Venezuela's Exclusion of anti-Chávez Candidates Faces a Challenge

Leopoldo López was once touted as a future leader of Venezuela, a young and appealing opposition figure who could have challenged President Hugo Chávez in next year's presidential election. After serving as mayor of Chacao, a major commercial district of the capital, from 2000 to 2008 — he won his 2004 re-election with 81% of the vote — the Harvard-educated López was poised in 2008 to run for mayor of all Caracas, with a 65% lead in the polls. But López was stopped in his tracks when he, together with more than 300 other Venezuelan politicians, were declared "inhabilitados" by Chávez's comptroller general, and disqualified from seeking public office until 2014 because they were supposedly guilty of corruption in their past.

Not surprisingly, say Chávez critics, 80% of those disqualified were opposition politicos. And, like López, most have never been formally charged, let alone convicted of any crime. That prompted López and other inhabilitados to take their cases to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) in Costa Rica, arguing that both the Venezuelan Constitution and the American Convention on Human Rights hold that only those who've been formally convicted of crimes can be prevented from running for election. Last week, López, 39, finally got to testify before the IACHR. "This is the first time that I have had the opportunity to present my case in front of impartial judges," he told TIME afterward, insisting that Chávez "has developed a strategy to destroy democracy" by keeping his foes from seeking office.


Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2058180,00.html#ixzz1GSnBItim