State-terrorism cannot be ignored at the Summit of the Americas

(Interamerican Institute for Democracy) Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua’s regimes “exert their power using illegitimate methods to instill fear and terror in the civilian population in order to generate behaviors that otherwise would not occur” and to indefinitely hold power with impunity. It is “State- Terrorism”, an organizational system based on the commission of crimes against humanity, a system that uses prosecutors and judges to violate human rights, while the victimized population is in a situation of defenselessness, something the 9th Summit of the Americas cannot ignore.

Terrorism is the “domination by terror”, the “series of violent acts conducted in order to instill intimidation”. Terror is “very intense fear”. Whenever terrorism is conducted from the seat of power or by the government, we are faced with State-Terrorism that is defined as
“The use of coercion or illegitimate persecution, kidnapping, forcible disappearance, torture, assassination” and includes the “manipulation of legal standards and procedures” up to the creation of policies and standards that “prevent the population to abandon the country, and promote a person’s exile”

State-Terrorism occurs with the commission of “crimes against humanity” and felonies aggravated commensurately to the position of the perpetrating government official as described in the International Criminal Court’s Statute from Rome in effect since 1 July of 2002 that in its Article 7 lists as a statutory offense the “Imprisonment or other serious deprivation of physical freedom…”, “torture”, the “persecution of a group or community with its own identity founded on the basis of racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, genre, or other reasons universally recognized as acceptable …” and “other inhumane acts of similar character that intentionally cause great suffering or seriously attempt against the physical wellbeing or mental health”.

The objective reality shows that the regimes from Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua have standardized their methodology of State-terrorism based on the 60+ years of the Cuban regime’s successful experience in these crimes. They use violence and this is done mainly through judicial proceedings that do not respect any individual’s rights and that are nothing more than kangaroo-courts that result in “lynching”. They have disappeared the “rule of law” and the so-called judicial branch is nothing more than a tool for the dictatorial operation.

Proof of State-Terrorism is found in the text of “dictatorships’ laws” that are “despicable laws” that have instituted “special crimes” with “aggravated sentencing” completely ignoring the “legal due-process”, eliminating the “presumption of innocence”, ending the “equality of the people before the law”, abolishing “the legal right to defense” and have simply established procedures with which, at the whim of prosecutors and judges an accused without evidence can remain indefinitely incarcerated by “preventive detention”, or that can be sentenced very quickly in a question of hours after their arrest to decades of imprisonment. In the sixties, Cuba executed them by firing squads, today they apply a slow-death.

Today’s victims are those who are falsely accused for the mass protests that took place on 11 July of 2021 in Cuba, Nicaragua’s presidential candidates and political leaders, Bolivia’s civic leaders and top echelons of the Armed Forces and Police, and Venezuela’s tortured civilians and military. Victims are all political prisoners of the 21st Century Socialism or Castrochavism that have been victimized through judicial sentences ruled by “despicable judges” who hand-down “atrocious sentences” intended to produce fear. These same judges are the ones who coverup corruption, narcotics’ trafficking, massacres, assassinations, dead political prisoners and the terror system applied by their political police.

Proof of State-terrorism is on the reports certifying the number of political prisoners in Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua. Additional proof is seen on the news-media, with the millions of Cubans and Venezuelans who were -and continue to be- compelled to forcibly abandon their country, the same thing with the almost 200,000 Nicaraguans and thousands of Bolivians. The migratory crisis is a consequence of a cause that is called “dictatorships of State-Terrorism” that has been turned into an attack weapon and a profitable business

Representatives of civilian societies will be in attendance at the 9th Summit of the Americas and will be able to corroborate what all attending democratic leaders, diplomats, journalists, already know, that “there is State-Terrorism in Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua” and that “the peoples are in a situation of defenselessness”. We all need to have international standards applied to end this shameful disgrace.

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

Translation from Spanish by Edgar L. Terrazas