former justice of the Supreme Court), the 3,251 persons arrested during the protests that started in February of this year, Daniel Ceballos and Enzo Scarano (two former mayors of the opposition), and Leopoldo López (the leader of the Voluntad Popular opposition party.)
López has been particularly subjected to extreme cruelty on the part of the State that includes a ban on visits from his children, wife and parents; isolation and the refusal to comply with a recommendation from the U.N Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to immediately give back his freedom taken away nine months ago. López today is the prisoner of Maduro, a flag he waves to send a clear message to all the political dissidence. But, the outrages against López are also showing the world the aberrant face of a judiciary hamstrung by partisan interests that amalgamate the violations against many students who were also unfairly sent to prison.
Therefore, the significance of the refusal of López not to appear before an oral and public debate until the Court of Appeals rules on the objection of the court to abide by the resolution of the U.N Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.
Hence the importance of López warning the judge in his case, Susana Barreiros, that: "We have murderers, murderers of justice. You, a temporary judge with no autonomy, as were all those who have intervened in this case and more than 70% of Venezuelan judges; you, who have succumbed to the threat of being jailed as once did justice María Lourdes Afiuni; you will not break me."
These are the young people and students who with the same courage as those in November of 1957 stood up against another dictator to prove that Venezuelans won’t bend to the will of a totalitarian regime that easy.
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