Call for the immediate release of Alejandro Peña Esclusa We, the undersigned—intellectuals, businessmen, students, politicians, citizens conscious of their duties—, wish to declare to the general public, and to the authorities of Caracas in particular, that we have never and will never be fooled by the grotesque judicial farce staged against the Venezuelan opposition leader Alejandro Peña Esclusa. Accused for a crime he did not and could not have committed, Peña Esclusa has been incarcerated for more than six months, awaiting his trial, which will be presided over by a judge who has never concealed his hatred for the accused, which is the same as announcing his verdict before trial. The very tenor of the charge betrays the farce. According to the Venezuelan authorities, Peña Esclusa is the supposed local “contact” of a Salvadoran terrorist, Francisco Chávez Abarca. Therefore, he would also be a terrorist. However, there is not even a shred of evidence that Chávez Abarca himself is a terrorist. In fact, so far there has been no proof of any crime the he has ever committed other than grand theft auto, an offence of which he was convicted in his native land. Much less is there any proof that Peña Esclusa has ever met that man, or even that he has had any chance to lay eyes upon him. And Chávez Abarca’s word is the only mockery of proof that has been ever presented against Peña Esclusa. But would Chávez Abarca have really uttered such word? Checking this fact has been prohibited. Without ever allowing his alleged testimony to be examined by an independent observer, the Venezuelan government made the witness inaccessible to the defense attorneys and even to the judge of the case, by sending him to Cuba, where he remains unreachable, and where any declaration coming from his mouth will not be trustworthy, given that there is no independent justice, right to defense, or freedom of the press in that country. Everything in that case characterizes a gross, almost puerile, incriminatory farce, which was staged in retaliation for the lawsuit that Peña Esclusa had filed against the Venezuelan government with an international court, and designed to hush up the connection between this government and terrorist organizations, a connection that Alejandro Peña Esclusa himself has repeatedly denounced and provided proof of. The imprisonment of Peña Esclusa is a scandal and a crime. In making public our most vehement protest against this cruel and premeditated iniquity, we are not asking anything from the Venezuelan government. We are demanding, for the sake of decency, that that government give up its cowardly hiding behind the incrimination of an innocent man, and that it do so sooner than the honor of the Venezuelan nation, that by no means deserve any of this, be maculated by this vile episode.