<a href=www.vheadline.com>venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Friday, May 09, 2003 By: VHeadline.com Reporters

PUBLIC AI Index: AMR 53/007/2003 09 May 2003 UA 130/03 Fear for Safety

VENEZUELA

Miguel Diaz Loreto (m) Dinorah Maria Diaz Loreto (f) Jairo Alexis Diaz Loreto (m) Bladimir Diaz (m) Alexandra Gualdron (f) Enmary Cava (f)

Dinorah Maria Diaz Loreto, Jairo Alexis Diaz Loreto, Bladimir Diaz, Miguel Diaz Loreto, Alexandra Gualdron and Enmary Cava are all family members from the town of Cagua in the State of Aragua.

They have been subjected to escalating death threats and harassment in recent months, allegedly by agents of the Aragua State Police and Amnesty International is seriously concerned for their safety.

The family members have been pressing the local authorities to carry out an exhaustive investigation into the killing of brothers Robert Diaz Loreto and Antonio Diaz Loreto and their father Octavio Ignacio Diaz, who were killed in suspicious circumstances, by agents of the Aragua State Police on 6 January.

Since the investigation into the killings began the family members have reportedly been subjected to systematic harassment and death threats. The most recent incident took place on 26 April when police agents entered the house of Miguel Angel Diaz Loreto reportedly without a warrant. They wanted to arrest him for his alleged involvement in a recent crime. As a result of the police operation, Miguel Angel was temporarily detained by the police.

Whilst also in temporary custody during the operation, Dinorah Maria Diaz was reportedly told by one of the police agents that he would kill all of her family, if they continued to pursue an investigation into the deaths of Robert, Antonio and Octavio Ignacio Diaz. Miguel Angel was also urged to stop supporting the case.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION Many Venezuelan states, including Aragua, Bolivar, Anzoatequi, Portuguesa and Falcon, have a history of extra-judicial executions carried out by the police and a failure to protect witnesses and family members of the victims. Both the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights have intervened in several of these cases, requesting that local authorities and the Venezuelan state investigate these crimes and provide protection to those involved.

However, the measures requested by the Inter-American System have not, in most cases, been carried out effectively.

In December 2002, Cesar Emilio Machado was reportedly assaulted and threatened by the Municipal Police in Girardot, city of Maracay, Aragua State in order to prevent him from testifying in a trial against the Municipal Police (see UA 32/03, 29 January 2003, AMR 53/004/2003).

RECOMMENDED ACTION: Please send appeals to arrive as quickly as possible, in Spanish and English or your own language:

• expressing concern for the safety of Dinorah Maria Diaz Loreto, Jairo Alexis Diaz Loreto, Bladimir Diaz, Miguel Diaz Loreto, Alexandra Gualdron and Enmary Cava and asking the authorities to take action to guarantee their safety in accordance with their wishes;

• calling on the authorities to carry out a full, prompt and impartial investigation into the death threats and harassment experienced by these individuals, to publish the results and bring those responsible to justice;

• calling on the authorities to carry out a full, prompt and impartial investigation into the killings of Robert Diaz Loreto, Antonio Diaz Loreto and Octavio Ignacio Diaz, to publish the results and bring those responsible to justice.

APPEALS TO (Time difference = GMT - 4 hrs / BST - 5 hrs):

Attorney General

Fiscal General de la Republica Dr. Isaias Rodriguez Avenida Universidad, Esquina Pele el ojo a Misericordia, frente a Parque Carabobo, Caracas, VENEZUELA

Telegram: Fiscal General de la Republica, Caracas, Venezuela

Fax: 00 58 212 576 44 19

[Salutation: Estimado Senor Fiscal General/Dear Attorney General]

Local Governor

Gobernador de del estado Aragua Sr. Didalco Bolivar Palacio de Gobierno Maracay Estado de Aragua, VENEZUELA

Telegram: Gobernador del estado, Aragua, Maracay, Estado de Aragua, Venezuela

Fax: 00 58 243 2377002

[Salutation: Estimado Senor/Dear Sir]

Local Police

Comandante de la policia de Aragua Comisario Angel Mercado (no address available)

Telegram: Comandante de la policia de Aragua, Maracay, Estado de Aragua, Venezuela

