Human Rights Watch is notoriously biased (stick with Amnesty International instead)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Rights_Watch#CriticismOnly the plight of the pro-US wealthy elite matter to Human Rights Watch:
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/5963SELECTIVE BLINDNESS
But, in their zeal to paint Venezuela as a country rife with persecution, Human Rights Watch’s political spin on the Afiuni case ignores this fundamental problem, opting instead to paint the judiciary as a tool of the Chavez administration.
This is the same judicial system, it is worth reminding readers, which has failed to prosecute wealthy vigilante landowners who, upset with Chavez’s land re-distribution laws, have been actively contracting assassins and paramilitaries to systematically murder small farmers.
As the murder of poor farmers by wealthy landowners does not serve Human Rights Watch’s anti-Chavez campaign, the NGO chooses to ignore them in its report, focusing, rather, on the plight of Venezuela’s upper classes.
See, US based "human rights" groups turn a blind eye to
people being killed, and prefer to list as "atrocities" beareaucratic red-tape applied to wealthy people who break the law.
Oh Yeah! And "Human Rights Watch" condemn Venezuela as cracking down on free-speech, while praising
Colombia who do things like this:
(from Reporters without Borders at
http://en.rsf.org/colombia.html)
"Manual teaches intelligence agency employees how to spy on problem journalists"
The weekly Semana has just revealed the existence of an instruction manual for employees of the Administrative Department of Security (DAS), Colombia’s leading intelligence agency, that explains how they should spy on, threaten, intimidate and discredit NGOs, judges and journalists who create problems for the government.
The revelation is the latest in a series of scandals implicating the DAS, coming after phone tapping revelations in February, the discovery in May of a list of media and journalists being kept and surveillance and the disclosure in October that bodyguards assigned to protect journalist Claudia Julieta Duque were in fact spying on her.
“Such methods of surveillance and intimidation are worthy of a police state,” Reporters Without Borders said. “The recent dismissal of senior DAS officials has not resolved the problem of abusive practices within the agency. We note that the president’s office has so far failed to dissociate itself from these latest ones. And why hasn’t the DAS handed over its files on Duque and other journalists to the Constitutional Court, as it is supposed to?"
The national daily El Espectador said the spying manual was among the files seized during searches of the DAS that were carried out on the orders of the attorney-general’s office. A PowerPoint document entitled “Political War,” the manual includes instructions on how to make anonymous phone calls and spread false allegations.
One of the manual’s most alarming aspects is its use of the case of Duque, the Radio Nizkor reporter whose bodyguards were spying on her for the DAS. The authorities appear to have been worried about Duque’s investigative reporting of the 1999 murder of columnist and humorist Jaime Garzón, which many have been carried out by former DAS employees.
Duque’s personal details, including her phone numbers and email addresses, appear at the head of the manual, which recommends how long anonymous calls should last, the kind of place from which they should be made and how the person making the call should travel in a bus and avoid places with surveillance cameras. These recommendations appear to have been followed to the letter in Duque’s case since 2004, the year she began getting calls threatening her and her 10-year-old daughter.
The DAS’s activities have never been properly investigated. The Constitutional Court ordered the DAS to hand over all the information it had gathered on Duque, but the agency has yet to respond.
Hollman Morris, who has been covering Colombia’s civil war for more than 10 years and who, like Duque, was one of the first journalists to be targeted by the DAS, has brought a complaint against the Colombian state before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, calling for an investigation into “those responsible for the threats, harassment, tailing, defamation and political stigmatisation” of himself and his family, which forced them to flee the country.
In the 71-page complaint, prepared with the help of the José Alvear Restrepo lawyers collective, Morris said he received the first threats in 2000, when he was working for the daily El Espectador. Since then, he has been the target of various forms of harassment, threats and smears, including by President Alvaro Uribe himself.
Other classy Colombian headlines:
"Interior Ministry protection programme for journalists also used for "close-quarters spying""
"Community television journalist murdered"
"SEVENTH BREAK-IN AT JOURNALIST’S HOME, INTELLIGENCE AGENCY SUSPECTED"
"Statute of limitations to apply to six murders of journalists"
"Five journalists declared “military objectives” in “Black Eagles” message"
"U.S. Congress and Obama Administration urged to examine dark side of Uribe years" (USA will obviously not do this, they love mass-murdering Uribe)
"Parliament to question former president about illegal phone-tapping, but threats and sabotage could be ignored"
"Protest by gagged journalists to demand respect for free expression"
"Former intelligence chief charged in connection Garzón murder 11 years ago"
"Investigators of murder of community radio boss rush to judgement"
"Journalist gunned down in region under paramilitary sway after protection withdrawn"
According to Human Rights Watch, the above is done by the "good guys" of South America, or at least a "free society"
---
Also of interest is this BBC article on the claimed deaths caused by Colombian military 2002-2008 : 114,000 "terrorists" killed in 6 years.
Either the figures are lies, or the previous government is the biggest killer in colombian history.
(there are an estimated total of 30,000 rebels, so how you can kill 114,000 of them is a mystery)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7781991.stmAlso: 446 bodies found by UNHCR :
http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/11717-unhcr-446-unidentified-bodies-buried-in-meta-graveyard.htmlThe UNHCHR undertook an analysis of the La Macarena graveyard, following concerns from human rights organizations that the cemetery may have been used as a mass grave to house up to 2,000 bodies, among them alleged victims of extrajudicial killings.
[...]
The report also remarked that with 114 instances, the Meta department has the second highest number of extrajudicial killings or "false positive" cases under investigation in Colombia. False positives refer to Colombian civilians killed by members of the Colombian armed forces and presented as guerrillas killed in combat.
According to the UN, the Colombian Prosecutor General's office has been investigating 1,354 cases of alleged false positives since March 15 of this year. As a result the UNHCR stressed "the magnitude of a situation in which unidentified cadavers are buried in cemeteries at a national level."
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