A leading Human Rights Watch monitor who was abruptly put on the first plane leaving Venezuela early on Friday said his expulsion showed the intolerance of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s government to criticism.
Jose Miguel Vivanco, the rights group’s longtime Americas director, told reporters in Sao Paulo, Brazil, that “we were forcibly expelled from the country as if we were criminals.”
“This the first time that this has happened to us in the hemisphere,” said an exhausted Vivanco after arriving in Brazil with his deputy director Daniel Wilkinson, an American.
PHOTO: AP
Both were expelled for what Chavez’s government called “illegally meddling in the internal affairs” of Venezuela.
“We aren’t going to tolerate any foreigner coming here to try to sully the dignity” of Venezuela, Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro said.
The two were forced out just hours after presenting a report by their New York-based group concluding that “discrimination on political grounds has been a defining feature” of the Chavez presidency.
“What happened is a confirmation of exactly the points that we raised in the report, and it shows the lack of tolerance in the government of President Chavez to criticism of his record on any area,” said Vivanco, a Chilean citizen.
Chavez had threatened to expel foreigners who come to verbally “attack” his government; this was the first time he did so.
At a rally on Friday night, Chavez called Vivanco “one of those characters who go around the world doing the dirty work the US empire orders.”
Chile called the action against one of its citizens regrettable.
Chilean Deputy Foreign Minister Alberto Van Klaveren said Venezuela’s reaction was “totally out of proportion” and that Vivanco has criticized Chile before — something the government in Santiago views as normal.
Vivanco said he and Wilkinson were met at their Caracas hotel after dinner on Thursday by heavily armed policemen.
They were shown on state television gathering the last of their belongings and being driven to the airport in a caravan complete with motorcycle escorts.
Vivanco said he didn’t know where they were headed until they boarded the plane.
More than two dozen human rights groups based in countries from Mexico to Argentina signed an e-mail statement condemning Vivanco’s expulsion.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
RSS