“The most cited source with regard to political discrimination is the newspaper El Universal. ”

El Universal being an opposition newspaper.

HRW responded by looking at ALL sources they quoted which evaded the point. Moreover the sources HRW listed as presumably unbiased sources (the ILO, IACHR) have shown bias against Venezuela.

The IACHR failed to call for reinstatement of Chavez while a dictatorship was briefly installed following the coup of 2002. Please don’t say the facts weren’t clear. The people in the slums of Caracas not only figured out that a coup had taken place – they foiled it.

The ILO’s ruling that the oil industry shutdown was not intended to bring down the Chavez government was preposterous, as is HRW’s attempt to hide behind it as part of their effort to defend their report.

The problem isn’t the use of biased sources. Completely unbiased sources cannot exist about topics like human rights conditions. The problem is failing to sensibly factor political bias into an analysis. For example, I cite HRW on Colombia, noting that HRW is biased in favor of US allies. Hence HRW are more likely to downplay rather than exaggerate the crimes of the Colombian governmnet.

I hope that this public debate continues and that, as part of it, HRW will finally answer some questions which I have been posing to them for years and to which they have never replied.

1) When a coup deposed Chavez for 2 days in 2002, why did HRW’s public statements fail to do obvious things like denounce the coup, call on other countries not to recognize the regime, invoke the OAS charter, and (especially since HRW is based in Washington) call for an investigation of US involvement?

2) Very similarly, when a coup deposed Haiti’s democratically elected government in 2004, why didn’t HRW condemn the coup, call on other countries not to recognize the regime, invoke the OAS charter, and call for an investigation of the US role? Many of these things were done by the community of Caribbean nations (CARICOM). A third of the UN General Assembly called for an investigation into the overthrow of Aristide. Why didn’t HRW back them up?

3) Since 2004, why has HRW written about 20 times more about Venezuela than about Haiti despite the fact that the coup in Haiti created a human rights catastrophe in which thousands of political murders were perpetrated and the jails filled with political prisoners?

4) Why did HRW never write a word in support of Father Gerard Jean-Juste, Haiti’s most prominent political prisoner after the coup? Even after Amnesty International named him a “prisoner of conscience” and participated in an international campaign to have him released to receive treatment for cancer, HRW said absolutely nothing. Instead HRW has repeatedly objected to law suits brought against Venezuelan “civil society” leaders like Maria Corina Machado, who has never been jailed despite signing the infamous Carmon decree which briefly abolished Venezuelan democracy.

Joe Emersberger

nonviolent drug offenses and incarcerations, Katrina victims and of course American indigenous peoples atrocities