Today at the inauguration of the Fifth Summit of the Americas hosted by Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was confronted by a full-page announcement published in the national newspaper Trinidad Express signed by nine prominent human rights groups, calling upon all Summit delegates to directly confront Mr. Chavez on numerous human rights violations.
The announcement states that President Chavez has manipulated the criminal justice system to bring politically motivated charges against 45 different individuals, violating their basic human rights as guaranteed by local and international law.
These violations include character assassination, fabricating criminal charges and evidence, torturing and bribing witnesses, breaching privacy and confidentiality, interfering with and controlling judges, and groundless pre-trial incarceration and denial of bail, the announcement states.
"We have all signed this statement to raise awareness among other Latin American nations of the reality of judicial persecution in Venezuela," said Gonzalo Himiob Santome, co-director of the civil rights NGO Foro Penal Venezolano. "Foreign governments at this summit can help these victims by conditioning their talks with the Venezuelan delegation upon the restoration of basic human rights and rule of law."
The announcement published in the Trinidad Express cites several cases of political prisoners and politically persecuted individuals who have been targeted by state-controlled courts, including Ivan Simonovis, Lazaro Forero, and Henry Vivas (the three police commissioners who were just sentenced to 30 years in prison); Francisco Uson (a retired general who was jailed over an empty conviction); Eligio Cedeno (a businessman jailed without conviction for consorting with the opposition); Nixon Moreno (a student movement leader persecuted on trumped up charges, forced to flee the country to asylum); and several others.
"What is happening in Venezuela today under President Hugo Chavez is an outrageous travesty of justice and human rights, which goes on unrecognized underneath the rhetoric of revolution," said Canadian lawyer Robert Amsterdam, international defense counsel for political prisoner Eligio Cedeno. "There is no excuse or plausible defense for how Chavez is treating his own citizens, and no supporter, no matter how loyal or ardent, can come forward to explain why these individuals have been jailed and deprived of their rights. When a president breaks the law, violates the constitution, and openly behaves like a criminal, the international community has a duty to act in response."
An alliance of Latin American and Caribbean governments led by Venezuela will create a regional electronic currency that is expected to circulate by 2010, Chavez stated on Thursday.
The leftist Chavez, who has called the global financial crisis the end of capitalism, has frequently urged allies to stop storing currency reserves in dollars and recently proposed creating an international currency backed by oil reserves.
Member nations of the ALBA, a trade bloc of Venezuela's allies including Bolivia, Nicaragua and Cuba, meet on Thursday to sign an accord creating the currency called the "sucre."
"Today the Sucre will be born," said Chavez, speaking on live television with Cuban President Raul Castro.
"In September, we should be ready to begin some pilot projects for exchange with that virtual currency ... by the first of January of 2010 we should have the system functioning," he said.
He did not offer more details on how the currency would work. In the past, Chavez has said the Sucre could one day become a physical currency.
The OPEC nation's finance ministry yesterday stated it hopes countries outside the ALBA trade bloc, including other nations in South and Central America and the Caribbean, will later join in using the currency.
Most Latin American countries store their reserves in U.S. dollars, though the greenback's steady decline in recent years and China's growing influence in the region have left countries seeking new ways to store cash.
Chavez has also championed the use of alternative "social currencies" used in barter-style markets of small Venezuelan communities as part of his self-styled socialist revolution he calls an alternative to global capitalism.
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During campaigning in Venezuela to pass the law to keep Chavez in command for a longer term the opposition to Chavez sent out mass text messaging to indiviudals. Is this an invasion of privacy or a right of the people to get there message to the public?