Venezuela: Leopoldo López Faces 10 Years in Prison

PanAm Post ^ | Thursday, February 20, 2014 | Staff

[Prospero]

Venezuelan political opposition leader and founder of the Popular Will Party, Leopoldo López, will spend the next 45 days in the Ramo Verde jail in Los Teques. During that time, the Public Prosecutor’s Office will decide whether it seeks to convict him of the alleged planning of the violent incidents that happened after the opposition rally on February 12 in the center of Caracas.

Judge Ralenis Tovar Guillén delivered the detention measure today at 1:00 a.m. inside the military prison where López is held. She made use of a “mobile court” unit — basically a bus repurposed to function as a court of law, allegedly to “protect the life and integrity of the accused,” as stated by the prosecution.

Guillén dismissed the objection of Juan Carlos Gutiérrez, López’s lawyer. According to Gutiérrez, the judge’s decision violates legal and constitutional dispositions of due process: the audience should have taken place in a proper court of law.

The prosecutor is accusing López, among other charges, of criminal association, an offense penalized by the Organic Law Against Organized Crime and the Financing of Terrorism with 10 years of prison.

Source (Translated from): El Universal.

[Prospero]

To anyone familiar with Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelego the significance of receiving a possible "tenner," a nearly automatic ten year sentence "for eating with the wrong fork," can't escape the irony of this possible sentence, in the context of a repressive Communist regime.

The picture is of López as he surrendered, after speaking to a huge crowd of supporters in Caracas, Tuesday. He was immediately singled out by the Maduro-Castro regime from among the Opposition leaders as the man responsible for the protests resulting in the death of a student in Caracas earlier this week.

López was no more responsible than any of the other demoralized opposition leaders and their movements. The assassination of an out-of-control Collectivo leader, on orders from the regime, after these well-armed bully gangs and defenders of Chavez were called out to harass student demonstrators on Monday, resulted also in the death of a student attending his first protest.

The present, still-ongoing "insurrection" seems to have actually begun in San Cristobol after protests erupted when police failed to deal with a gang-related rape, repeated home invasions and the general rise in violent lawlessness in that city, on February 2.

The regime has reacted, probably under pressure from Castro's 30,000 "advisers" reported to be on the ground in Venezuela, and the revolt has spread, fed also by food and material shortages throughout the country.

The revolt continues, despite a news and Internet crackdown.

[VRW Conspirator]

The prosecutor is accusing López, among other charges, of criminal association, an offense penalized by the Organic Law Against Organized Crime and the Financing of Terrorism with 10 years of prison.

To anyone familiar with Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago...

Article 58...counter-revolutionary activities: can mean anything the court decides it means, including "eating with the wrong fork".

[dsrtsage]

I don’t think creating martyrs at this time is a wise political choice

[DJ MacWoW]

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[Biggirl]

Look Venezula to become a hot, civil war sitiuation.

[Biggirl]

This internet service be truly the downfall of dictatorships:

http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/coming-soon-free-internet-from-space-20140220

[GeronL]

Everyone knows that government-backed Collectivos did the killings and continues in their violence (San Cristobol anyone?)

This is what is called a ‘dirty war’

I hope the people of Venezuela don’t resign themselves to living this way any longer

[GeronL]

only one side is armed

[Biggirl]

Even so, the people have had enough.

[Biggirl]

This is like a pimple ready to break open.

[ScottinVA]

He probably won’t even last the 45 days. A successful “suicide” of Mr. López is very likely being arranged at this moment.

BTW, the American “media” have kept a tighter lid on this more than any similar unrest. They, like their masters in the White House, truly detest the idea of “Chavismo” reaching an end.

