By John Fund
Sunday, July 09, 2017
Venezuela’s crisis is a genuine nightmare, but it now
also has elements of farce. The nation’s most famed political prisoner has been
released to house arrest, and the attorney general who put him behind bars has
changed sides and denounced the “state terrorism” of strongman Nicolás Maduro.
In turn, Maduro’s supreme court is on the verge of ousting the attorney general
on flimsy charges and has illegally named a Maduro loyalist to be her deputy.
The deputy has been denied access to the Ministry of Justice, so last week she
entered the building in the trunk of a car to gather evidence against her new
boss before she was discovered and thrown out of the building. Politics in
Venezuela is a cross between a Latin version of House of Cards and an Inspector Clouseau movie.
Venezuela’s socialist dictators have so mismanaged the
nation and trampled so savagely on human rights that street demonstrations now
occur daily and have left 90 people dead since March. By transferring noted
political prisoner Leopoldo López from prison to house arrest after three years
of brutal confinement (over a third of which was in solitary), the government
of Maduro, whom Hugo Chávez’s chose as his successor, may finally be showing
weakness.
López, the mayor of a Caracas suburb, was arrested in
2014 for “incitement to commit a crime” during a peaceful protest he led. The
term “kangaroo court” could have been invented to describe the farce of a trial
he received, in which the government presented 108 witnesses against him while
López was allowed only two of his 60 proposed witnesses. In 2015, the lead
prosecutor in his trial fled to Miami and applied for asylum, saying he was
ordered to pursue the case even though the government knew the charges were
trumped up.
The leading dissident inside the government, Luisa Ortega
Diaz, has been using her now-precarious post as attorney general to rail
against the government’s arbitrary actions, thuggish repression of protesters,
and illegal searches and seizures. Ortega held a news conference last week as
the hearing against her began. She announced that she fully expected to be
fired by “an illegitimate and unconstitutional” supreme court. “I am not going
to validate a circus that will stain our history with shame and pain,” she
said.
The supreme court has already thrown out Ortega’s order
for the former head of the National Guard to testify about his mistreatment of
protesters. Over her objections, it has also appointed Katherine Haringhton as
a “shadow” vice prosecutor who is waiting in the wings to replace Ortega.
Haringhton is a Maduro stooge who has had her assets frozen in the U.S. for her
role in jailing innocent protesters. But when Haringhton tried to enter the
Ministry of Justice, she was denied access by security guards at the gate. But
the next day, hiding in the trunk of a car owned by a pro-Maduro prosecutor,
she managed to enter the building. Once inside, she spent two hours combing
through offices looking for evidence of “corruption” before she was discovered
and ejected from the premises.
Haringhton’s effort to sneak into the ministry was aided
by Narda Dianette Sanabria Bernatte, whose vehicle served as the Trojan horse
for her incursion. Sanabria is the prosecutor who first filed formal charges
against Leopoldo López in 2014.
Despite the cracks in the formerly solid wall of
repression in Maduro’s regime, no one expects his government to go easily. “The
Cubans have an enormous stake in propping him up, and they run the security
services,” Thor Halvorssen, founder of the New York–based Human Rights
Foundation, told me. “The military is filled with people involved in funding
the drug cartels that send illegal substances to U.S. cities. Any officer who
is honest or an opponent of Maduro is likely to have been purged from its top
ranks.” Venezuelans are in a tough spot. While they slowly starve and are in
danger of losing the strength to fight the government, they face rulers who
know they must stay in power at all cost or risk the wrath of their own people.
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