Fax: 00 58 243 235 1220

[Salutation: Estimado Senor Comisario/Dear Sir]

Human Rights Ombudsman

Defensoria del Pueblo Dr. German Mundarain Bellas Artes comienzo Avenida Mexico frente al Ateneo de Caracas Plaza Morelos Caracas, VENEZUELA

Telegram: Defensoria del Pueblo, Caracas, Venezuela

Fax: 00 58 212 575 4467 (if a voice answers, say "tono de fax por favor")

Email: gmundarain@defensoria.gov.ve

[Salutation: Estimado Senor/Dear Sir]

PLEASE SEND COPIES OF YOUR APPEALS TO: His Excellency Senor Alfredo Toro Hardy, Embassy of Venezuela, 1 Cromwell Road, London SW7 2HR. Fax: 020 7589 8887 Email: venezlon@venezlon.demon.co.uk

AND, IF POSSIBLE, TO THE FOLLOWING:

Commission for Human Rights, Justice and Peace for the State of Aragua Comision de Derechos Humanos de Justicia y Paz del Estado Aragua Calle Negro Primero, Oeste N 98, frente al Liceo 'Valentin Espinal', Cruce con Av. Ayacucho, Maracay, Estado Aragua, VENEZUELA

Telefax: 00 58 243 233 6363 (if a voice answers, say "tono de fax por favor")

PLEASE SEND APPEALS IMMEDIATELY. Please do not send appeals after 27 June 2003.

SHOULD YOU MENTION AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL IN YOUR APPEALS? The name of Amnesty International may be used unless otherwise stated in the text above.

Letters written in a private or personal capacity may be more effective.

FAX NUMBER NOT WORKING? Officials will sometimes switch off their fax machines to stop appeals arriving? please keep trying. If you can't get through, please put your appeal in the post. If a number is unobtainable please inform the Urgent Action team.

EMAIL ADDRESS NOT WORKING? Please send a copy of the delivery error report to ua@amnesty.org.uk

RECEIVED A REPLY FROM A GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL? Please send it or a copy to the Urgent Action team. If appropriate, thank the official who has replied and ask to be kept informed about the case.

May. 9, 2003. 06:24 AM LINDA DIEBEL <a href=www.thestar.com>TORONTO STAR

So, okay, maybe the Don jail isn't the worst stinking hole in the world.

But that's only because there's no torture room.

There's no "parrot perch,'' or hanging metal bar that is a staple of most Brazilian prisons. Prisoners on the perch have been stripped naked, thrown over the bar, hands and ankles tied, then beaten and jolted with electric shock until they pass out, or die.

At the Don, there's no saw-horse, a device similar to the parrot perch, except that torturers get the added kick of being able to submerge a prisoner's head in water while administering shock treatment to the genitals and anus.

I've seen these torture chambers.

As the Star's Latin America correspondent for many years, I have seen more than my share of Third World prison conditions. I have nightmares to last a lifetime.

But I came away from a tour of Toronto's Don jail this week thinking the biggest difference with any Third World hellhole I've ever seen is the absence of endemic physical torture.

That's it.

Otherwise, with the possible exception of Haiti, where I once saw prisoners, some of them clearly mad, sitting deep in their own excrement, the Don jail could just as easily be the Guerrero state prison in Iguala, Mexico, or fit nicely into the Vieira Ferreira Neto penal complex in Niteroi, Brazil.

A vermin-infested cell is a vermin-infested cell.

In some ways, living conditions at the Don are worse.

That's because prisoners don't have the same access to a tropical outdoors and frequent family visits. They also live with constant, mind-numbing din and the psychological tension it creates.

I'd never been in a prison with that kind of decibel level before my Tuesday afternoon tour of the Don with Brant MPP Dave Levac.

As Liberal corrections critic, he wanted to revisit the jail this week after yet another Toronto judge condemned "medieval" conditions that don't meet minimal standards for housing prisoners laid out by the United Nations.

Now, I wasn't there at Carandiru prison in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1992 when military police put down a prison riot over brutal conditions, killing 111 inmates.

Clearly, with the gunfire and screaming, it must have been louder than the din I heard Tuesday.

