In Miami forum, Venezuela’s Leopoldo López proposes worldwide bloc against dictatorships
Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo López proposed on Tuesday a worldwide effort to stop the spread of totalitarian states around the planet, saying that dictatorships are working together and learning how to put down democratic movements.
Speaking at the Oslo Freedom Forum held this week in Miami Beach, Lopez said that strongmen such as Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro are able to remain in power not only because of the advantages they might have inside their countries or the missteps taken by the democratic forces.
These factors are important, but “they are not the core problem. The main reason why Maduro is still in power is because of the support he gets from powerful countries very active in promoting the expansion of authoritarianism around the world: China, Russia, Iran, Turkey and, in our case, Cuba,” López said.
These nations are constantly helping burgeoning dictatorships, working in a network mode to support them, he said.
“They feed each other, help each other, learn from each other and know how to suppress street protests. They share the mechanisms to control communications and social media,” said López, who was jailed by Maduro for starting the 2014 protests in Venezuela.
López, top leader of opposition leader Juan Guaidó’s political party, said that this network of dictatorships cannot be effectively fought by the individual efforts of opponents in each of their countries, emphasizing that the emerging global phenomenon requires a joint effort of democratic forces.
“The main thing is that we must unite and organize among ourselves,” Lopez said. “All movements are isolated within their own countries, and even neighbors such as Cuba and Nicaragua, who are facing the same phenomenon that we are facing in Venezuela, are not united... We do not communicate with each other; we do not learn from ourselves.”
López, who fled Venezuela in 2019, gave his statements in the framework of the world forum that for two days brought to Miami artists, political leaders and spokespersons of some of the movements that seek to rescue democracies around the world.
Despite his comments about the need to preserve unity, López was received on Tuesday by activists and dissenting Venezuelan opponents who were protesting against him and other members of Guaidó’s team for the decision to participate in a negotiation process with the Maduro regime.
Cuban artist Tania Bruguera, who called the July 11 protests on the island the largest in decades in her country, also spoke at the forum.
“The Cuban government had wanted to portray [the demonstrations] as the acts of criminals who wanted to cause problems, but the reality was that this was the greatest uprising of all time in Cuba since the revolution,” Bruguera said in a presentation on the state of human rights on the island.
According to the artist, the protests arose spontaneously throughout the island and provoked a quick response from the government. Appearing on national television, Cuban leader Miguel Díaz-Canel urged “revolutionaries” take to the streets to put down the protests.
He was speaking in code, Bruguera said. “And the code is that everyone who went to defend the people in power would not be prosecuted or tried.” To this day, none of them have received punishment for their actions that left multiple injuries, she noted.
The island saw an increase in government repression: In a single day there were more than 1,000 detainees, some of them children who were mistreated in prison, some of them sexually, the artist said.
The state security apparatus also began to use covert methods to contain the protest, including dressing as medical personnel to gain entry to homes where hunger strikes were underway.
The artist, who was on the island at the time of the protests, left Cuba on Aug. 17 and is now in Miami. Currently, she said, she is establishing contacts with “many people” from the Cuban community abroad because she is convinced they are vital to bring about change on the country.
This story was originally published October 5, 2021 at 5:08 PM.
