A Venezuelan court on Friday sentenced nine former police officials to as long as 30 years in prison for the killings of demonstrators during street protests that led to the failed 2002 coup against President Hugo Chavez.
Former Caracas police chief Henry Vivas, deputy chief Lazaro Forero and city public safety director Ivan Simonovis were sentenced to 30-year terms, the Attorney General’s Office said. It said they were convicted of being accomplices to murder in the killings of two pro-government demonstrators, and accomplices in the attempted murder of two others and the wounding of a dozen people.
Six rank-and-file officers were sentenced to 17-year and 30-year terms for “complicity” to murder in the killings and other crimes, prosecutors said in a statement.
Allies and adversaries of Chavez were among 19 killed on April 11, 2002, as an opposition march led by police approached a pro-Chavez demonstration in Caracas.
The violence preceded a short-lived coup in which Chavez was ousted by dissident military officers. He returned to power two days later with the help of loyalist generals and street protests by supporters.
Government foes blame the violence on National Guard troops and Chavez supporters who were filmed shooting from a bridge. Chavez backers say the police were responsible.
Defense lawyer Jose Luis Tamayo condemned the sentence, calling it “a trophy for President Chavez.”
“They’ve convicted a big group of Venezuelan citizens here without proof,” said Tamayo, who said prosecutors used photographs of several officers holding guns rather than any forensic evidence linking them to the killings.
He said prosecutors “didn’t even prove the metropolitan police’s weapons were fired” and that the judge exercised a “Nazi interpretation” of the evidence.
Lawyer Antonio Molina, who represents some of the government supporters who were killed, said: “This isn’t political vengeance as they’ve wanted to sell it.”
He said the sentence has “done justice” and that police had been acting as the “armed wing” of government opponents who tried to topple Chavez.
The Caracas city government and police force were led by Chavez opponents at the time of the coup.
Relatives of the ex-policemen — some teary-eyed and angry — condemned the decision outside the courthouse in north-central Aragua state. Some accused Chavez’s government of using the legal system to frame opponents.
“I expected this sort of sentence because this is a political trial,” Nubia Vivas, a sister of the former police chief, told reporters.
Yesenia Fuentes, a member of the pro-government Association of April 11 Victims, said she was pleased with the sentence.
“It set a precedent. There won’t be a police officer who messes with a Venezuelan citizen and doesn’t go to jail,” she said.
One police officer who had originally faced charges, Rafael Neazoa, was acquitted by the jury, prosecutors said. Another, Ramon Zapata, was sentenced to three years for covering up police involvement and will go free because he has already spent six years in jail, the Attorney General’s Office said.
Liliana Ortega, director of the Venezuelan human rights watchdog group Cofavic, said the sentence contributes to “impunity because one of the most serious problems we’ve seen concretely in this case is that there have been serious deviations from due process.”
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CARTEL ARRESTS: The president said that a US government operation to arrest two cartel members made it jointly responsible for the unrest in the state’s capital Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Thursday blamed the US in part for a surge in cartel violence in the northern state of Sinaloa that has left at least 30 people dead in the past week. Two warring factions of the Sinaloa cartel have clashed in the state capital of Culiacan in what appears to be a fight for power after two of its leaders were arrested in the US in late July. Teams of gunmen have shot at each other and the security forces. Meanwhile, dead bodies continued to be found across the city. On one busy street corner, cars drove
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to