Two years ago a collective of our snowfield socialists - including the ABC’s Phillip Adams, propagandist John Pilger, the Greens’ Kerry Nettle and Kevin Rudd’s nephew Van Thanh Rudd - begged Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez to come teach Australians a lesson: Here’s Chavez’s latest lesson:
When Judge Maria Lourdes Afiuni issued a ruling in December that irked President Hugo Chavez, he did little to contain his outrage. The president, contending on national television that she would have been put before a firing squad in earlier times, sent his secret intelligence police to arrest her. Then the agents took her to the overcrowded women’s prison in this city of slums near Caracas. They put her in a cell near more than 20 inmates whom Afiuni had sentenced. “I’m in this hell because I had the temerity to do my job as a judge in a way that didn’t please Chavez,” said Afiuni, 46. Since Afiuni’s imprisonment, a dizzying sequence of other high-profile arrests has taken place, pointing to Chavez’s recent use of his security and intelligence apparatus to quash challenges to his grip on the country’s political institutions. The arrests have taken aim at some of Chavez’s most prominent critics ahead of legislative elections in September, and they illustrate Chavez’s attempts to tighten control over institutions like the judiciary. Senior officials in Chavez’s government, including Attorney General Luisa Ortega, say the most recent arrests were necessary to suppress conspiracies or to prosecute people whose comments were deemed offensive. In Afiuni’s case, Ortega said the judge had illegally freed the businessman Eligio Cedeno, who had been jailed on charges of circumventing currency controls. The imprisonment of Cedeno, who had previously financed opposition politicians, was explicitly criticized last year by a panel of United Nations legal experts after his pretrial detention exceeded the limits set by Venezuelan law. |
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