But is that really what we want in Canada?

It would take little Canadian flags stitched on orange jumpsuits to differentiate between some of the inmates I saw — drooling, toothless, hair matted, talking to themselves — and prisoners in Brazil, Colombia or Venezuela.

It's bad enough prisoners are treated with inhumanity anywhere in the world.

But, as the critics of Ontario's corrections system point out, this jail is in our very own backyard.

Right here in east-end Toronto, prisoners live with vermin, overflowing toilets and the same all-encompassing stench of human excrement that knocks you off your feet when you walk into Vieira Ferreira Neto prison, not far from Rio's Copacabana beaches, where the tourists romp.

One prisoner at the Don talked about being "peed on.'' Happens all the time.

"We Canadians view ourselves as a just society and we like to think of ourselves that way," says Richard Coleman, co-ordinator for Toronto's drug treatment court and a veteran counsellor of Don jail inmates.

"But we've become a very hard-edged people, and it's been coming on for many years now.''

We are, he adds, "punishing people in the most brutal ways imaginable.

"It is social science gone horribly wrong, because the reality is that the criminal justice system was created to reform, not merely to punish."

Father Barry McGrory, a retired Catholic priest and volunteer at the Don jail, says he weeps to see such "devastation of the weakest" in our society.

"They are still human beings,'' he says. "They are not people from Mars. I hear heartbreaking stories from these men, and the thing of it is, we, any one of us, could end up in that place."

He, like Coleman, bristles at what he views as hypocrisy. He cringes at the comfortable Canadian notion that things are so much better for everyone here than in the Third World.

"I hate it when people say, `Oh, they should go and see what bad conditions really are. Go to the Third World,''' he says. "How much worse can it get for a prisoner than in the Don?"

For me, the cold-shower realization of the many ways in which, like it or not, Toronto wears aspects of the worst of the Third World has been the hardest part of my transition back to Canada, and home.

It was one thing to walk into a prison in Brazil and chronicle horrible conditions in somebody else's country for readers of the Toronto Star.

But it was a shock to see it in my own.

And we're not just talking about conditions in the Don jail.

For years, for example, I wrote about the murdered women of Juarez, Mexico, the disposable women whose corpses — often in pieces — have been turning up in the Mexican border town. It's estimated that, since the early 1990s, more than 300 women have been killed a stone's throw across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas.

Their deaths remain unsolved and, to be blunt, it's not a big issue in Mexico, or anyplace else.

Who cares? These are faceless women, poor, indigenous and, too often, anonymous.

But I came home recently to a Canada where 500 aboriginal women have disappeared or been found murdered over the past 15 years in a similar atmosphere of neglect.

I was appalled.

In Canada, you say?

There's more.

At any intersection in Acapulco or Cancun, Canadian tourists tsk-tsk — how sad! — at pregnant women begging for money, raggedy children holding their skirts or playing in the gutter.

A few years ago, a Canadian reporter wrote with disgust about a Mexican woman who agreed to sell her baby after his newspaper widely advertised for a child. He didn't buy the baby, of course.

And, yet, in my city, this past January, a newborn baby was left to die, umbilical cord still attached, in the shadow of City Hall, left by a wandering, seemingly witless homeless woman, and found in the nick of time.

Every year, an estimated 300 babies — and probably far more — are born to women living in the streets of Toronto.

There are two ways, it seems, of looking at this issue.

You can say, "Oh, things could be worse. You could be living in Calcutta or Juarez. So get used to it."

Or, you can say, as Father McGrory does, this is not acceptable anywhere.

But the problem is that Juarez is creeping closer to Toronto, and not the other way around.

"We are being swallowed by our dark side,'' says McGrory.

The Don jail is Vieira Ferreira Neto — without the torture chambers.

And, without the Brazilian sunshine.

<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Wednesday, May 07, 2003 By: Patrick J. O'Donoghue

Human rights umbrella group Foro por la Vida has condemned the assassination of a well-known human rights activist, Jorge Nieves on April 26, 2003 in Guasdualito (Apure).

