Francisco Javier Velázquez, the director general of the Spanish police, will travel to Venezuelan to work with Hugo Chávez's government in an investigation of members of the Basque separatist group ETA, said Spain's Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. "Venezuela has been one of the countries where some members and supporters of ETA terrorist group have settled," Zapatero said, as reported by AP. Spain and Venezuela reduced a tense spat on...

Luis Eduardo Ataya, the governor of the Colombian department of Arauca, a member of the Cambio Radical political party, said on Friday that he has reports showing that Germán Briceño Suárez, also known as "Grannobles," a FARC guerrilla leader, is hiding in Venezuela. "We have received several reports according to which Grannobles is in the town of Elorza (Venezuela)," Ataya said in an interview with the Colombian TV station Caracol Noticias, Efe...

The People's Party (PP), the main opposition party in Spain, considers that if the probe confirms that Hugo Chávez's administration supported the Basque separatist group ETA, the Spanish Executive should convene "immediately" its ambassador and "seriously consider the possibility of breaking relations" with Venezuela. María Dolores de Cospedal, the Secretary General of PP, made these statements when she referred to the accusation made by the Spanish...

For almost a week, I have been haunted by Cuban political prisoner Ariel Sigler Amaya's description of what the Castro dictatorship is doing to him as he sits in a Havana hospital suffering from a litany of health problems. "This is obvious," said Sigler, "they are killing me little by little." And nobody, except the relative few of us who follow and care about the plights of Sigler and other Cuban political prisoners, gives a damn. The MSM is not tracking the steep...

In response to a report issued by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) last week regarding violations of human rights and intimidation of citizens in Venezuela based on their political beliefs, U.S. Sens. Dick Lugar (R-IN) and Chris Dodd (D-CT) released the following joint statement. “We are deeply disturbed by some of the report’s observations. One of the more alarming findings was that: ‘The Commission considers that the lack of independence and autonomy of...

Judge Eloy Velasco, of the Spanish High Court, accused the government of President Hugo Chávez of cooperating with an alleged alliance between the Basque separatist group ETA and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Under such alliance, the two armed groups allegedly plotted to try to assassinate Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, his predecessor Andrés Pastrana and other top Colombian officials, according to the judge, DPA reported. Velasco wrote in the...

Amnesty International has urged Cuban President Raúl Castro to immediately and unconditionally release all prisoners of conscience after a political activist died following a hunger strike. Orlando Zapata Tamayo was reported to have been on hunger strike in protest at prison conditions for several weeks before his death in Havana on Monday. "The tragic death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo is a terrible illustration of the despair facing prisoners of conscience who see no hope of...

Amnesty International has adopted its 55th prisoner of conscience in Cuba and urged President Raúl Castro to release him immediately and unconditionally. Darsi Ferrer, Director of the ‘Juan Bruno Zayas’ Health and Human Rights Centre in Havana, has been detained since July 2009 on spurious charges of receiving illegally obtained goods, an offence usually immediately bailed. He has not been brought to trial and he’s being held in a maximum security prison in...

Violence and public insecurity, the climate of intolerance toward different views and obstacles that prevent opponents an equal participation in domestic elections, worry the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), which deems that such situations "contribute to the weakness in the rule of law" in Venezuela. However, the human rights branch of the Organization of American States warned that the lack of an independent judiciary is one of the weakest points of democracy...

Juan Manuel Martí­nez Moreno, a grass-roots activist who had been wrongly held for the past year as a suspect in the 2006 murder of US cameraman Brad Will of the Indymedia agency in the southern city Oaxaca, was finally released yesterday for lack of evidence. Martí­nez participated in a series protests that the Popular Assembly of Oaxaca Peoples (APPO) staged against Oaxaca governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz in 2006. Will sympathised with the protests and was filming a major...