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Venezuela Opposition Leader Rosales Fled to Peru
By Matthew Walter
Bloomberg

Venezuelan opposition leader and Maracaibo Mayor Manuel Rosales, who was scheduled to appear in court yesterday on corruption charges, has left the country and is seeking political asylum in Peru.

The mayor is being “politically persecuted,” said his wife, Eveling Rosales, in comments broadcast by CNN’s Spanish- language channel. Manuel Rosales, 56, lost the 2006 presidential election to President Hugo Chavez.

“The fundamental problem is that there’s no credibility in the judicial system, which is a system that’s been completely politicized,” said Leopoldo Lopez, a member of Rosales’s Un Nuevo Tiempo party and former mayor of the Caracas borough of Chacao, in a telephone interview. “This is retaliation and selective repression.”

Opposition leaders say the Rosales case is the result of Chavez’s opponents winning elections in the country’s biggest cities and states in November, when Rosales took the mayor’s office in Maracaibo, the country’s second-biggest city. In addition to Rosales, former Defense Minister Raul Baduel, who turned on Chavez in 2007, has been detained in connection with a corruption probe, prosecutors said.

‘Impartial Trial’

“There’s no possibility for an impartial trial,” said Javier Valle-Riestra, Rosales’s attorney in Peru, in comments broadcast by CNN. He confirmed that Rosales has formally asked Peru for asylum.

In the Baduel case, military prosecutor General Ernesto Cedeno said he had enough evidence to issue the arrest order for the former minister and that he may have been a flight risk. Baduel was pulled from his car and apprehended by military intelligence officers on April 2.

“This is simply a response to the will and orders of President Chavez,” Raul Emilio Baduel, the former defense minister’s son, said in an interview. “All legal institutions are on their knees before Chavez’s will. It’s naïve to believe that due process is going to be respected in this trial.”

He said his father denies any wrongdoing.

Mario Isea, a lawmaker in the National Assembly and a member of Chavez’s socialist party, said yesterday that Rosales isn’t being persecuted, and that there’s evidence that he illegally profited from his previous position as governor of Zulia state.

Peruvian Tourist

Peruvian Foreign Minister Jose Garcia Belaunde said that Rosales entered the country as a tourist, in comments broadcast by Lima-based Canal N. He said that any asylum request would be evaluated by a ministerial committee, Garcia Belaunde said.

Neither the Foreign Ministry nor Valle-Riestra immediately returned calls from Bloomberg News seeking comment.

Opponents of the government have also been targeted by the legislature and by government appointees over the past year. Ahead of the November regional elections, the former Chacao Mayor Lopez was banned from running again for any public office by the government’s comptroller general, an anti-corruption watchdog.

Last week, Chavez appointed a head for a newly created Capital District, weakening opposition leader Antonio Ledezma, who was elected Caracas mayor in November.

The crackdown comes as Chavez seeks improved relations with President Barack Obama, whose hand he shook at least three times at last weekend’s Fifth Summit of the Americas.

Republican Senator John Ensign of Nevada said in broadcast comments over the weekend that it was “irresponsible” to be seen “joking” with Chavez. Venezuela is the fourth-biggest supplier of foreign crude oil to the U.S.

“You would be hard pressed to paint a scenario in which U.S. interests would be damaged as a consequence of us having a more constructive relationship with Venezuela,” Obama told reporters April 19.