The dictatorships of 21st century socialism hold power through their system of “state terrorism, which is the institutionalized perpetration of crimes by the government with the purpose of generating fear in the population and thus achieving submissive behavior.” It is the expansion of the criminal method of the Cuban dictatorship with roots in the Soviet dictatorship, applied in Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua. The flagrant crimes that make up “state terrorism” are permanent and of global public knowledge since the demonstrations of July 11, 2021 (11-J) in Cuba and are being repeated in the process of the July 28 elections in Venezuela.
Terrorism is “domination by terror”, “the succession of acts of violence carried out to instill terror” and “the criminal activity of organized gangs that, repeatedly and usually indiscriminately, seek to create social alarm for political ends.”
When these are carried out by a government or by officials of a regime that holds power, we are faced with “state terrorism.”
In State terrorism, the systematic criminal activity of repression, harassment, persecution, threats, reprisals, extortion, different forms of violence and improper use of force, which is committed through and/or by the rulers with the aim of dominating the population with fear, to avoid any act of resistance to oppression and even achieve active collaboration.
The protests that began on July 11, 2021 in Cuba “were a desperate cry for change in the country.” Thousands of people spontaneously took to the streets in dozens of cities shouting “freedom,” “down with communism,” “we are not afraid,” “hunger killed fear”… making the song “Patria y Vida” a hymn of freedom instead of the dictatorship’s “patria o muerte” (homeland or death). The protests were peaceful but the response was state terrorism by order of the dictator Miguel Diez Canel: “the order to fight has been given, revolutionaries to the streets.”
Since then, protests have not ceased and the world has witnessed repression to silence people through arbitrary arrests, interruption of internet service, violations of due process, ill-treatment, torture, forced disappearances, rigged trials with infamous sentences, as well as “constant intimidation and surveillance using security agents” as documented by Amnesty International.
On June 24, 2024, the “United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention” (WGAD), adopting cases from the Prisoners Defenders complaint, has condemned the 9/11 detentions by the Cuban dictatorship, pointing out the “1.- Deprivation of liberty without judicial protection; 2.- Lack of independent lawyers; 3.- Dependence of prosecutors and judges on the political power; 4.- State experts and witnesses as the only source of accusation; 5.- Criminalization of the exercise of fundamental rights; 6.- Insufficient crimes, all of them manipulable; 7.- Military courts used against civilians with convictions in a matter of hours.” All of these acts are serious crimes that constitute “state terrorism.”
Three years after the start of the protests on July 11, 2021, Prisoners Defenders has certified that the Cuban dictatorship took 1,728 political prisoners, of which 1,117 are in political prison. The cases of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia, which suffer from the application of the same criminal methodology, are equally critical. The dictatorships of these countries are sustained by fear, with 287 political prisoners in Venezuela as of July 8, 2024 certified by the Venezuelan Penal Forum, in Nicaragua 128 political prisoners according to the Mechanism for the recognition of political prisoners, and in Bolivia as of July 7, 2024 with 296 political prisoners documented by the Global Human Rights League.
We are now witnessing the application of state terrorism in the process of the Venezuelan elections scheduled for July 28, 2024. Faced with the reality that these are elections that dictator Nicolas Maduro cannot win because he has more than 80% popular rejection, 21st century socialism has launched a setup to falsify and claim victory through “continuous electoral fraud based on state terrorism.”
Venezuela has gone from being “elections under a dictatorship to elections under state terrorism.” In the middle of the electoral campaign, the dictatorship has arrested more than 40 leaders of the opposition campaign, closed hotels and restaurants that serve the candidate Edmundo Gonzales or the leader María Corina Machado and falsely accused and arrested their supporters, interrupted roads, carried out attacks with shock groups, threatened, falsified surveys, spread false news about support for the dictator, carried out actions to assassinate the reputation of the opposition, had 6 leaders of the opposition campaign persecuted in the Argentine Embassy in Caracas and they continue.
