Politics and Prison in Venezuela - washingtonpost.com

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Student Protester's Saga Shines New Light on Chávez's Approach to Dissent

By Juan Forero
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, October 5, 2009

CARACAS, Venezuela -- President Hugo Chávez's government says Julio Cesar Rivas is a violent militant intent on fomenting civil war.

Rivas's supporters say the 22-year-old university student is just one of many Venezuelans jailed for challenging a populist government that they contend is increasingly intolerant of dissent.

As the Chávez government approaches 11 years in power, many of its most prominent opponents are in exile in foreign countries or under criminal investigation here.

But human rights and legal policy groups say that even more worrisome is the growing number of government foes in jail for what they allege are politically motivated reasons. There are more than 40 political prisoners in Venezuela, and 2,000 Chávez opponents are under investigation, the groups and human rights lawyers say.

"The government tries to defend itself by saying it has politicians who are prisoners," said Teodoro Petkoff, a newspaper editor critical of Chávez. "But however you label them, they are people who are prisoners for political reasons."

Chávez administration officials contend that politics is not a motivating factor in the arrests and that the prisoners, political opponents or not, violated criminal code.

The arrests come in a year in which the number of anti-government protests has grown dramatically in Caracas, the capital, and other major cities. In the first eight months of this year, 2,079 demonstrations took place, up from 1,602 in 2008, according to a recent study by Provea, a human rights organization, and Public Space, a policy group that monitors free speech issues. Nearly 500 people were hurt and 440 were detained, the study said.

Venezuela's chief prosecutor, Luisa Ortega, warned at the end of August that such demonstrations were "in effect, criminal civil rebellion." She said protesters could be charged with crimes carrying prison terms of up to 24 years.

"People who disturb order and the peace to create instability of institutions, to destabilize the government or attack the democratic system, we are going to charge and try them," she told reporters.

Soon after that, Rivas learned how swift Venezuelan justice could be.

On Sept. 7, two weeks after participating in a demonstration, Rivas was arrested at his home. The main charge against him: inciting civil war.

"I didn't commit any crime. I am a young student who is not a coup plotter," he said in an interview. "I am not a CIA agent as they say I am."

Rivas's lawyers said the evidence against him was flimsy. A video made by a state television crew shows him shaking a police barricade during the protest and then telling a reporter that "we want to go to the Congress because we have a right." The tape was repeatedly shown on state television before Rivas was arrested, his lawyers said.

Rivas also became a target of Mario Silva, host of a state television show, "The Razor," in which Chávez foes are skewered. Silva aired photographs from Rivas's Facebook page and suggested that they demonstrated his culpability in generating unrest.

Among the photos was one of Rivas wearing a gas mask, which drew howls of laughter from Silva, and others of him with well-known opposition leaders. "Look, these are his friends!" Silva said. "This is in his Facebook. How horrible."

Alfredo Romero, who works at a Caracas law firm that represents Rivas and others detained by the government, said the steps taken against Rivas were meant to send a message to others in a budding student movement.

"The government is using Julio Rivas as an example to all the students: If you're a student and you go to a mass protest, you're going to go to prison," Romero said.

But Interior and Justice Minister Tareck El Aissami said Rivas's release Monday, after 22 days in jail, debunked "countless opposition lies" alleging government repression. "Like never before, we say that our government, particularly President Hugo Chávez, respects human rights," he told state media.

Though now free, Rivas still faces charges. But Tuesday, a day after his release, he joined 50 university students on a hunger strike to protest the jailings.

Government critics singled out for prosecution have little right of redress because the Chávez administration controls the Supreme Court and the lower courts, said Carlos Ayala, a Venezuelan constitutional and human rights lawyer who is president of the Andean Commission of Jurists.

"Venezuelan justice has been subservient to political intervention," Ayala said.

Calls to Ortega, the attorney general, were not returned. But Chávez has frequently characterized criticism of Venezuela's human rights credentials -- as well as accusations that he controls the courts -- as the fabrications of CIA-supported coup plotters.

Some of those who have been prosecuted, though, say the government shows little mercy.

Five years ago, three Caracas police commissioners were convicted on charges that they ordered the killings of pro-government protesters in 2002.

"The government needed to blame someone, but it did not look for who was really responsible," said Ivan Simonovis, one of the commissioners, who is serving a 30-year term.

