Venezuelan prisoner of conscience held incommunicado: Leopoldo López not seen since April 7, 2017

Concerned that Leopoldo López has not been seen in a month, and rumors about his health because of  how Cubans who advise Maduro murdered Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas.

Further information on UA: 33/14 Index: AMR 53/6078/2017 Venezuela Date: 18 April 2017

 URGENT ACTION PRISONER OF CONSCIENCE HELD INCOMMUNICADO

By Amnesty International

Venezuelan prisoner of conscience, Leopoldo López, has been kept incommunicado since 8 April. He has been placed in solitary confinement for reasons that have not been disclosed by the authorities. During this time, he has been illegally denied visits from his lawyer and family. 

On 8 April prison authorities denied Leopoldo López’s family the right to visit him, and informed them that he was currently serving 15 days in solitary confinement. Leopoldo López was last seen on 7 April, and since 8 April his lawyers and family have been repeatedly denied access to visit him. Leopoldo López’s lawyers were not notified of the process or decision to place him in solitary confinement, nor of the contents or basis for this decision. As a result, he has been denied his right to a defence. 

Leopoldo López, leader of the opposition party Popular Will (Voluntad Popular), has been in detention since 18 February 2014 at CENAPROMIL (Centro Nacional de Procesados Militares), a military prison in Los Teques, on the outskirts of the capital, Caracas. He is a prisoner of conscience who must be released immediately and unconditionally, as his detention is arbitrary, the charges filed against him were never adequately substantiated and his sentence was clearly politically motivated.

Placing Leopoldo López in solitary confinement is an unlawful way of justifying his incommunicado detention, and violates his personal integrity and his right to a defence and private and family life. Leopoldo López has been placed in solitary confinement on numerous occasions, and his lawyers believe that this punishment has been used systematically against him, which contradicts the exceptional nature of such practice.

Please write immediately in Spanish or your own language:

•  Demanding the Venezuelan authorities immediately grant Leopoldo López free and private access to his family and lawyers of his choosing; 
•  Urging them to guarantee his personal safety; 
•  Calling on them to release Leopoldo López immediately and unconditionally, as he is a prisoner of conscience who was arbitrarily detained and sentenced without any credible evidence against him. 

PLEASE SEND APPEALS BEFORE 30 MAY 2017 TO: 

Minister of the Interior and Justice Gen. (Ej.) Néstor Luis Reverol Torres Ministerio del Interior y Justicia Avenida Urdaneta Esquina de Platanal Edificio Interior y Justicia Despacho del Ministro  Caracas, Venezuela Fax: +58 212 506 1685  Twitter: @NestorReverol Salutation: Dear Minister/ Señor Ministro 

Minister of Defense Chief General Vladimir Padrino  Fuerte Tiuna, Edif. Sede del Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Defensa,  Caracas, Distrito Capital, Venezuela Email: mppdrrii@gmail.com Twitter: @vladimirpadrino Salutation: Dear General/ Señor General

Ombudsperson  Dr. Tarek William Saab Av. Urdaneta, Frente El Universal Financiero Latino, Piso 27 Caracas, Venezuela Fax: +58 212 507 7025 Email: contacto@defensoria.gob.ve  Salutation: Dear Ombudsman/ Señor Defensor
 

Please check with your section office if sending appeals after the above date. This is the seventh update of UA 33/14. Further information: www.amnesty.org/en/documents/amr53/2449/2015/en/

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Leopoldo López, the leader of the Venezuelan opposition party Popular Will (Voluntad Popular), surrendered before the National Guard on 18 February 2014 after leading a protest. He was charged with a series of crimes, including terrorism, homicide, severe bodily harm, public incitement, damage to property, arson, and conspiracy to commit a crime. He has been imprisoned ever since. 

In August 2014, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions qualified Leopoldo López’s detention as arbitrary and the High Commissioner for Human Rights demanded his immediate release. 

On 13 February 2015, Leopoldo’s cell was raided by prison guards, who broke and damaged some of his personal belongings, such as photographs and documents, in what was considered an intimidation tactic. 

On 10 September 2015, Leopoldo was sentenced to 13 years and nine months in prison for conspiracy, arson, incitement to commit a crime, and damage to public property. On 13 August 2016, the Appeals Court upheld this ruling. 

