Judge Denounces Dark World of Chavista Justice

López described how Venezuelan judges receive constant pressure, are openly threatened and have their telephones tapped, as strategies to oblige them to take decisions which favor the interests of the government.

The judge maintained that when she declined to follow the instructions from the office of the magistrate of the Criminal Circuit of Caracas, the most important in the country, she was harassed by the National Guard, received threats of dismissal, was warned that her security could not be guaranteed, and suffered a kidnapping attempt of her 11-year-old son.

Explaining the details of her case, such as they were presented before federal officials who analyzed her asylum petition, López narrates her odyssey after challenging the high leaders of chavismoby admitting a complaint presented by the Venezuelan businessman Eligio Cedeño against two officials from the Office of the Public Prosecutor of the Republic.

Cedeño, considered back then as a personal enemy of President Chávez, is currently one of the most prominent political prisoners of the business sector in Venezuela. For two years he has remained under arrest in a high security prison accused of alleged financial crimes, contraband, embezzlement.

His lawyers, however, maintain that his arrest is due to the support he gave to the opposition leader Carlos Ortega, currently under political asylum in Peru.

Judge López says that when she admitted the complaint for false testimony against the two prosecutors, presented by Cedeño, "a war began against me." The prosecutors cited as defendants were Gabriel Estagno and José Gregorio Arreaza, whom Cedeño accused of having lied under oath in the case that the state was pushing against him.

López said that during the three days leading up to her decision, she received calls from lawyers and high-ranking officials of the Supreme Court of Justice and Office of the Public Prosecutor, "making me see that this case was to be dealt with as an enemy of the government."

She affirms that a high-ranking judicial official expressly ordered her "to disqualify herself from the case, that I take sick or ask for vacation," so as not to take a decision which would affect the prosecutors accused in the complaint.

The same day that she received the case, a staff member "left me a message that if I wanted to preserve my job and my security, that I should withdraw myself from having to make a decision," she indicated.

A short time afterward, one of the staffers of the prosecutors accused in the complaint, "violently entered my office to warn me that I was going to be removed from office, warning me that I didn't know who I was dealing with."

When she refused to pay attention to the pressures, they obligated her to take a vacation and a court inspector arrived to her office to recuse her and formally remove her from the case.

From the moment she accepted the complaint, the phone threats, the persecution by State security bodies, and the attempt to kidnap her youngest child began, the judge complains.

"Some strangers attempted to pick up my 11-year-old son from the school without authorization, fortunately I arrived in time to avoid the kidnapping," López said in her testimony.

El Nuevo Herald attempted to obtain a version of these complaints from the Public Prosecutor as well as the Supreme Court of Justice of Venezuela, under whose authority the mentioned individuals are, but various emails and telephone messages were left unanswered.

The complaints of Judge Yuri López coincide with indications made public by important independent organizations within and outside of Venezuela.

The Venezuelan Episcopal Conference this week expressed its criticism of "the growing arbitrariness in the administration of justice, in which the people are not treated with the condition of citizens, equal before the law, but rather their ideological affinity or political militancy."

According to the bishops, "it is judicially and ethically unacceptable that due process is not being followed, that different measures are applied according to what group one belongs to, that people are defamed and sentenced before being judged, that the punishments are based upon arguments that bear no direct relation to the accusations and convictions given without real evidence, that disproportionate sentences are given which show political retaliation."

The most recent report by the organization Human Rights Watch, with headquarters in New York, indicated that the Chavista government "openly disregards the principle of the separation of power, and, specifically, the notion of an independent judicial system."

This week sectors of the opposition denounced the complete politicization of the case against opposition leader Manuel Rosales, who has solicited political asylum in Peru.

On Sunday Ismael García, a former Chavist in the Podemos party, presented a document in which the judge assigned to the Rosales case, Reyna Morandi, expressed her decision to convict, even before the first preliminary hearing took place.

In Venezuela the government "is jailing those who think differently" and "we have a partisan and politicized justice system," said the opposition leader Julio Borges, president of the Primero Justicia party.