Milagro Sala and Leopoldo López
By Sebastián LacunzaEditor-in-Chief
Milagro Sala (San Salvador de Jujuy,
1964) and Leopoldo López (Caracas, 1971) are separated by a world of
differences or, at the very least, a continent. She is being held at the
women’s prison in Alto Comedero, just two kilometres from an emblematic
neighbourhood built by the organization she leads in Jujuy province,
Túpac Amaru.
For his part, López is jailed in the Venezuelan prison of Ramo Verde — a special unit for politicians, military and public figures — some 26 kilometres away from Caracas and more than 3,800 kilometres from San Salvador de Jujuy.
The indigenous leader was born in Bajo Azopardo, a neighbourhood of San Salvador. She sees herself as part of a tradition dating back to the Inca revolutionary Túpac Amaru and Argentine iconic figures Eva Perón and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, which speaks a great deal about her political convictions. Firstly, Sala’s field of action was the trade union struggle and then, social activism through the Túpac Amaru organization, which has managed to take centre stage in Jujuy society since the devastating 2001-2002 crisis.
The Venezuelan economist, meanwhile, was raised in a family of politicians and businessmen. Back in Caracas with a Harvard degree, López got involved in politics to oppose Hugo Chávez. He was elected mayor of El Chacao, a district near the capital city with a poverty rate of only 4.7 percent (according to the 2011 census). He then went on to support the coup of 2002 and, in recent years, led the rightist faction of the broad Venezuelan opposition coalition. López, a frustrated presidential candidate but still a leader with a great potential, does not accept Chavistas in office.
Sala was jailed and charged last Sunday with “turmoil” and “incitement to commit crimes” due to the tents she set up in the central square of San Salvador that demands — it is still there — funding for the cooperatives, schools and community centres managed by the Túpac Amaru organization.
Since Sala was arrested, new Jujuy Governor Gerardo Morales — an ally of President Mauricio Macri — has been rounding up charges against her for a number of alleged crimes, including embezzlement and conspiracy. Once the suspect was in jail, the provincial Executive is searching for a case while allied media outlets air the “evidence” leaked by the governor. The country has already witnessed these types of shameful dossiers during its muddiest times.
López was sentenced last September to more than 13 years in prison for leading demonstrations that sought “the departure” of Chavista President Nicolás Maduro. With flashpoints spread across several cities in Venezuela, the protests ended the first half of 2014 with 43 dead, both Chavistas and anti-Chavistas. The charges against the lawmaker from Voluntad Popular, filed by the prosecution and then ratified by Judge Susana Barreiros, included incitement to commit crime, public intimidation, arson, murder and terrorism. The judge drew a direct line between the violent actions in February 12, 2014 and the call for Maduro’s departure hoisted by López.
“López’s right of defense was in question. The prosecutor who accused him (Franklin Nieves) fled to the United States and said the whole case was nonsense and it was fully set up by the government,” Andrés Cañizález, a political analyst and professor at the Andrés Bello Catholic University, told the Herald from Caracas. According to Cañizález, López’s lawyers did not have access to all the evidence that was part of the case, hearings were not public and the judge reached an arbitrary conclusion from unrelated facts and didn’t take into account the possibility that infiltrators from the intelligence sector had undertaken violent actions to harm the protests.
Amnesty International has spoken up in the cases of both López and Sala. In time, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the OAS received complaints from local and international organizations for what they consider extorsive arrests which were ruled by a rigged, submissive judiciary, just to intimidate opponents.
Given that Mauricio Macri overplayed his call to condemn Venezuela for the arrest of López (to the point of generating an early disagreement with partners in the Mercosur bloc as soon as he took office), the question that BAE newspaper journalist Alejandro Bercovich posed in Davos was relevant. The reporter asked Macri if Sala’s illegal detention could put Argentina in the same spotlight as Venezuela regarding legal principles. The Argentine president evidently became annoyed at the question and cut off the conversation.
Macri thinks the processes against López and Sala cannot be compared because the former “didn’t do anything wrong” and the latter “has several cases in which she breaks the law.” The president is referring to the charges of threats and clientelism attributed to the leader of the Túpac Amaru organization. The other side of those charges, which are not part of the case that led to her detention, is the provable fact that the organization led by Sala built houses, schools and community centres that Macri would do well to envy considering he managed these issues so poorly in the eight years he was in charge of the Buenos Aires City government.
The problem that Macri is facing is that the legality of a detention does not depend on the opinion of a president but rather in the respect for judicial guarantees, such as making sure the charges are precise and proven (Sala is in jail, basically, for exercising her constitutional right to protest in a public square) and the independence of powers.
Any comments about the requirement of independence are superfluous if the offensive against the Túpac Amaru leader is led by judicial authorities who were appointed by Governor Morales only weeks earlier. If the case reaches the provincial Supreme Court, at least three judges will have to excuse themselves because Morales has just designated them and they are leaders of his party (UCR) and, during their phase as politicians that ended in December, they did not spare any public statements against Sala.
