We must identify and prosecute dictatorships’ despicable prosecutors and judges

(Interamerican Institute for Democracy) The dictatorships from Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua yield power by practicing state-sponsored terrorism that has, as one of its important methods, the manipulation of judicial prosecutions to persecute, imprison and sentence the innocent. Through the judicialization of political repression, these dictatorships turn political leaders and human rights’ defenders into criminals and instill fear. This criminal methodology is executed by despicable prosecutors and judges that must be internationally identified, sanctioned and prosecuted.

The execution of dictatorial power is comprised by a long chain of crime that enables the concentration of all power and makes the “rule of law” disappear in order to substitute it with “the rule of the dictatorship” that is built by their so-called legislative branch that legislates laws that violate human rights, establishes investigative and prosecutorial penal and procedural codes, punishment, and severe sentences and that also grants prosecutors and judges discretionary power and impunity, all under a system of controlled information.

The constitutional texts of Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua’s dictatorships have been drafted or amended violating human rights, such as in the non-retroactivity of the law, the presumption of innocence, equality under the law, the impartiality of judges, the legal due process, the freedom of expression, private property and more. The so-called constitutions and laws of 21st Century Socialism’s regimes are proof of their violation of human rights.

The legal system that Castrochavism’s dictatorships have created in the 21st century for Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua is the imposition, copy, and refinement of the system that oppresses the Cuban people for over 63 years. It is the tragicomedy of dressing with legality the commission of crime, such as; false crimes and accusations, counterfeiting of evidence, suppression of legal rights, violation of human rights, torture, extortion, prevarication, kidnapping, imprisonment, persecution, and more. This is what “the rule of the dictatorship” is all about, the institutionalization of organized crime at the service of state-sponsored terrorism.

With the executions by firing squads that happened in Cuba starting in 1959 to the trials with despicable sentences against protesters from 11 July 2021 and following, the Cuban so-called “justice” has only violated human rights and has enabled for the commission of crimes against humanity, all with the shameful disguise of calling it “justice”. This exact way of state-sponsored terrorism is replicated by the regimes from Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua as is evidenced by the lists of political prisoners, tortured, those assassinated while in jail and those in exile.

This shadowy system has an international effect because the accusations, prosecutions, and sentences handed-down by the regimes from Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua are sent to other countries as bona fide court records of those states and enable for the internationalization of political persecution and for the “assassination of the reputation” of the victims of dictatorships. Doing it this way, dictatorships attribute their crimes to their victims and build false narratives that, to say the least, end up in questioning the true defenders of freedom.

This method works with the participation of investigators, prosecutors, judges, and magistrates from the appeal tribunals, members of the so-called Supreme Court of Justice, and other tribunals of constitutional control. These people are real, they exist, most of them are attorneys, or lawyers with an academic background in jurisprudence and they are knowledgeable of human rights, the concept of justice, and the notion of the rule of law.

The dictatorships’ government officials charged with the people’s repression, the ill- designated systems of “justice”, instead of being guarantors of freedom and basic rights in Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua are in-fact “henchmen”, conscientious and re-incident violators of human rights who have turned judicial trials into lynching, but they are not anonymous because they sign their atrocities and flaunt the dictatorial government’s benefits bestowed on them. They are “despicable prosecutors and judges” because they are “devoid of honor and behave with wickedness and vileness”.

To defend the victims from judicial lynching, in cases similar to the ones now happening in Cuba against protesters of the 11 July march, or the politically persecuted or imprisoned in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua, we must identify and publicize the names of the despicable prosecutors and judges, document each case in which they violate human rights and internationally prosecute them because their acts and omissions constitute “crimes against humanity” integrated in the dictatorships’ “state-sponsored terrorism”.

*Attorney & Political Scientist. Director of the Interamerican Institute for Democracy.

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