Jhon Hader Betancourt

• Name: Jhon Hader Betancourt
• Position: Businessman
• Deprived of liberty from: August 16, 2019
• Judgment: Awaiting trial
• Country: Venezuela
• Place of confinement: SEBIN
• Health condition: Severe health conditions
• Torture complaint: Subject to torture and inhumane prison conditions

On April 30, 2019, Mr. Betancourt was on his way to work on his motorcycle for the Altamira distributor, and stopped when he saw that there was a significant group of people in the middle of the distributor headed by Juan Guaidó and Leopoldo López. At some point while observing, López approached him to shake his hand, as he did with other people who had approached the Distributor. Those images were recorded by TV and people who recorded and published on social networks. 4 months later, on August 16, 2019, officials of the FAES Group showed up at the commercial premises of the El Cementerio Market in Caracas, where the victim works, and took him into custody, without an arrest warrant. They involve him with the alleged “State Coup” that Guaidó and López wanted to give him that day. The FAES group is attached to the National Police.

For 4 days he remained completely isolated in the custody of SEBIN without his relatives and lawyer knowing about his whereabouts. He had been arrested by officials of the FAES of the National Police and handed him over hours later to SEBIN and there was no public information about where they had him until he was transferred to the Court for the presentation hearing. SEBIN is attached to the Vice Presidency of the Republic.

He was handcuffed by hands and feet for 4 continuous days, and beaten multiple times, including in the head. Then he was locked up and isolated in a totally dark cell for 4 days in the SEBIN, without any visibility, without ventilation, without food and without water, and only came out when he was interrogated and beaten. On the last day they gave him some water since he suffered a hypertension crisis. He made his physiological needs on top of it. He was a victim of psychological torture, he was threatened with his family, with his wife and children telling him that they were going to hurt him. He was also hit hard in the head, in fact he still currently has a crack in the head by the blows, the victim thinks he was hit with blunt objects.

Today, behind the bars of the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service SEBIN, Betancourt’s twin children need a “high-risk surgical intervention” for presenting mixed quadriparesis. So they ask for a humanitarian measure for the detainee, because the two children in wheelchairs “need their father next to them,” since in addition to not committing any crime, he is the breadwinner of the household and five other children. The defense of Betancourt Restrepo “has presented all the necessary elements as a means of proof between videos, emergency brief, witnesses and required proceedings, to prosecutor 67 Mora Salcedo, consigning evidence of the unfairness and violation of this whole process.”

Observations

Miguel Ángel Rodríguez Echeverría is a Costa Rican economist, businessman, lawyer, and politician. Rodríguez was Minister of Planning (1967-1970) and of the Presidency (1970) and Director of the Central Bank during the administration of José Joaquín Trejos (1966-1969), deputy of the Legislative Assembly in the period 1990-1994, in which he held the Presidency of Congress, 43rd president of the Republic from May 8, 1998 to May 8, 2002 and was unanimously elected secretary general of the Organization of American.

For five decades he has remained active in the academic field as a professor at the School of Economics of the University of Costa Rica and at the Autonomous University of Central America. He is the author of numerous books and articles on economic, social and political issues.

He was a visiting professor at the University of California Berkeley in 1968, at Carlos Tercero University in 2003 and from 2002 to 2004 at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, in the city of Washington. He has served in recent years on the board of directors of the International Foundation for Electoral Systems and on the advisory board of Initiative for Policy Dialogue, in addition to chairing the advisory group of the consulting firm Manatt Jones Global Strategies.