LatinNews Daily Report - 26 November 2012

POLITICS  | Afiuni case: Venezuelan prison conditions get renewed attention. The public revelation in a new book that Judge Maria Lourdes Afiuni was raped and tortured while in a Venezuelan prison has focused renewed international attention on her case. Afiuni was arrested in December 2009 on the orders of President Hugo Chávez after she released a businessman suspected of corruption after he had been detained in prison without trial or charge well beyond the legally-permitted limit on preventative detention. He subsequently fled the country. In a new book Afiuni apparently told the author that she became pregnant after the assault and underwent an abortion behind bars. Afiuni, now 46, was moved from prison to house arrest in February 2010, having suffered cancer in jail. She describes herself as a political prisoner and well known international Chávez government sympathisers, including the US academic Noam Chomksy, have sought (unsuccessfully) to intervene in her case. The prosecution of Afiuni's has been at a standstill since April 2011, as she has boycotted the court hearings.  The Chávez government pledged to address the notoriously bad conditions in Venezuela’s overcrowded and violent prisons after several major riots in the past year.

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