The three days of reflection around the challenges of democracy in Latin America, organized by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA) and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (Eclac) in Santiago of Chile, ended on Wednesday with an analysis specific to the countries that cause greatest concern, such as Venezuela and Cuba. Although outside the official program, about 40 intellectuals and political leaders of the region, Europe and the united States invited to the event were summoned by IDEA to listen to assemblyman venezuelan Tomás Guanipa and the cuban activist Rosa María Payá –between other panelists from Nicaragua, Honduras and Colombia–, who insisted on the importance of the solidarity of the region with its countries to address their respective crises.
“Nobody can feel that their problems are solved when we have a neighbor who is struggling. It is a principle of solidarity,” said Guanipa. “The world can’t see the case of Venezuela as a theme far that you can’t touch the door itself, because it is currently knocking on the door of several of the countries of Latin america with the serious phenomenon of migration venezolana”. For the member of the opposition to the regime of Nicolás Maduro, his country is a kind of “mole” that can spread to the rest of the region: “When Venezuela had as president-elect Hugo Chavez, said: ‘As Cuba never will be. They are two very different countries and we are not in the Cold War’. Today this has to be a reason of reflection for Latin america”.
MORE INFORMATION
chinese Companies paid 176 million in bribes to obtain contracts in Venezuela
For Rosa Maria Payá, “the request to the international community to put eyes on the citizens of Cuba and not so much in Çerez Politikası the narrative of the totalitarian power of 60 years”. “How much longer do you have to wait for the region to have a consensus of the Latin american democracies, and for the first time in a long time, put part of the cuban people and not the dictators?”, asked Payá, whose presence at the meeting of Santiago prompted a letter of complaint from the ambassador of Cuba in Chile, Jorge Lamadrid, addressed to the director of the Latin american Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO), Angel Flisfisch, which facilitated the facilities of the institution so that it could carry out this last activity of the event.
With an intervention that began with an analysis on “how the cuban regime is becoming more and more obvious in their attempts to expand the repressive methods to other places,” Payá said to the way in which the Government of his country, “sells stories and realities” with the goal of “washing the face with a view to the international community, while trying a process of transition from power to power.” “Havana continues to generate stories, which, today, takes the form of ‘Cuba is changing’. The visit of Obama and Rolling Stone, Channel, and your fashion show in the Paseo del Prado in havana. Is the use of the symbols of the free world to give a picture of change that is not real,” said the daughter of the deceased opposition leader Oswaldo Payá.
The activist said that currently the reported number of political prisoners is 130, while producing between 6,000 and 7,000 arbitrary arrests annually. “In parallel, we penalize alternative expressions and not only the political but the artistic movements or the “cuenta-propistas” [independent workers],” he said.
assemblyman Guanipa also gave figures of the reality of venezuela: “Today, a venezuelan common earns six dollars a month, and every day that number is going to depreciate. More than three million people have had to leave in the exodus is more important after Syria we live in the world and that has become the venezuelan crisis in a regional crisis”. Stated that, according to the study of the Catholic University Andrés Bello, a venezuelan joint has lost on average 11 kilograms of weight in the last year. “But even worse: according to Caritas, about 40% of the children who enter the hospital do so for diseases that have as a cause of malnutrition.
To Guanipa, “is not simply a crisis of the persecution of political”, although he noted that currently “there are nearly 300 people arrested in Venezuela, the deputies are not paid their salaries for two and a half years and we have removed all of their functions to the National Assembly”.
