Human Rights Watch (HRW) executive director Kenneth Roth said Cuba is one of the Latin American countries where power is exercised “with the barrel of a gun.”
In statements to the EFE news agency, the manager said that Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba are part of a triad of governments that have lost all popular support and that power is exercised “with the barrel of a gun”.
He also believed that “human rights and democracy urgently need strong defenses in the region,” citing examples from Mexico and Brazil, countries where regimes are contained by strong democratic institutions.
“It’s not something we can take for granted, and (besides) it can be attacked from left or right. But at the same time, Latin America is much better than it was in my day,” Roth told EFE after announcing his departure from the NGO he led for almost 30 years.
Last January, HRW warned of the “alarming restriction of fundamental freedoms in Latin America” and called for “defending democratic spaces that we used to take for granted.
In its 2022 World Report, the organization found that even leaders who came to power through democratic elections “attacked independent civil society, freedom of the press and the independence of the judiciary” and millions of people were “driven from their homes and countries.” the increase in repression.
“In one country after another, we see people taking to the streets to oppose autocrats and defend democracy,” Roth explained in an interview, recalling the special cases of Hong Kong, Thailand, Burma, Russia, Cuba or Nicaragua in recent months. where the social situation has been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic.
The above report indicates that in the Cuban case, the government has systematically ill-treated critics and artists, including arbitrary arrests, ill-treatment of detainees and abusive criminal proceedings in response to largely peaceful protests against them.
Referring to the July 11 demonstrations, he condemned consistent and repeated patterns of abuse by multiple security forces in different parts of Cuba, which indicate “human rights abuses” and “a deliberate plan by the Cuban authorities to suppress and suppress the protest.
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