On 6 December 2016, the Council for the Protection of Children and Youth of the municipality of Chacao ordered the prison Director to allow visits from his children, which were being denied at the time. 

Name: Leopoldo López Gender m/f: Male

Further information on UA: 33/14 Index: AMR 53/6078/2017

Issue Date: 18 April 2017

https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/amr53/6078/2017/en/

Cuban May Day Flag Protester Daniel Llorente remains jailed, now faces political show trial

"Freedom begins in the mind and that is something that has to change in Cubans, they are afraid to tell the truth." - Daniel Llorente Miranda

Daniel Llorente Miranda, age 52, jailed and facing show trial in Cuba

 
 The man who defied the Castro regime and exposed its totalitarian nature on May Day has been identified and his name is Daniel Llorente Miranda, age 52 and a taxi driver. He is an independent dissident, not belonging to any organization.  He's been jailed since May 1, 2017, now charged with "public disorder and resistance" for his seconds long run  with an American flag in front of the Castro regime's May Day gathering in the "Revolutionary Plaza" in Havana shouting "freedom for the people of Cuba" before being tackled down, beaten up and taken away by the secret police.

His son, Eliécer Llorente Pérez, was finally able to see him for ten minutes on Friday, May 5, 2017 and reports that his father in is good spirits and being held at the Technical Department of Investigations of the Police in 100 and Aldabó [Departamento Técnico de Investigaciones de la Policía en 100 y Aldabó]

The dictatorship's official media mouthpiece Granma, with out identifying him, declared his protest a "annexationist monologue" and sought to slander Daniel Llorente in an editorial. But what the official media writes about this independent activist does not match up with his past statements and actions.

Daniel had protested peacefully at least three times before with the American flag. When President Barack Obama arrived in Havana last March he could be seen carrying the flag, again when cruise ship Adonia docked in Cuba on May 2, 2016 and on August 31, 2017 at the Santa Clara airport when commercial flights between the United States and Cuba started up again.

Independent journalist Augusto Cesar San Martin had interviewed the independent Cuban dissident in December of 2016 and his civic consciousness and courage come across:

"Freedom begins in the mind and that is something that has to change in Cubans, they are afraid to tell the truth. The truth is that in Cuba there is a system where the biggest beneficiary is the government. The people work and benefit the State."

In another interview with the same journalist Daniel Llorento explained "It's my right to go anywhere in Cuba with the flag of the United States. ... That is my way of expressing  myself and it does not hurt anyone."

Please call your Congressman and Senators in Washington DC and ask them to contact the Cuban Embassy in Washington DC and ask for Daniel Llorento's release.  This free man living in Cuba should not be imprisoned for exercising a fundamental human right.

World Press Freedom Day 2017: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

"Th newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, controls th' ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward". -   Mr. Dooley ( Finley Peter Dunne), 1902

On World Press Freedom Day the map of press freedom prepared by Reporters Without Borders is bleak with a darkening tide of censorship across the globe. Despite having a First Amendment to the Constitution that protects free speech and freedom of the press the United States today has 43 countries ahead of it with greater press freedoms.  This confirms the observation of the late conservative polemicist Joseph Sobran, who passed away in 2010 that “the U.S. Constitution poses no serious threat to our form of government.” It gives me no comfort to be able to say, but hey Cuba, our next door neighbor, is at 173 much less free then the USA. As a citizen and a patriot this is one list that if not number one, the United States should strive to be in the top ten. It has not been there for some time. The ten most censored countries in the world according to the Committee to Protect Journalists are also terrible places to live not only for journalists but everyday people.

A free press is a benchmark of a free society that needs to be celebrated and defended from both  external and internal threats to its good works. Since it is a free institution, it must be self-policing and only answer to its customers on the basis of the quality of the journalism.

The ten countries with the greatest press freedom, according to Reporters Without Borders, in contrast do not have refugee exodus crises, even as is the case with Costa Rica (6) and Jamaica (8) they are not materially the richest countries but they are free peoples.

Today is a day to honor courageous and professional journalists who take their work seriously, but are willing to poke fun at themselves as Finley Peter Dunne did 115 years ago. It is an ironic tribute that his skewering of the self-important news media has been edited down and turned into a challenge to some journalists to "comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable." On this day let us comfort journalists afflicted for practicing their trade in closed societies.