On December 15, while the governor of Jujuy was organizing the provincial Supreme Court, the Public Defender’s Office and the Attorney General’s Office to his liking, giving a post to each of his friends, Venezuela’s National Assembly, in one of its last days with a Chavista majority, reformed the Public Defender’s Office and designated Barreiros as the leader. Barreiros was the judge who sentenced López.
@sebalacunza
For his part, López is jailed in the Venezuelan prison of Ramo Verde — a special unit for politicians, military and public figures — some 26 kilometres away from Caracas and more than 3,800 kilometres from San Salvador de Jujuy.
The indigenous leader was born in Bajo Azopardo, a neighbourhood of San Salvador. She sees herself as part of a tradition dating back to the Inca revolutionary Túpac Amaru and Argentine iconic figures Eva Perón and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, which speaks a great deal about her political convictions. Firstly, Sala’s field of action was the trade union struggle and then, social activism through the Túpac Amaru organization, which has managed to take centre stage in Jujuy society since the devastating 2001-2002 crisis.
The Venezuelan economist, meanwhile, was raised in a family of politicians and businessmen. Back in Caracas with a Harvard degree, López got involved in politics to oppose Hugo Chávez. He was elected mayor of El Chacao, a district near the capital city with a poverty rate of only 4.7 percent (according to the 2011 census). He then went on to support the coup of 2002 and, in recent years, led the rightist faction of the broad Venezuelan opposition coalition. López, a frustrated presidential candidate but still a leader with a great potential, does not accept Chavistas in office.
Sala was jailed and charged last Sunday with “turmoil” and “incitement to commit crimes” due to the tents she set up in the central square of San Salvador that demands — it is still there — funding for the cooperatives, schools and community centres managed by the Túpac Amaru organization.
Since Sala was arrested, new Jujuy Governor Gerardo Morales — an ally of President Mauricio Macri — has been rounding up charges against her for a number of alleged crimes, including embezzlement and conspiracy. Once the suspect was in jail, the provincial Executive is searching for a case while allied media outlets air the “evidence” leaked by the governor. The country has already witnessed these types of shameful dossiers during its muddiest times.
López was sentenced last September to more than 13 years in prison for leading demonstrations that sought “the departure” of Chavista President Nicolás Maduro. With flashpoints spread across several cities in Venezuela, the protests ended the first half of 2014 with 43 dead, both Chavistas and anti-Chavistas. The charges against the lawmaker from Voluntad Popular, filed by the prosecution and then ratified by Judge Susana Barreiros, included incitement to commit crime, public intimidation, arson, murder and terrorism. The judge drew a direct line between the violent actions in February 12, 2014 and the call for Maduro’s departure hoisted by López.
“López’s right of defense was in question. The prosecutor who accused him (Franklin Nieves) fled to the United States and said the whole case was nonsense and it was fully set up by the government,” Andrés Cañizález, a political analyst and professor at the Andrés Bello Catholic University, told the Herald from Caracas. According to Cañizález, López’s lawyers did not have access to all the evidence that was part of the case, hearings were not public and the judge reached an arbitrary conclusion from unrelated facts and didn’t take into account the possibility that infiltrators from the intelligence sector had undertaken violent actions to harm the protests.
Amnesty International has spoken up in the cases of both López and Sala. In time, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the OAS received complaints from local and international organizations for what they consider extorsive arrests which were ruled by a rigged, submissive judiciary, just to intimidate opponents.
Given that Mauricio Macri overplayed his call to condemn Venezuela for the arrest of López (to the point of generating an early disagreement with partners in the Mercosur bloc as soon as he took office), the question that BAE newspaper journalist Alejandro Bercovich posed in Davos was relevant. The reporter asked Macri if Sala’s illegal detention could put Argentina in the same spotlight as Venezuela regarding legal principles. The Argentine president evidently became annoyed at the question and cut off the conversation.
Macri thinks the processes against López and Sala cannot be compared because the former “didn’t do anything wrong” and the latter “has several cases in which she breaks the law.” The president is referring to the charges of threats and clientelism attributed to the leader of the Túpac Amaru organization. The other side of those charges, which are not part of the case that led to her detention, is the provable fact that the organization led by Sala built houses, schools and community centres that Macri would do well to envy considering he managed these issues so poorly in the eight years he was in charge of the Buenos Aires City government.
The problem that Macri is facing is that the legality of a detention does not depend on the opinion of a president but rather in the respect for judicial guarantees, such as making sure the charges are precise and proven (Sala is in jail, basically, for exercising her constitutional right to protest in a public square) and the independence of powers.
Any comments about the requirement of independence are superfluous if the offensive against the Túpac Amaru leader is led by judicial authorities who were appointed by Governor Morales only weeks earlier. If the case reaches the provincial Supreme Court, at least three judges will have to excuse themselves because Morales has just designated them and they are leaders of his party (UCR) and, during their phase as politicians that ended in December, they did not spare any public statements against Sala.
On December 15, while the governor of Jujuy was organizing the provincial Supreme Court, the Public Defender’s Office and the Attorney General’s Office to his liking, giving a post to each of his friends, Venezuela’s National Assembly, in one of its last days with a Chavista majority, reformed the Public Defender’s Office and designated Barreiros as the leader. Barreiros was the judge who sentenced López.
@sebalacunza