José Miguel Vivanco, the Americas director of Human Rights Watch, has published an opinion article in today’s Washington Post criticizing the human rights abuses of the Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.  Although I am certainly influenced by the fact that I represent political prisoners in both Russia and Venezuela, I can’t help but read Vivanco’s piece and see some strong comparative parallels between the processes, trends, and methodologies used by both Vladimir Putin and his Latin American counterpart with respect to managing their human rights and democratic shortcomings. 

The growing convergence of the Russia-Venezuela relationship is one that should be obvious just from the newspaper headlines.  No sooner had Chávez made his relatively small nation of 26 million citizens the #1 buyer of Russian arms worldwide (according to a SIPRI report, there was a 900% increase in arms purchases by Caracas in 2004-2008), does Sec. of State Hillary Clinton start talking about the urgent need to counter the rise of Iranian, Chinese, and especially Russian (because only Moscow has talked about establishing military bases) influence in Latin America.  Before all of this, we had Gazprom and Rosneft being gifted with Orinoco development licenses by PDVSA (many of them stripped away from previous owners), followed shortly by a naval exercise media circus.  Venezuela was also proud to become the host of Latin America’s only Kalashnikov factory … though sometimes a few hundred thousand of these arms go to FARC missing.