Armando.info: The quartet of judicial terror

In a meeting of the judicial branch of the Nicolás Maduro regime, headed a few days before the recent presidential elections by the pro-government attorney general, Tarek William Saab, and the current president of the Caracas Criminal Circuit and former prosecutor, Katherine Haringhton, some details of the repressive machine that had to be activated as soon as the fraudulent proclamation of Nicolás Maduro as re-elected president of Venezuela was consummated, as in fact occurred at the close of business on July 28.

Assuming as a working hypothesis that the impending electoral-judicial maneuver would provoke protests, the participants set about designing measures to eventually calm them. In the streets, the brute force and cruelty of the security forces would have to be deployed, of course, but among the twists that were prepared, the activation of a second line of attack stood out: the Terrorism Courts, a novel jurisdiction that Chavismo-Madurismo established and that, for at least three years, acts as a virtual task force to expeditiously and implacably prosecute any person identified as an opponent.

Operating from Caracas for the past four weeks, the four judges in charge of the court have not been shy about their mission. They follow a common pattern of arbitrary actions that is chilling: they deny access to the files of the detainees, who are prosecuted without consideration, without the possibility of appointing trusted lawyers, always behind bars, outside and far from their natural jurisdictions, sometimes in groups – therefore, without considering the circumstances of each individual case – and by telematic means.

When a few years ago the Venezuelan Carlos Armando Figueredo translated The Jurists of TerrorIngo Müller’s classic about the courts of the German National Socialist State, perhaps did not imagine that this warning with historical foundations would soon be reincarnated in Carlos Liendo, Ángel Betancourt, Franklin Mejías and Joel Monjes. Constituted in a terror machine, the four judges are part of a punishment operation that, according to sources consulted by Armando.info, is being developed remotely controlled from the Criminal Cassation Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ) by the magistrate Elsa Gómez Moreno, close to Cilia Flores, wife of Nicolás Maduro. The connection between Gómez Moreno and the first lady or first combatant, as the revolutionary jargon prefers to call her, goes through the magistrate’s niece, Jennifer Karina Fuentes, who was the partner of Walter Gavidia Flores, son of Cilia Flores.

More details at Armando.info.