A US citizen who allegedly entered North Korea illegally delivered a lengthy denunciation of US domestic and foreign policy yesterday and said he was seeking political asylum in Venezuela, North Korean official media said.
The man identified himself as Arturo Pierre Martinez, 29, from El Paso, Texas, in video footage of a news conference released by North Korea’s KCNA news agency and said he had taken “a risky journey to reach [North Korea] so that I could pass along some very valuable and disturbing information.”
Martinez spoke of human rights violations allegedly committed by the US government and its attempt at forcing imperialist influence and domination on other nations, KCNA said in an article released with the footage.
Photo: EPA
North Korea is under international sanctions for its nuclear and missile programs. It regularly threatens war on democratic South Korea and the South’s major ally, the US.
Martinez’s mother told CNN her son was mentally unstable and has bipolar disorder, and had previously tried to enter North Korea from South Korea by swimming across a river. He was captured and sent back to the US, where he was committed to a psychiatric hospital in California, CNN reported he saying.
“He is very smart and he got the court to let him out and instead of coming home to us, he bought a ticket and left for China,” the television news channel quoted Patricia Eugenia Martinez as saying.
In September, South Korean media outlets reported that a man in his late 20s had been arrested by South Korean marines for swimming in a river that flows toward North Korea. The man had been trying to go to North Korea to meet its leader, local media outlets reported at the time.
Martinez said in the KCNA article that he had been staying in a nice hotel and was being treated well by the North Korean government, adding that he would seek political asylum in Venezuela.
Martinez said he chose to come to North Korea to talk about US policy because it has successfully defied US influence by maintaining a “very powerful military.”
It was not immediately clear how Martinez entered North Korea.
CNN cited a North Korean statement as saying Martinez entered the nation two days after US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper arrived in Pyongyang to negotiate the release of detained US citizens Matthew Miller and Kenneth Bae.
Miller and Bae had both been serving hard-labor sentences for breaking local laws, but were released last month during Clapper’s visit. A third detained US citizen, Jeffrey Fowle, was released in October.
“[I am] extremely grateful for having been pardoned from the punishments given to violators of these laws, and for the most generous reception I have received,” CNN reported Martinez as saying in a statement at the news conference.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has railed against the US Senate for passing a bill that would impose sanctions on Venezuelan government officials found to have violated protesters’ rights during demonstrations earlier this year.
Critics of Maduro said that he blasts the US to distract Venezuelans from the cash-strapped nation’s ballooning economic crisis.
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