@POTUS @realDonaldTrump @SecRubio @DeputySecState @JMHumire @usembassyve
Mr. President, Secretary Rubio, Deputy Secretary Landau, Mr. Humire:
My name is Vladimir Petit Medina. Venezuelan PhD in Social Sciences, Harvard KSG MPA, IESA MBA, Tulane GMBA, professor of political leadership, columnist, entrepreneur. For eight and a half years I have been unable to return to my own country. Not by choice. The Venezuelan State has denied me the most basic thing a citizen has: my identity. No passport. No way to return home as a free man.
Venezuela’s passport office answers to the Ministry of Interior. The Minister of Interior is Diosdado Cabello, the same man the U.S. Department of Justice indicted for narco-terrorism, with a $25 million reward on his head.
My case is not a personal grievance. It is evidence of a method:
Critics are punished by seizing our documents.
Regime-friendly media run smear campaigns against critics.
Cabello used 18 episodes of his own TV show to repeat an accusation that 18 court rulings had already proven false. No judicial cause pending...but still wanted.
Those who obey are rewarded. Those who speak are punished. Nobody signs the order.
That is the playbook of a cartel, not of a government.
Denying citizens the right to return to their own country violates Article 12.4 of the ICCPR and Articles 35 and 50 of Venezuela’s own Constitution. Done systematically against dissidents, it is persecution under Article 7 of the Rome Statute: a crime against humanity.
It also matters to America’s interests. No serious investor will put a dollar into a country where Cabello, his family and his network can seize whatever they want, whenever they want. Ask El Nacional, whose building he took. As long as he holds power, the only “investment” in Venezuela will be complicity.
I respectfully ask you to:
Recognize the denial of identity documents to Venezuelan dissidents as political persecution in U.S. policy, reporting and sanctions.
Make the restoration of documents and the safe return of exiles a condition of any engagement with Venezuela’s interim authorities.
Keep Cabello out of Venezuela’s future. A transition with him in it is not a transition.
There is recorded evidence, and there are witnesses willing to testify under oath.
We laid it all out last night:
youtube.com/live/baKsaK7ZlLw
Thank you for standing with the Venezuelan people.