The group of former presidents who make up the Democratic Initiative of Spain and the Americas (IDEA) lamented on Monday the “disrespect” of diplomatic asylum for collaborators of Venezuelan opponents María Corina Machado and Edmundo González Urrutia by the Government of Nicolás Maduro.

The group lamented the “persecution” of members of Machado’s right wing of the campaign, “subject to diplomatic asylum in the representation of the Argentine Republic in Caracas without receiving the respective safe-conducts, which must be granted as a matter of urgency.”

Former presidents of IDEA today denounced in a statement this “violation” of the 1954 Caracas Convention on diplomatic asylum, in this case “with the manifest purpose of enervating” Machado’s support for González Urrutia’s presidential candidacy.

They recalled that asylum is a “humanitarian practice with the purpose of protecting fundamental rights of the person” according to the International Court of Justice and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

IDEA urged the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States (OAS) to consider violations of the Asylum Convention by Venezuela and, if applicable, to “urge the States parties to it, in particular Argentina, to file an instance before the International Court of Justice.”

Likewise, IDEA complained that “the illegal and arbitrary imprisonment” of those who make up Machado’s executive arm is maintained.

The statement was signed by former Spanish Government President José María Aznar and former Colombian presidents Andrés Pastrana, Iván Duque and Álvaro Uribe.

It is also signed by the former presidents of Costa Rica Miguel Ángel Rodríguez and Luis Guillermo Solís, among a total of twenty former presidents.

On March 26, it was reported from Buenos Aires of the entry of a group of opponents in the Argentine residence in the Venezuelan capital although it was not specified since when they were there.

The testimony of Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, during this Monday’s session in the criminal trial faced by the former president in New York portrayed him as someone with such a fixation for silencing the ‘affair’ with porn actress Stormy Daniels as a will to try to dodge payments.

Emails, invoices and even a recording of an audio of Trump himself were provided today by the Prosecutor’s Office during Cohen’s statement, which assured that the former president, accused of forging accounting documents to silence Daniels and thus protect his 2016 campaign, prioritized his political career over his marriage.

“I want it to be hidden until the elections are passed (2016). If I win, it will have no relevance because I will already be president; if I lose, I won’t even care,” Cohen paraphrased Trump to add that Trump’s obsession with silencing the adult film performer “was for the campaign, not for Melania (his wife).”

Melania – who has not accompanied the former president on any day of this trial – and Trump met in 1998, when he was 52 years old and she was 28, and the couple arrived at the altar in 2005, just a year before the alleged slip with Daniels; an adventure that, if proven, would have happened when she was pregnant.

Despite Cohen’s quiet face, these harsh statements provoked some of Trump’s most agitated-headed denial movements today. Meanwhile, a hundred journalists and ordinary citizens scrutinized their gestures with maximum expectation from the court or a surrounding room to follow the process.

Cohen, sentenced to three years in prison in 2018 for illicit financing of the Republican presidential campaign two years earlier, defined as “catastrophic” the possibility that the alleged sexual relationship between him and Daniels would come to light.

“Women are going to hate me… Men may think it’s cool, but this is going to be a disaster for the campaign,” the former head of the U.S. Executive allegedly said according to Cohen’s account.

Trump agreed to seal an agreement in 2016 with Daniels’ former lawyer, Keith Davidson, to send the story to limbo for $130,000, but the transfer was postponed again and again, and the porn actress’s legal team began to become impatient to the point of threating with publishing the story in the Daily Mail media, according to the lawyer, who is now disabled.

He then detailed multiple meetings with Allen Weisselberg, former financial director of the Trump Organization, to solve the problem.

Among the proposals that were considered were, according to Cohen, creating an event of the institution whose entries were aimed at paying for it or presenting it as a “business opportunity” to the related tabloid The National Enquirer to buy the story and apply the ‘catch and kill’ technique, for which history would never see the light.

The former president, who even boasted with his condition of “billionaire”, avoided the payment and this then fell to Cohen, according to his version, who agreed to advance the money and then receive it through a screen company and under the false concept of legal services provided to the Trump Organization.

Finally, the premium that was paid to advance the money was “disappointing” for Cohen, who said that he was very angry with this undisclosed amount and that he let Weisselberg know: “I expressed how angry he was in a very clear language (…) I was even surprised how irritated I was,” he said as Trump sketched a half-smile.

Cohen also corroborated today the scheme set out by the Prosecutor’s Office in which, as a former lawyer for the former president, he allegedly worked hand in hand with the former editor of The National Enquirer, David Pecker, to acquire the exclusive rights of other extramarital Trump scandals and exercise ‘catch and kill’, as well as favoring the publication of positive news towards the future Republican candidate, along with other negative news about his political rivals.

The Mexican-American artist Lizbeth de la Cruz Santana painted a mural on the border between the Mexican Ciudad Juárez and the American El Paso with images of 13 mothers, veterans and ‘dreamers’ who already had a life in the United States but were deported from that country.

His work, installed on pillars and foundations of the Santa Fe international bridge, on the Mexican side of the border, shows the human side of deportation, asylum and what happens with American families disarmed by the immigration system of the United States.

“There are 13 people, different profiles, different nationalities, it is very important to take into account that people from different parts of the world arrive at this point of the border,” the muralist said on Monday in an interview with EFE.

He said that the project in Juárez includes the documentation of the stories of these 13 people, so the mural has QR codes so that people who visit this point know the stories on the artist’s website.

De la Cruz Santana commented that Mexico must have more humane policies to receive the deportees so that they can integrate more easily into society because they suffer a lot of discrimination.

He said that the main audience of the work are the deportees themselves, whose photos have been captured, so that they do not feel that their stories have been forgotten, in addition to being a message for governments, so that they are more human.

“For me, it is very important not to forget the people who have suffered deportation. People or relatives who are left behind or who have to take their children born in the United States to another country like Mexico, remind people that this issue has not been solved,” he remarked.

An example is Any García, who was born in Jalisco, a state in western Mexico, from where her family took her to the United States when she was 4 years old, but the authorities deported her 30 years later.

“My whole family is in the United States, my mom, my sisters, the father of the children, even if we are together, because we are missing those on the other side. In a perfect world, we want the way to return, even if it is not to live, but to be able to be with our loved ones,” Any said.

The woman commented that the border separates thousands of families, so the idea of participating in this project is to make visible what migrants deported by a “very inhuman” system are experiencing.