Wednesday, June 18, 2014

TalCual: A New Attack on Democracy in Venezuela

6/18/2014

Monday was a new chapter in the degradation of the national system of justice. The appearance of opposition lawmaker María Corina Machado before the Public Prosecutor’s Office is another step towards the degradation of that judiciary body led by Luisa Ortega Díaz. Whoever thinks things can’t get any worse we have real bad news for them, because the Prosecutor is ready to do whatever it takes to keep pleasing those in power so they can remain just where they are now.

Let’s keep in mind that the case of Machado started with a complaint by Jorge Rodríguez, the Mayor of Caracas’ Libertador municipality, who presented as “evidence” a few emails whose content could have been easily altered by people with little knowledge of Internet technologies, as recently demonstrated on a late night talk show formerly hosted by Luis Chataing. When addressing the press, Rodríguez didn’t care about giving specific details on what court and who was the judge that had authorized to intercept the private communications of Machado.

The show put on by Rodríguez was so lame that one of the “emails” presented as evidence was sent when Diosdado Cabello, the head of Parliament, had not officially pressed charges against Machado, for which the most voted opposition lawmaker in 2010 still enjoyed all prerogatives from her peers and could not be investigated by any national court without previous authorization from the Parliament. This is just another small detail overlooked by these autocrats.

The farce continued with the intervention of Ortega Díaz, who tried to fix the wrongs by telling what court had authorized the interception, besides acknowledging that the law prohibits such investigations to become publicly known by people not involved in them, but in this case it didn’t matter to abide by the law: when it comes to prosecute and punish someone opposing the “socialist” process, Ortega simple takes care of shoving the law up their… you know the place we are talking about here, don’t you?

This lady is consistent in the bad performance of her duties. If someone files a complaint against any opposition leader, her office acts at lightning speed. And if it’s the other way around, case files end up and get lost in some forgotten drawer.

None of the corruption complaints filed by democratic lawmakers, including those of the misappropriation of PDVSA’s pension fund or the food imports by “Pudreval,” have received the attention they deserve by the office led by Ortega Díaz. An investigation request to Cabello – made by TalCual president and editor-in-chief Teodoro Petkoff – for taking advantage of the Parliament for personal purposes in his accusation against Petkoff and the newspaper’s board of directors will probably suffer the same fate. Besides, that fellow is the most untouchable among untouchables.

This new attack from the Government against democratic leaders must be responded vigorously by members of the Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD) opposition party. Regardless of the differences that many of them have over the strategy to get rid of this archaic political model called chavo-madurismo, they must stand against this new abuse. This is a good opportunity for them to bring all the opposition back together again.


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