[devolve]

- I am looking at having some simple basic black baseball caps (Magum PI style) made up with the two words : YOU LIE boldly printed on them -

- i doubt many politically savvy people will want to stop and chat about the weather with me -

- There was very recent poll taken on how the various groups would vote on another OBAMA Vs ROMNEY election after the Obamaqueer mess and more - such as blacks losing even more jobs - with an unemployment rate of 14.5% - more surprising was the Hispanics -

- Sorry - I cannot give you the URL/source or polling outfit name - others with better STML can correct, edit, add info please -

- HISPANICS - 100% voted NO for Obama (78% voted for Obama in 2012) do not lrepeatedly lie to Hispanics

- BLACKS - 45% voted NO for Obama (99% voted for Obama in 2012) - wow - see Chicago black clergy meetings recently - goodbye Barry

- ALL DEMOCRATS - 55% of DEMS voted NO for Obama (80-something% voted for Obama in 2012)

- ASIANS -sorry - I cannot recall - (but wow - 82% voted for Obama in 2012) - more recent west coast welfare Asians are mostly moochers

- OBAMA Vs ROMNEY right now - Obama - 46% / Romney - 54% - It’s the economy stupid!

[Recovering Ex-hippie]

I SENT MY FRIEND WHO HAS LIVED IN VENEZUELA AND NOW IS A PROUD AMERICAN CITIZEN THIS THREAD AND HERE IS WHAT SHE RESPONDED:

I am sorry, but the majority of the comments are made by probably well intentioned folks out there who don’t know a thing about Latin America, Venezuela, the history of the Latin American countries and the relationship of the US with L.A. They have never been to Venezuela, nor have they ever witnessed what a real student protest looks like in this country.

Most of us in the comforts of our recliners have never seen military forces bomb or really beat the crap out of students, women, nuns, priests or innocent bystanders. Most of us have never witnessed what an “arrest” by 17 year old soldiers carrying sub-machine guns in the streets, schools, and buses look like. I have. Right smack in the middle of Caracas.

Slums? Our slums in the US look like country clubs compared to those surrounding the mountains of Caracas. This is a nation that once had Europeans immigrating TO Venezuela in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s. During the petroleum boom years Venezuela was a prosperous country. The Bolivar money was stable for many years at 25 Bolivars to the dollar. Education for the youth is held in very high esteem. When the country nationalized the petroleum wells and took control from Standard Oil the nation began having serious economic and political problems.

The US took the oil buying business to the Middle East and we all know what happened over there since then. Inflation began to take a tight grip on this once prosperous and amazing nation. I had to help my family change their money from the Bolivar to the dollar in order for them to remain in the then shrinking middle class.

The illustrious Mr. Chavez arrived on the scene became a dictator for many years. Because of him inflation rose higher. He introduced the communist thugs from Cuba and vomited his daily schpiel on the benefits of socialism while he lived in absolute luxury. He completely allowed his country to disintegrate into an ecological mess. He GAVE AWAY oil to the paramilitary troops in Colombia (who were responsible for continuing their cocaine and crack trade into the US).

These are drugs that infest our people, our youth, our future. He allowed the once pristine Lake Maracaibo to become a veritable cesspool. He was a terrible, terrible man. Yet, we welcomed him in our country to give a speech in the UN. I don’t get this. So, as long as a Latin American nation is in our pocket and does what we tell it to we give them our hearts and pocketbooks. But once they buck we turn our backs and allow, sometimes enable and give money to criminals like Chavez.

Now what? Chavez is dead and Venezuela continues to disintegrate. Any Venezuelan with money long ago immigrated to the US. There is a neighborhood in south Florida called Weston. There are so many Venezuelans there that it is now called Weston-zuela. Lucky for us these people have education and money to contribute to our country.

The one comment about Venezuelans not resigning themselves to living like this any longer. You have no idea what people’s daily lives are like there. Resignation? Try protesting the lack of potable water, the slums, the lack of human dignity. It takes so much energy just to carry your drinkable water up a muddy, slippery, hill to the hovel that you call home. Try that several times a day and tell a Venezuelan about resignation.

I don’t mean to sound mean or like a know it all, but honestly I am astounded with how little traveling Americans do and how little they know about other countries.

