Organized crime regimes’ political exiles

Carlos Sánchez Berzaín
 June 21, 2018 

(Interamerican Institute for Democracy) There are millions of political exiles in the Americas, they are the victims of crimes committed by the dictators from Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Correa’s Ecuador.  People who were forced to abandon their homes by the application of the 21^stCentury Socialism’s methodology to separate political, social, media leaders, businessmen, professionals, the middle class and the labor force who confront the system, from the national scene.  Political exile in the Americas is but another consequence of the crimes committed by the Organized Crime’s regimes.

The Latin origin of the word exile “exsilium” derives from the word “exsul interpreted as something removed from its (ex) soil”.  Exile is the “separation of a person from the land he/she lives on”.  It is the result of acts and events that compel a person “to alienate himself/herself from the homeland where he/she lives in, or from his/her place of birth”.  It is the “expatriation” of someone, meaning to leave someone without a homeland, to separate such person from “his/her place of birth or adoptive nation to which a human being is attached by legal, historical, or endearment’s links”.

There is no voluntary exile because even though the person makes the decision to abandon his/her land, the causes and circumstances that compel the person’s departure are forceful, are relentlessly felt, and condition his/her will.  The decision to abandon one’s homeland is not an act of freedom, quite to the contrary, it is the consequence of violent acts the regime commits or threatens to commit against the victim and under such circumstances of intimidation, the decision to leave is made under duress and cannot be considered as voluntary.

Exile is the consequence and a visible expression of the violation of a person’s freedom in order to force such person to live removed from his/her home, family, society, and homeland.  It is the forced abdication to remain in a place such person would like to continue living in, in order to protect his personal wellbeing and life.  Exile should be a temporary situation that ends with the disappearance of the causes that motivated it as when freedom, democracy, the Rule of Law are recovered, but in many cases, it lasts a lifetime by the prolongation of dictatorial regimes such as Castroist Cuba.

It is precisely Castro’s Cuba, the only dictatorship there was in the Americas in 1999, who, with Venezuela’s money and oil misappropriated by Hugo Chavez, created the Castroist Chavist system labeled as the Bolivarian project, ALBA, or 21^stCentury Socialism, against the region’s democracies.  They expanded the dictatorial mold/model that nowadays controls Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia.  A mold/model that Ecuador is trying to exit with Lenin Moreno after Correa’s government, and one with which; Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras are still threaten by and that Argentina, Peru, Brazil, Panama, Costa Rica, Paraguay (readers can add or edit the list of countries) got rid of.

Until 1999, Cuba’s Castroist dictatorship had produced nearly 2 million Cuban exiles, generating a worldwide “diaspora”.  In almost 20 years under the Castroist Chavist system, it has produced nearly 3 million Venezuelan exiles that have generated another diaspora, with another over 1,500 Bolivian exiles in Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Peru, Spain, and the United States and dozens of Nicaraguan and Ecuadorean exiles.

All the acts and omissions of the Castro’s in Cuba, Chavez/Maduro in Venezuela, Ortega’s in Nicaragua, Evo Morales in Bolivia, and Correa in Ecuador to force people into exile, are crimes that reveal they comprise a Transnational Organized Crime network.  They respond to a model/mold -as if they were a franchise- created by the Cuban dictatorship and expanded into their territories under the responsibility of the local dictators.  A closer look to the objective reality, the international press, and an analysis of cases, corroborate it.

Crimes committed by the Castro’s/Diaz Canel, Maduro, Ortega, and Evo Morales, as well as Rafael Correa against people in order to force them into exile, range from; persecution with the aim of physical torture and killing, judicial trials with false accusations heard by “despicable judges”, the application of the regime’s pseudo-laws violating human rights or of “despicable laws”, restricting the freedom of speech or freedom to work, to be employed, or discharge a profession, assassinating the individual’s reputation to convert the wrongly accused as an undesirable, subjecting the person into a condition of being defenseless, depriving him/her of a job, food, and much more.

Translated from Spanish by Edgar L. Terrazas, member of the American Translators Association, ATA # 234680. 

Published in Spanish by Infobae.com on Sunday June 17th, 2018