Daniel Lozano Madrid
Madrid
Updated Monday, March 18, 2024-20:15
Forum A global front against dictatorships: "Tyrants cooperate among themselves, now we will do it"
Repression World summit of activists against dictatorships: "We all share the dream of being free"
"That Spain understands that this cancer is spreading throughout the world."
The words of the Bolivian
Zvonko Matkovi
, current president of the Legislative Assembly of Santa Cruz, culminated the first day of the
Faces of Torture
forum , organized in Madrid by the pro-democracy movement World Liberty Congress (WLC).
Activists, family members and former political prisoners from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and Bolivia united their voices, convinced that only together can they confront the autocracies that "work in coordination, learning from each other, politically, militarily and economically. Also with repression
.
The tactics to persecute, imprison, torture and kill are the same," revealed former Venezuelan political prisoner Leopoldo López, host of the meeting.
"Democracies have been losing ground on the planet:
seven out of every 10 people today live under autocratic regimes
," calculated the leader of Voluntad Popular, whose headquarters in Amazonas was attacked in the last few hours.
López broke down the tools that the planet's dictatorships use and borrow to stay in power.
Dictatorships that are also celebrating, after the new electoral victory of Vladimir Putin, celebrated in style by his Latin American allies.
"Our older brother has triumphed, he is triumphing on all battle fronts. These are good omens," boasted Nicolás Maduro after the results of some "exemplary votes" were announced, as Daniel Ortega added.
Faced with the
impunity
of the regimes, the WLC and its guests opted for a frontal challenge.
As soon as you enter the exhibition hall built for the occasion, the hand chains of the different revolutions appear, the "faces of torture."
"
Human rights have no borders
, they cannot be defended on the country's islands," López added before recalling the historic milestone that occurred in February, when the International Criminal Court made the decision to continue the investigation into crimes against humanity. Venezuela and appoint three judges for it.
Javier El Hage
, from the Human Rights Foundation, distinguished the different regimes, definitions that have produced so many controversies in the past.
Nicaragua, "converted by Ortega into a prison", as former political prisoner
Lesther Alemán
stated , is a dictatorship that is moving towards totalitarianism, with the presidential couple Daniel Ortega/
Rosario Murillo
determined to look like the North Korea of the continent.
Cuba and Venezuela are dictatorships, complete authoritarian regimes.
While Bolivia, which keeps former president Jeanine Áñez and several front-line opposition leaders, such as
Luis Fernando Camacho
and
Marco Antonio Pumari
, behind bars, is considered a hybrid regime with a certain democratic façade.
One of the first to suffer in his own body "the autocracy hidden in a democracy" was Matkovíc himself, accused of terrorism by a prosecutor who ended up fleeing Bolivia to denounce that it was a case mounted from power, which led to prison for eight years.
"Bolivia does not have the media impact of other countries," he insisted, despite the electoral fraud promoted by
Evo Morales
in 2019. Last week the Andean country received the Puebla Group (GP), determined to mitigate the effects of the fratricidal war put in place. underway between the factions of President
Luis Arce
and former President Morales.
The GP delegation, which brings together leftist, populist, revolutionary and some progressive leaders, was headed by the former president of the Spanish Government,
José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero
, and the Chavista vice president, Delcy Rodríguez.
The GP has opened its doors, wide, to the dictatorship of Cuba and Venezuela, which it defends from the first day of its launch.
Terrible tortures
If one case highlights the violation of human rights in Bolivia, it is that of the coca grower leader
César Apaza
, tortured so viciously that he has been left paralyzed.
"He depends on other prisoners to feed himself, even to change his diaper. All of this without medication," activist Jhanisse Vaca Daza
confirmed in her cell
.
Also an "expert in torture" is
Luis Zúñiga
, leader of the Cuban Resistance Assembly, after 19 years in his country's prisons.
"They torture because they need to establish terror in society, they torture those who have the audacity to protest or rebel. Prisons are so important because they need control in perpetuity," Zúñiga said.
Both Zúñiga and
Javier Larrondo
, president of Prisoners Defenders, added one piece of information after another just a few hours after the last
major revolt in the streets of Santiago de Cuba and Bayamo
, both in the east of the island.
Hundreds of citizens took to the streets to shout about hunger and the constant blackouts that affect the country, unable to overcome its systemic crisis.
With 1,067
political prisoners
, Cuba leads the ranking of prisoners on the continent, ahead of the 267 Venezuelans, among whom six with Spanish nationality stand out, four women and two men.
The latest addition to the list is the renowned activist Rocío San Miguel, implicated without evidence in a new alleged conspiracy against Maduro.
According to the calculations of
Molly de la Sota
, president of Families of Military Political Prisoners, Chavismo has denounced 35 "conspiracies", which later serve as justification to imprison leaders, soldiers or family members.
A persecution that has broken borders in recent weeks, after the kidnapping, execution and burial under a layer of cement of the Venezuelan rebel lieutenant Ronald Ojeda, who had political refugee status in Chile.
"We are afraid of transnational repression. With the death of Lieutenant Ojeda they wanted to leave a message for all of us:
the world is not safe for anyone
," said De la Sota.
Those present at the event received the final words of the Venezuelan fighter with a mixture of stupor and indignation, but with the decision made to confront the continental autocracies with all their strength, despite the fact that the international community is "blind, deaf and mute", as clarified the Nicaraguan activist
Alexa Zamora
, one of the 300 people from whom Ortega took away their citizenship, in what is clearly already a global conflict between democracies and dictatorships.