The Due Process of Law Foundation, a Washington group that promotes judicial reform, last year concluded after a six-month study that Venezuela had violated the police officials' rights. The foundation also raised questions about the independence of the judges.

Simonovis said the only way out now is if the opposition wins a majority in Congress next year and names what he calls independent judges to the judiciary.

"For the moment," Simonovis said, "the president controls it all, and uses it like a weapon to make criminals of the opposition."

Battle for Honduras--and the Region - Nation

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Roberto Micheletti, who took power in Honduras following the June 28 coup, has come under intense criticism from the international community for rejecting a compromise, negotiated by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, that would allow Manuel Zelaya, the democratically elected president forced into exile by the military, to return as head of a reconciliation government. But Micheletti's obstinacy is encouraged by those who see the crisis as a chance to halt the advance of the Latin American left. A month and a half after Zelaya's overthrow, the small, desperately poor Central American country has become the site of a larger battle that could shape hemispheric politics, including Barack Obama's foreign policy, for years to come.

In the 1980s Honduras served as a staging ground for Ronald Reagan's anticommunist operations in neighboring Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala and as a portal for New Right Christians to roll back liberation theology. Central America's anticommunist crusade became something of a death-squad Da Vinci Code, pulling together a carnivalesque cast that included first-generation neocons, Latin American torturers, local oligarchs, anti-Castro Cubans, mercenaries, Opus Dei ideologues and pulpit-thumping evangelicals.

The campaign to oust Zelaya and prevent his restoration has reunited old comrades from that struggle, including shadowy figures like Fernando "Billy" Joya (who in the 1980s was a member of Battalion 316, a Honduran paramilitary unit responsible for the disappearance of hundreds, and who now works as Micheletti's security adviser) and Iran/Contra veterans like Otto Reich (who ran Reagan's Office of Public Diplomacy, which misused public money to manipulate public opinion to support the Contra war against Nicaragua). The Honduran generals who deposed Zelaya received their military training at the height of the region's dirty wars, including courses at the notorious School of the Americas. And the current crisis reveals a familiar schism between conservative Catholic hierarchs and evangelical Protestants who back the coup, on the one hand, and progressive Christians who are being hounded by security forces, on the other.

Joining the coup coalition are new actors like Venezuelan Robert Carmona-Borjas, who was involved in the 2002 attempt to overthrow Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. According to Latin American analyst Laura Carlsen, Carmona, working closely with Reich, turned his attentions to Honduras after having failed to halt the electoral success of the left in Venezuela. Starting in 2007, Carmona's Arcadia Foundation launched a press campaign to discredit Zelaya by accusing his government of widespread graft. As Carlsen writes, the "politicized nature of Arcadia's anti-corruption offensive was clear from the start. Carmona, along with Otto Reich, charged President Zelaya of complicity" in assorted misdeeds. The crusade was similar to the way International Republican Institute-linked "democracy promotion" groups destabilized the government of Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, resulting in his overthrow in 2004.

Also fresh to the fight is Lanny Davis, a former Hillary Clinton adviser turned lobbyist, who was hired by business backers of the coup to push the Clinton State Department to recognize the Micheletti government. The Clinton wing of the Democratic Party has deep ties to Latin American neoliberals who presided over ruinous policies of market liberalization in the 1990s, now largely displaced from office by the region's new leftists. Clinton pollsters and consultants, such as Stanley Greenberg and Doug Schoen, have worked on a number of their presidential campaigns, often on the losing side.

Three years ago the region, locked into the US sphere of influence by the Central American Free Trade Agreement, seemed immune to the changes taking place in South America, which had brought leftists to power in a majority of countries. But then the Sandinistas returned to office in Nicaragua in 2006. Recently, the FMLN won the presidency in El Salvador, and Guatemala, led by center-left President Álvaro Colom, is witnessing a resurgence of peasant activism, much of it against transnational mining and biofuel corporations.

In Honduras, Zelaya shook things up by raising the minimum wage and apologizing for the executions of street children and gang members carried out by security forces in the 1990s. He moved to reduce the US military presence and refused to privatize Hondutel, the state-owned telecommunications firm, a deal that Micheletti, as president of Congress, pushed. Zelaya also vetoed legislation, likewise supported by Micheletti, that would have banned sale of the morning-after pill. Considering Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega's shameful support of the Catholic Church's position on abortion, which resulted in legislation mandating up to thirty-year jail terms for women who receive them, this was perhaps Zelaya's most courageous move. He also accepted foreign aid, in the form of low-cost petroleum, from Venezuela. It would be impossible to overstate the Central American ruling class's hatred of Chávez, whose hand is seen behind every peasant protest and every call to democratize the region's politics and economics. The president of a Honduran business council recently said Chávez "had Honduras in his mouth. He was a cat with a mouse that got away."

