MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Venezuela’s main opposition leader in Peru seeking asylum

Manuel Rosales at the moment is a tourist

Peru’s Foreign Affairs minister José Antonio García Belaúnde, confirmed on Tuesday that Manuel Rosales, the mayor of Maracaibo, and one of the leaders of the Venezuelan opposition, is in Lima, capital of Peru supposedly seeking asymlum.

In an interview with the network CNN, García Belaúnde said that he is not aware of how long the leader of the opposition party Un Nuevo Tiempo (UNT) has been in Peru. But he said that Rosales entered the country as a tourist.

García Belaúnde said that Rosales has not yet applied for political asylum and that he has, from the moment he arrived to Peru, “one hundred days to make the request; Mr. Rosales was allowed to enter Peru because despite the fact that there is a legal process against him in Venezuela, he is not on the run since he has not been sentenced”.

Mr Rosales left Venezuela to escape corruption charges, which he says are politically motivated by his criticism of President Hugo Chavez. Last October, Mr Chavez accused Mr Rosales of corruption and plotting to assassinate him, and threatened to have the opposition leader jailed.

The mayor is being “politically persecuted,” said his wife, Eveling Rosales, in comments broadcast by CNN’s Spanish- language channel. Rosales 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. “This is retaliation and selective repression”, he added.

Opposition leaders say Rosales’s case stems from Chavez’s reaction to his 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.

“Mr. Rosales is being unjustly persecuted” Javier Valle-Riestra, his lawyer in Peru, told reporters today in Lima. “He won’t return to Venezuela under these circumstances, because Peru will never expel him”.

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 mayor of Chacao, 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 won the post of Caracas mayor in the November elections.