The US State Department denounced on Tuesday in its annual report on human rights that the Nicolás Maduro regime keeps “hundreds” of politically motivated prisoners in prison in Venezuela, many of them in “critical” conditions.
In the 2021 document, the US mentioned figures from the Penal Forum organization that last October there were 260 political prisoners in the country, 50 of them “in critical health conditions”.
He stressed that the Maduro regime “allowed some opposition candidates to participate” in the regional elections in November, but “there were no conditions for free and fair elections.”
He also stated that negotiations between the Executive and the opposition, which took place in Mexico between August and September, allowed the return to the country of some “figures of exile”.
“Despite these changes, the Maduro regime continued to hold hundreds of people in prison for political reasons and prevented hundreds of opposition candidates from exercising all their rights to run,” he criticized.
The document further cited that members of Venezuela's security forces “committed numerous violations” of human rights and that “the Maduro regime did not take any action to identify or investigate” these abuses.
Last month, two out of ten Americans imprisoned in Venezuela were released after a delegation of U.S. officials traveled to Caracas for a meeting with Maduro government officials.
The United States also pointed to Russia, Cuba, Nicaragua and China in its annual report.
At a press conference, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned that in the last year Washington has seen a worsening human rights situation and a continuation of the rise of authoritarianism in many parts of the world.
He added that “in few places have the human consequences (of that worsening) been as harsh as in the brutal war of the Russian government in Ukraine.”
The Secretary of State stressed that, as Russian troops withdraw from the Ukrainian cities they had occupied or besieged, the “widespread atrocities” of Russian forces are coming to light.
He cited the testimony of women and girls who have been raped, as well as bombed civilian infrastructure, such as a theater and a train station.
In this regard, in the Ukrainian chapter, the State Department accused the Moscow-backed forces of perpetrating “widespread” violent acts against civilians in the Donbas region in 2021, where the Kremlin has been supporting pro-Russian militias since 2014.
Russia began an invasion of Ukraine on February 24 with the excuse of helping the people of the Donbas and, since then, the war has left thousands dead, more than four million refugees and some seven million internally displaced persons, according to the United Nations.
(With information from EFE)
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