.@mothermushroom has been detained since October and should be released immediately #FreethePress #WorldPressFreedomDay #WPF2017 pic.twitter.com/qDqIPT5Bwh

— CPJ Asia (@cpjasia) May 3, 2017

The Vietnamese blogger Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh, better known as Me Na or "Mother Mushroom" has been detained since October 2016 while trying to visit an imprisoned activist. She stands accused of "propagandizing against the state."  

Let us also recognize Nguyen Van Hoa, a 22 year old video journalist jailed for using a drone to broadcast environmental protests in Vietnam.

In Venezuela on the evening of May 1, 2017 Marcos Vergara and Deivis Valera, production assistants for the online media platform VivoPlay were taken into the custody of the Venezuelan National Guard while covering a protest, reports the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Please spread the world and demand their freedom.

Peter Greste, Mohamed Fahmy, journalists for Al Jazeera who were arrested in Egypt in 2013, writing today in The Australian warn that a "tragedy is unfolding in Turkey. Independent journalism is being systematically stamped out. Prison doors are slamming, media outlets are being boarded up and a disturbing silence is falling over what has been a vibrant and ­diverse media landscape."

Be not silent before this atrocity against freedom.

George Orwell well understood that "Freedom of the press if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose." He also understood what was not only "fake news" but also fake language and called it "newspeak" in his novel 1984. 

We must recognize that there are hacks that can due great and lasting damage peddling "fake news" working in free newspapers. The ghosts of Walter Duranty and Herbert Matthews continue to possess the Gray Lady with their enduring and shameful legacies in Ukraine and Cuba. Walter Duranty won the Pulitzer covering up Stalin's 1930s manufactured famine in Ukraine that claimed eight to 10 million lives. With his reports denying the reality all around him this New York Times journalist was complicit in genocide. Twenty years later in Cuba Herbert Matthews engaged in a fallacious propaganda campaign disguised as news reporting to turn Fidel Castro into a national figure presenting him as an anti-communist and a democrat. The total number of dead  is still being added to 58 years later for the lies he reported in the 1950s.

However this hacks are small time purveyors of fake news compared to governments that manufacture entire news agencies, black mail journalists with the threat of expulsion.  The way to counter fake news is with more press freedom to challenge it along with greater reader discernment to weigh the facts and seek the truth. Facts matter, recognizing objective truth exists and getting the story right regardless of agendas is the best way to serve readers.

Believing the government can be dangerous to your freedom. President Ronald Reagan said it best, "trust but verify." He applied that to his dealings with the Russians, but it should be expanded when dealing with all governments.

However the threats to a free press are not only state actors, but also technology and artificial intelligence that threatens to simulate writing and overwhelm the net with inferior prose designed to push an agenda or a product and not inform a readership is a future threat. However, an ever present threat today thanks to the greed of Western technology companies such as Yahoo, Sun Microsystems, Google and others that helped erect the Great Fire Wall of China. Modernizing totalitarianism and giving it new life into the 21st Century. Google is now collaborating with the Cuban intelligence service and military allowing them to store their servers. This means that journalists can write their articles but no one will be able to find them in their online searches. Russia is also now adopting their own version of the great fire wall. This is also a profound threat to press freedom.

The belief that legitimacy is no longer found in objective truth but in "positive results" has proven a destructive meme in schools of journalism that in the final analysis rejects reality as a social construct are bearing fruit in declining readership and sales.

These are great challenges but can be overcome if confronted and resisted.





 

Cuban defiance to Castro totalitarianism revealed to all on May Day

 The audacity of hope in Cuba meets the cold reality of Raul Castro's secret police

Unidentified protester running with an American flag chased by secret police

Was it great courage, desperation for freedom, or a Cuban example of what Barack Obama called the "audacity of hope" that prompted a black Cuban to sprint in front of the Castro regime's May Day parade carrying an American flag in his outstretched hands as he ran as fast as he could chased by Castro's secret police.  When they finally caught him they roughed him up and carried him away. The Associated Press reported that after being subdued and hauled away one of the secret policemen "struck the protester in the face as he was carried past reporters."  One can only wonder what they are doing to him away from the cameras. Videos that have emerged showing the pursuit and violent take down of this lone demonstrator, a powerful demonstration that Cuba remains a totalitarian regime. However it is also a vivid reminder that Cubans defiance and desire to live in freedom has not been diminished.