Foro spokesmen, Jose Gregorio Guarenas, Fernando Pereira (Cecodap) and Carlos Correa (PROVEA) recall that Nieves founded the Apure State Paez Municipality Human Rights Committee (Codehum) and undertook an important role in highlighting and following up HR abuse cases during the suspension of guarantees between 1995 and 1999.

• More than 50 persons have died in the border area since December 2002.

The Foro calls on the central and state governments to adopt urgent security measures in line with respect for the rule of law and human rights principles established by international organs.

"We are not requesting a suspension of guarantees because the experience in 1995 and1999 showed that far from resolving the crisis of insecurity, it made it worse by criminalizing the peasant population and increasing the number of arbitrary arrests and tortures. "

The group wants the government to ensure what it calls a "democratic policy of citizen security which implies not just measures of democratically activating security organs but strengthening civil institutionality in the zone."

Concluding, Foro has asked for a thorough and independent investigation into the circumstances leading to the death of Nieves and others before him with the corresponding penalties for those responsible.

The Foro communique made no mention of Nieves militancy in Patria Para Todos (PPT) or the running conflict between PPT and El Universal journalist, Roberto Giusti.

<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Sunday, May 04, 2003 By: Jose Gregorio Pineda & Jose Gabriel Angarita VENANCHAM

VenAmCham's Jose Gregorio Pineda (chief economist) and Jose Gabriel Angarita (economist) write: On Wednesday, April 30, the government announced a staged increase in the minimum wage to aid workers who have borne the brunt of the economic instability and a tight labor market and who also earn real salaries too low to allow them to buy the entire standard consumption basket. This measure covers public and private sector employees. A 10% adjustment will become payable on July 1 and a 20% additional adjustment will start on October 1. These increases are not retroactive.

According to CENDA's calculations, the basic food basket cost 353,876 bolivares per month in April 2003, 4.4% more than in February in spite of the price controls. That means that the Bs.190,080 per month minimum wage buys only 53.7% of the basket. But workers will have access to 59% of the basket's value starting July 1 (with a Bs.209,088 per month minimum wage) and 69% on October 1 (with a Bs.247,600 bolivar per month minimum wage) ... not counting the effects of inflation from now to then.

Whether they agree with the minimum wage hike or not, the question is whether businesses are in a position to absorb the impact of this salary decree. If they are, will it be large enough to improve workers' living standards?

In the first place, the private sector stated (through FEDECAMARAS) that it would abide by the Presidential Decree ... but FEDECAMARAS does not underestimate the tribulations of the Venezuelan economy, and indicated that a minimum wage increase would be irresponsible at the present time. In any event, an adjustment of over 80% would be necessary for the lowest-earning workers to be at least able to buy the complete basket of consumer goods. The National Treasury is clearly unable to bear a salary hike on that scale for the private sector, nor is the private sector for that matter.

The increase will cost the Treasury 800 billion bolivares according to the National Budget Office (OCEPRE). It will be funded by revenue raised through an extension of the Bank Debit Tax (BDT) and Central Bank profits.

Even so, the parties will have to bear costs associated with the increase. Private businesses, for their part, will have to cut payroll even more in order to reduce the measure's impact on costs. And workers who manage to keep their jobs may find themselves with more purchasing power only in the short run, given the inflationary pressure that will be generated by funding of the increase through the use of Central Bank foreign exchange profits.

The trend should be to keep jobs in existence, and even to create more of them ... but that cannot be achieved solely by an adjustment in the labor market; also needed is a set of economic measures to restore the country's productive activity, and legal, political, and social reforms to enhance the nation's institutional efficiency.

Article in Spanish

News24 02/05/2003 20:44  - (SA)  

Caracas - Prisoners at a jail near the Venezuelan capital released 400 hostages on Friday at the end of a five day protest over conditions.

The hostages, all relatives of prisoners, had been detained following their weekly Sunday visit to the Rodeo jail east of Caracas. Prisoners protested against ill treatment, insufficient food and lengthy legal processes.

"Today at dawn, all of them were freed following negotiations with the authorities. Everything passed off peacefully," one prisoner's relative said speaking on condition of anonymity.

In total, over 1 000 relatives were detained on Sunday at three different prisons, and according to the authorities all have now been freed.

Venezuela has a prison population of 26 000 housed in overcrowded, unhygienic violence-plagued prisons.