The fixation on Chávez usefully diverts attention from the gnawing poverty in the region, as well as from the failure of the neoliberal economic model promoted by Washington in recent decades. Forty percent of Central Americans, and more than 50 percent of Hondurans, live in poverty. The Chávez mania also distracts from the fact that under Washington's equally disastrous "war on drugs," crime cartels, deeply rooted in the military and traditional oligarchic families, have rendered much of Central America into what the Washington Office on Latin America calls "captive states."

For the White House, Honduras is proving to be an unexpectedly difficult foreign-policy test. After condemning the coup, Obama handed the crisis to the State Department. Rather than working with the Organization of American States (OAS), Secretary of State Clinton unilaterally charged Oscar Arias with brokering a compromise, ignoring the concerns of most other Latin American governments that negotiations would grant too much legitimacy to the coup. Clinton has so far been unwilling to apply a range of possible sanctions, including freezing the bank accounts of those who carried out the coup, to force Micheletti to accept the Arias plan. And for those who see Micheletti as the last line against the spread of Chavismo--be it in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador or elsewhere in the Americas--the return of Zelaya, even just to finish the few months left in his term, is unacceptable.

In the late 1970s the Sandinista revolution revealed the limits of Jimmy Carter's tolerance of Third World nationalism. The more Carter tried to appease hawks in his administration, the more he was accused of vacillating, thus paving the way for neoconservatives, under Reagan, to use Central America to showcase their hard line.

A similar dynamic is taking place today. Republicans have rallied around Micheletti, sending a Congressional delegation led by Connie Mack to visit Tegucigalpa. Taking a page out of the Latin American right's playbook, they have redbaited Obama by associating him with Chávez. Obama, said Texas Senator John Cornyn, "must stand with the Honduran people, not with Hugo Chávez." It's the kind of grandstanding that Republicans, absent a domestic agenda, have come to rely on. Venezuela's position on Honduras is identical to that of Brazil and Chile--and, for that matter, the European Union. But the right-wing attacks are effective, largely because self-described liberals repeatedly indulge in the demonization not just of Chávez, as Lanny Davis recently did, but of leftists like Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador.

In early August the State Department seemed to give ground to Republicans, stating in a letter to Republican Senator Richard Lugar that Zelaya's "provocative actions...unleashed the events that led to his removal." This statement, as well as other tepid efforts to pressure Micheletti, bodes ill for the Obama administration's willingness to stand up to right-wing pressure.

Obama himself continues to send mixed signals. At an August summit in Guadalajara of the presidents of Mexico, Canada and the United States, he complained that "critics who say that the United States has not intervened enough in Honduras are the same people who say that we're always intervening and the Yankees need to get out of Latin America. You can't have it both ways." However, no one in Latin America is asking for unilateral US intervention but rather for Washington to work multilaterally with the OAS. By deputizing Oscar Arias, the United States effectively undermined the OAS. On the same day Obama made these remarks, South American presidents, meeting in Quito, Ecuador, reaffirmed their condemnation of the coup and said they will not recognize any president elected under the current regime--a step Clinton's State Department has refused to take.

The failure to restore Zelaya to power will send a clear message to Latin American conservatives that Washington will tolerate coups, provided they are carried out under a democratic guise. As historian Miguel Tinker Salas recently observed in an essay published on Common Dreams, they already sense that Honduras might be a turning point. A conservative businessman recently won the presidency in Panama. In June in Argentina, Cristina Fernández's center-left Peronist party suffered a midterm electoral defeat and lost control of Congress. And polls show that presidential elections coming up in Chile and Brazil will be close, possibly dealing further losses to the left.

In the meantime, Zelaya is rallying supporters from abroad to press for his return. In Honduras, protests continue and the body count climbs. At least eleven Zelaya supporters have been killed since the coup took place. The latest, Martín Florencio Rivera, was stabbed to death as he left a wake held for another victim. Micheletti, for his part, is hunkered down in Tegucigalpa, betting he can leverage international support to last until regularly scheduled presidential elections in November. The future course of Latin American politics may hang in the balance.

