The Maduro regime's inhumane treatment of Venezuela's political prisoners

"In Venezuela there is a tomb for prisoners, in Venezuela human rights are violated #AmnestyIsFreedom" - Lilian Tintori over twitter, April 18, 2016

Lilian Tintori, wife of Venezuelan prisoner of conscience and opposition Leopoldo Lopez alluded in her tweet to a powerful article that appeared the same day. Attorney and human rights defender Tamara Suju Roa began her essay "The Tomb and the isolation cell" on the unseen harm done to Venezuelan prisoners of conscience:

The invisible wounds that Lorent Saleh and Gabriel Valles present may be overcome, maybe not. Perhaps only time really know what physical and psychological damage that confinement in The Tomb is going to leave them for the rest of their lives. Fear, humiliation, guilt, profound sadness, nervous disorder, despair, boredom for their physical appearance, form part of the psychological symptoms that those long isolated in extreme locations without ventilation and natural light.

 Venezuela, under the Maduro regime, continues to be a country in which there is not an independent judiciary that has rejected an amnesty law for prisoners of conscience and where Cuba's Castro regime continues to have undue influence over the internal affairs of the country. More information on the Tomb continues in the video below.

Remembering the meeting with Václav Havel and Oldřich Černý at Forum 2000 in 2009

"The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility."- Václav Havel IHT (21 February 1990) 

Six years ago in October of 2009 together with former prisoner of conscience José Gabriel Ramón Castillo, Czech journalist Carlos González Sháněl, political analyst Javier Loaiza, Tamara Suju Roa and  Former Bolivian President Jorge Quiroga met President Václav Havel and Forum 2000 Executive Director Oldřich Černý at the Forum 2000 on the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution.

It was at this event that President Havel made some profound observations that now and hindsight speak volumes at the challenges currently faced in a deteriorating international atmosphere.

At the time President Barack Obama had backed out of meeting with the Dalai Lama due to an upcoming trip to China, Vaclav Havel explained the importance of such "small compromises" on October 12, 2009 at Forum 2000:

I believe that when the new Laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize postpones receiving the Dalai Lama until after he has accomplished his visit to China, he makes a small compromise, a compromise which actually has some logic to it. However, there arises a question as to whether those large, serious compromises do not have their origin and roots in precisely these tiny and very often more or less logical compromises.

Both Václav Havel and Oldřich Černý have passed away and are greatly missed, especially in these difficult times when moral clarity and discernment are greatly needed. The video below was made by journalist Carlos González.


At the gathering above President Havel signed a petition calling for the release of 305 Cuban political prisoners. Cuban democrats should honor and remember the dissident who became a prisoner of conscience who became a president and later a private citizen and through out this trajectory maintained his solidarity with the victims of repression around the world. On the 26th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution the legacy of Václav Havel and Oldřich Černý lives on in the free society they struggled to bring into being.