Fox, Calderón, and former presidents of Spain and Latin America denounce Nicolás Maduro in The Hague

Armando G. Tejeda

Correspondent

The newspaper La Jornada
Saturday, September 7, 2024, p. 24

Madrid. Through the Idea Group, a civil association based in Florida, 31 former presidents of Spain and Latin America, most of them ultra-liberal right-wing, filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court in The Hague against the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, whom they accuse of crimes against humanityThe person responsible for filing the complaint was former Colombian president Andrés Pastrana.

The signatories base their report on the document of the Organization of American States (OAS) and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in which they describe themselves as state terrorism the events leading up to and following the July 28 presidential elections in Venezuela.

The former presidents, including the Spanish José María Aznar, Felipe González and Mariano Rajoy; and the Mexicans Felipe Calderón and Vicente Fox, warn the international prosecutor that The crimes against humanity that continue to be carried out, including the recent arrest warrant against the real president-elect, Edmundo González, are the work of an operational military structure whose chain of command is directly exercised by Nicolás Maduro, as an active military officer and commander in chief..

Crimes against humanity

In the complaint they urge international justice to, Together with its sanctioning function against members of the responsible military chain and in complaints filed by several heads of state and the OAS General Secretariat, it urgently deploys its equal preventive function to stop the wave of widespread and systematic violations of human rights, crimes against humanity that are carried out through forced disappearances, extrajudicial executions, arbitrary detentions, torture and sexual violence..

The signatories include former presidents such as Costa Rican Laura Chinchilla, Colombian Iván Duque, Uruguayan Julio Maria Sanguinetti and Ecuadorian Osvaldo Hurtado, among others.

Of the four living former Spanish presidents since the restoration of democracy in 1978, the only one who remained aloof from this dispute was the socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who participated as an observer in the last elections in Venezuela and has always defended the cleanliness and proper functioning of the Venezuelan electoral system.