About Greg Grandin

Greg Grandin, a professor of history at New York University, is the author, most recently, of Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan). He serves on the editorial committee of the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA)

South American Leaders Assail U.S. Access to Colombian Military Bases - washingtonpost.com

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By Juan Forero
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, August 29, 2009

BOGOTA, Colombia, Aug. 28 -- South American leaders meeting Friday at a special summit in Argentina lashed out at the United States and Colombia over an agreement that gives Washington access to seven military bases in this country.

The tension in the publicly televised meeting eased after the leaders unanimously agreed to a vague resolution that says no foreign military force should be allowed to threaten the sovereignty of a South American nation.

But the tone of the criticism and the apparent unease about U.S. American motives during the seven-hour meeting underscore the hurdles President Obama faces in trying to improve relations with countries that have distanced themselves from Washington in the past decade. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, president of regional power Brazil, said Obama should explain his administration's objectives, while the leaders of Ecuador and Venezuela warned that an expanded U.S. presence threatens their security.

"You are not going to be able to control the Americans," said Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa, locking eyes with Colombian President Álvaro Uribe. "This constitutes a grave danger for peace in Latin America."

Cynthia Arnson, director of the Latin American program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, said the agreement's scope and the secrecy of the negotiations between Washington and Bogota have generated controversy over what has always been a hot-button issue in Latin America: the deployment of U.S. troops.

"It's hurt the Obama administration's credibility in the region at a time when the administration was attempting to really set a different path in U.S.-Latin America relations that was multilateral, that involved working with allies," Arnson said, speaking from Washington by phone. U.S. relations with some countries in the region, particularly Venezuela, were in tatters by the end of President George W. Bush's term, she said.

"It's certainly the case that Chávez and his allies in the region have been the most vocal opponents," Arnson said, referring to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez's hostility to the base access plan. "But it says a lot that countries like Brazil and Chile were also opposed to this."

Since some details of the defense cooperation agreement between Bogota and Washington became public last month, governments from Ecuador to Argentina have questioned why Uribe would permit the United States long-term access to three air bases, two army installations and two naval ports. Colombian officials have said that the United States has expressed particular interest in stationing surveillance planes at the German Olano de Palanquero air base, strategically located in Colombia's geographic heart.

Uribe told the presidents meeting in the Patagonian resort of Bariloche that the U.S. assistance was necessary to fight drug-trafficking and Marxist rebels but that the bases remained Colombian, not American. Colombian officials have also said that U.S. servicemen and planes have been operating in Colombia for years and that the agreement merely formalizes a string of old accords and cuts bureaucratic hurdles.

The Colombian leader, a stalwart caretaker of Washington's war on drugs, arrived in Argentina with the challenge of assuaging Chávez. All this month, Chávez has warned that the base plan could lead to war and prompt him to break diplomatic relations with Colombia. He has also said his country would curtail Colombian imports and start investigating Colombian companies operating in Venezuela.

Speaking to the other presidents on Friday, Chávez read a long document that he said demonstrated that the United States is planning a war on South America. "This is the global strategy of the United States," he said. "That's the reason for this. It's the reason why they're talking about those bases."

The document, which is public, is an unofficial, academic paper -- some 14,000 words long -- that explains the importance of more than 40 bases worldwide for U.S. air mobility.

The concerns of Colombia's neighbors have been heightened by Uribe's ties to the United States, which has historically been viewed with suspicion by leftist leaders on the continent. Ecuador has also repeatedly warned that Colombia is a threat to its sovereignty since March 2008, when Colombian planes bombed a Colombian rebel camp just inside Ecuador, killing two dozen guerrillas.

Referring to the document that Chávez read, Correa said the United States was treating the region like a colony and that its planes could be used "for intervention in other countries."

Uribe, though, described the agreement with the United States as irreversible, and Chávez was unable to muster support for his effort to have the pact officially condemned. Uribe also forcefully criticized Venezuela, both directly and indirectly.

He said that arms "from other countries" have been supplied to Marxist rebels here, and he accused Venezuela of giving refuge to two top guerrilla commanders, Luciano Marin Arango and Rodrigo Londoño. Uribe also noted that Chávez had publicly eulogized a guerrilla commander who was killed last year.

The Colombian leader stressed that, with U.S. support, his country had curtailed violence generated by the long, drug-fueled conflict that has plagued this country.

"We are not talking about a political game, we are talking about a threat that has spilled blood in Colombian society," Uribe said.

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