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Politicians, organizations and institutions from twelve Latin American countries sealed this Thursday in Miami a commitment to create a Hemispheric Front for Freedom to help subjugated countries to free themselves and defend existing democracies from totalitarian threat.
At a meeting held at the headquarters and museum of Brigade 2506, group that led the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the Steering Committee of the front was formed.
Mentions to the Sao Paulo Forum and the Puebla Group were frequent in this meeting attended by Costa Rican deputy Dragos Dolanescu, of the Costa Rica Justa party.
“We democrats of the right and center have to start organizing ourselves, unify criteria and denounce abuses to freedom,” said Dolanescu, who received a plaque commemorating his visit to the headquarters of Brigade 2506, from its president, Johnny de la Cruz.
Dolanescu, accompanied by the executive director of Costa Rica Justa, Daniel Quirós, said that the policies of the current and previous governments in his country, both “leftist”, have caused more than one million unemployed workers and one and a half million poor, and the closure of 56,000 companies.
The PAC is going for a third government “tying votes” to its “welfarist” state policy, he added.
He also said that it is a “shame” that the current government, through its foreign minister, has congratulated Cuba on the 62nd anniversary of the revolution, when those in power on the island “do not even recognize the fundamental human rights charter.”
Another of the speakers and signatories of the Steering Committee’s document, Uruguayan Leonardo Martin, of the Center for Open Society Studies (CESCOS) of Montevideo, stressed that “freedom lovers” should be “more united than ever”.
Martin criticized the fact that the “frenteamplista” governments that Uruguay had, in 15 years of administration, “difficulties” in condemning the attacks on freedom and democracy by totalitarian governments, among which he included Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
Journalist Paul Sfeir, of the Chilean Human Rights Directorate, assured that his country is threatened by a plan to subvert order in Latin America “drawn up by the Cuban government and financed by the Venezuelan government.”
He denounced that in the south of his country there is the presence of “elements” of the Colombian FARC and ELN guerrillas and drug traffickers who have become involved in the Mapuche conflict and in the north an avalanche of Venezuelans seeking refuge in a democratic country has arrived, among whom there are people sent by the Venezuelan tyranny to destabilize.
The Cuban Resistance Assembly, represented by Orlando Gutiérrez, leader of the exile group Directorio Democrático Cubano, Dominican congressman Elías Wessin, Mexican jurist René Bolio, and Salvadoran Congressman Ricardo Godoy, are part of the Steering Committee.
Also in the group are Juan David Vélez, Congressman for Colombians abroad, Jorge Villena, of the Peruvian Committee for Democracy in Cuba, Nicaraguan Horonato Espinosa, of FDN-Frente Norte 380, and Ernesto Ackerman, of Venezuelan American Citizens (IVAC), among others.
