Leopoldo Lope’z hearing has ended, and the judge is expected to make her final decision on the case some time tonight. At stake is Lopez’s liberty, and whether or not charges will be dropped. The judge can decide to send him to trial and keep him in jail, send him to trial and grant him bail, or drop the charges and release him unconditionally. The judge is widely expected to make choose the first option.
In Other News
Vehicle production in Venezuela plummeted 92.09% in the month of May, according to the Venezuelan Automotive Chamber (Cavenez). The seven assembly plants in the country managed to put together 645 vehicles. General Motors posted the best performance, managing to put together 344 cars the whole month.
For comparison, in May of 2013, Venezuelan assembly plants build 8,152 cars.
The dismal production numbers stem from the inability of the industry to secure dollars from the government to use for importing raw materials, a situation which is causing scarcity in virtually every other sector of the Venezuelan economy.
Roberta Jacobson, the United States Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs and the top-ranked official on Latin American matters, spoke today on the prospect of applying sanctions to Venezuelan officials, saying:
Sanctions are a useful tool for certain times, but not for now.
The clear denial of the possibility of sanctions being used against Venezuelan officials was counter acted by comments made by President Obama today, who – speaking from Warsaw, Poland – said:
We stand together because we know that the spirit of Warsaw and Budapest and Prague and Berlin stretches to wherever the longing for freedom stirs in human hearts, whether in Minsk or Caracas, Damascus or Pyongyang.
It’s interesting that President Obama mentioned Caracas in the same breath as Pyongyang (capital of North Korea, the most repressive country on earth), Damascus (capital of Syria, a country bled dry by a savage civil war) and Minsk (capital of Belarus, a relic of Soviet-era oppression).
Finally, a video showing a National Guard incursion into the Universidad de Los Andes (Los Andes University) campus in Tachira. As in many other countries around the world, security forces – particularly military forces – are often restricted from accessing university grounds in the interest of maintaining them as free spaces:
And here`s a picture, allegedly also from San Cristobal, Tachira, taken today and showing a National Guard soldier aiming what appears to be a shotgun (probably loaded with rubber pellets) directly at a fleeing demonstrator:
In Venezuela 