Full story, photos: protester disrupts start of Cuba's annual May Day parade: https://t.co/JbMMCLm7tj (from @AP) pic.twitter.com/eiOdb5mZPf

— Michael Weissenstein (@mweissenstein) May 1, 2017

This also needs to be placed in context. Eduardo Cardet Concepción, national coordinator of the Christian Liberation Movement, a physician, husband and father of two since November 30, 2017 has been imprisoned in Cuba. What offense did he commit? He gave a critical appraisal of Fidel Castro's life and legacy in Cuba. He has spent six months in prison and was beaten up in front of his wife and two sons the day he was arrested. He is also an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience. There is an ongoing campaign for his release.

 Félix Yuniel Llerena detained and threatened by secret police in Cuba

Another example from April 29, 2017 involves 20 year old Félix Yuniel Llerena, a youth activist,  who spoke out against the Castro dictatorship while visiting the United States, returned home to harassment and the confiscation of goods on his arrival at the airport followed by a request to appear at a police station with his mother where he was threatened that "these are country folk, of people who don't understand anything of human rights and if some peasant believes that you are going to commit a terrorist act, he will attack you with a machete and later don't say that we sent him"; "if you continue acting like this we are going to declare you persona non grata in this municipality so that you will no longer be able to visit your family (...) we also know that you brought radios, backpacks and papers of Cuba Decide, therefore when you return to Villa Clara try to come clean because that we are not going to permit again (...).

Other young Cubans have been expelled from university for expressing themselves truthfully or for belonging to a civic organization. The Castro regime's claim that the "University is for Revolutionaries" endures to the present day, even if some consider it a cruel caricature to claim that allegiance to a static and decaying 58 year old totalitarian dictatorship as revolutionary.

However, I do not because the Castro regime is anti-natural, violating human societal norms, and systematically rejecting and violating human rights that are natural rights that preexist governing institutions.  The Castro regime is a totalitarian communist regime. Over the past century communist totalitarian regimes in Russia, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, North Korea, and in many other places has claimed the lives of over a 100 million souls. In that sense it is a permanent revolution against a just order. This is why the Castro regime must be resisted and rejected.

One way to do that is to speak up for Eduardo, Félix, and the unknown man who for a few brief moments before the cameras of the world, with an American flag flapping over his head, defied a communist regime that had spent six decades trying to silence all dissent.


  

Venezuela: Protests continue as Maduro's forces kill more students

"Years selling us the idea that all the weapons of war they bought was to fight the gringos, it turned out to be that it was to kill ourselves," Juan Pablo Pernalete, student age 20, murdered by Maduro's political police

Juan Pablo Pernalete, age 20 murdered by Maduro's political police

The situation in Venezuela continues to deteriorate as the Maduro regime announces that it will leave the Organization of American States to avoid having its anti-democratic behavior called into question as it's repressive forces kill more students.

Marching in memory of Juan Pablo Pernalete and other fallen students

Juan Pablo Pernalete, a 20 year old college student majoring in economics, was shot and killed by Maduro's Bolivarian National Police on April 26, 2017 and a day later thousands took to the street to honor his memory. Juan Pablo was a youtube sensation who had a presence on twitter with a photo of his girlfriend, Fabiana Marchesini, who now mourns for him.

Juan Pablo Pernalete with his girlfriend Fabiana Marchesini

The killings are meant to terrorize and break the spirit of the young protesters. Maduro and his Cuban handlers have apparently misjudged the situation and a child of a prominent regime official has taken to the streets and to social media to call out his dad to do the right thing and denounce the violence.

The narrative of the Castro and Maduro regimes in Latin America that all the evils of the world are due to the United States is breaking down before the cruel reality both are inflicting on Venezuela's youth in the name of 21st century socialism.

The nonviolent struggle by the student movement in Venezuela is shaking the pillars of power of the Maduro regime now is the time to step it up not abandon it.  Maduro and his Cuban masters know how to deal with violence, but are at a disadvantage confronting a nonviolent opposition.