[cherokee1]

“—tighter lid-—” Only Al Jazeera America has worked on reporting the Venezuelan mess ( ch 215 on dish) and they’ve done a pretty good job as best as I can tell.

[Nextrush]

When I heard ten year sentence I immediately thought of the Gulag.

The dictator Maduro is “showing his stripes” which look like a hammer and sickle to me.

[Prospero]

With respect for your friend, a proud American who has lived in Venezuela, who correctly says "most of us" do not know or understand conditions there, the history, its slums, etc., or what it’s like to be beaten and shot at by uniformed thugs operating under color of law, etc., while a pretty fair assumption was incorrect with regard to myself.

And if mine was, “the one comment about Venezuelans not resigning themselves to living like this any longer,” then ours might simply be a misunderstanding, an unclear reference on my part, referring to the complex nature of mass movements and its best recruits.

I’ll have to stick to my point as to the stark choice still available to Venezuelans who see themselves as newly poor and then refer Proud American to Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer,” Chapter V.

In that important and essential book, Hoffer made an important distinction between this category among "the poor" and those belonging among the “Abjectly Poor,” who are, indeed, largely exempt from this stark alternative, and about whom Proud American is definitely correct.

It is I who failed to communicate this distinction.

To better and more deeply illustrate, Hoffer wrote, with regard to “The Abjectly Poor,”

“The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility…Where people toil from sunrise to sunset for a bare living, they nurse no grievances and dream no dreams.”

“The intensity of discontent seems to be in inverse proportion to the distance from the object fervently desired. This is true whether we move toward or goal or away from it. It is true both of those who have just come within sight of the promised land, and of the disinherited who are still within sight of it; both of the about-to-be-rich, free, etc., and of the new poor and those recently enslaved.”

And to put the matter in better context, Hoffer wrote quite differently with regard to “The New Poor.”

“Not all who are poor are frustrated. Some of the poor, stagnating in the slums of the cities are smug in their decay. They shudder at the thought of life outside their familiar cesspool. Even the respectable poor, then their poverty is of long standing, remain inert. They are awed by the immutability of the order of things. It takes a cataclysm – an invasion, a plague or some other communal disaster – to open their eyes to the transitoriness of the “eternal order.”

“It is usually those whose poverty is relatively recent, the “new poor,” who throb with the ferment of frustration. The memory of better things is as fire in the veins. They are the disinherited and dispossessed who respond to every rising mass movement… So long as those who did the world’s work lived on a level of bare subsistence, they were looked upon and felt themselves as the traditionally poor. They felt poor in good times and bad. Depressions, however severe, were not seen as aberrations and enormities. But with the wide diffusion of a high standard of living, depressions and the unemployment they bring assumed a new aspect. The present-day workingman in the Western world feels unemployment as a degradation. He sees himself disinherited and injured by an unjust order of things, and is willing to listen who call for a new deal.”

[Prospero]

I don’t think creating martyrs at this time is a wise political choice

There are many on the scene who totally agree with you. The see the surrender as a ploy by Lopez, an ill-advised ploy, to place himself at the head of the opposition, especially since what some are now calling the "19F" insurrection, or movement, seems not to have arisen from any organized effort by the recognized, legal opponents of the regime.

It is also thought ill-advised if the regime is at crossroads where it's continued existence requires a Cuba-crackdown. Lopez could find himself on "The Isle" for a very long time.

Some thought he did not believe he would actually be arrested. But, rumors abound when there is little credible news.

[Mat_Helm]

Time to send some arms down to Venezuela’s citizens Fast and Furious........Maybe there are some spare weapons in Benghazi???????..........Maybe Homeland Security can spare some bullets???????? NO.....??? Que Pasa Obama?

[paristexas]

Anyone deeply committed to justice and freedom and the rule of law is in danger of imprisonment or death no matter where he lives in the world. He is inherently at odds with the powers that be.

[Tspud1]

How often do you watch that channel, thanks but no thanks