Blunter repression in Venezuela: mayor jailed

Enzo Scarano, mayor of San Diego and clearly the most popular politician in the very important Carabobo state, has been sent to jail for ten months and a half. The trial took eight hours and the evidence was based on accusations to him on a newspaper article. The Chavista regime had been trying to neutralise Scarano for years now. It was producing bogus accusations all the time (just one example). Now it accused him of not having taken away the barricades that students were putting up in the municipality where he has been mayor. Scarano had repeatedly said he could only take away the blockades when people were not opposing. By law the ones who had to come in case people were on the streets were the national police. 

That didn't help. A newspaper article by a journalist accusing him of something was everything the regime needed now.

Scarano had announced he would go to the trial the day before. He went there with his lawyers and a bunch of supporters. Still, unlike in other countries, he was simply taken away directly, like a dangerous criminal. Before that the military had sent at least seven tankettes to surround the Supreme Court.

Scarano has been a great threat to Chavismo's autocratic ways because he was bound to be the next candidate for the position of governor in Carabobo. He got 75.24% of votes in his re-election bid in December 2013 and that in an area that is not upper class or upper-middle class like in Northern Valencia but rather lower-middle class with several slums included. He could organise as best as possible the young people who would prevent Chavista thugs and military from stealing elections in voting centres under their radar. How he could do that? By making sure witnesses would be circulating and transmitting all the information they had on a very orderly fashion. Now he will be in jail.

The Supreme Court has been a joke for years. The current president, Gladys María Gutiérrez Alvarado, was a very public Chavista politician for years, not just a sympathizer. She ran for governor under Chávez's flag...and Venezuelans are expected to consider her as the supreme arbiter of political matters now. The previous one, Luisa Estela Morales, declared to baffled journalists the division of powers "weakens the State"...apparently a lawyer who doesn't know the division of power is one of the key factors for democracy, something people already consider evident at the time of the French Revolution.

Will the World keep quiet about all this? What will Amnesty International say? And what will the very silent presidents of all the Latin American countries with a very nice trade surplus vis-a-vis Venezuela?

Caracas Chronicles reports about another mayor who went to jail and how the Minister of Interior, not the Ministry of Justice, was the one announcing that.

Update: San Diego Municipality will have new elections pretty soon. The regime has basically neutralised its main opponent in the key state of Carabobo. And yet: this doesn't mean it has neutralised the people of the Tacarigua region. We aren't going to take it.