Political Prisoners and Torture in Venezuela: The Experience of an HKS Alumnus & Political Prisoner

CID Research Francisco Muci, Program Assistant at CID, interviews Francisco Marquez Lara, a Harvard Kennedy School MPP’12 alumnus who was held as a political prisoner in Venezuela. Francisco describes his experience and the context that led to his imprisonment. Recorded on November 28, 2016 About the Speaker: Francisco Marquez Lara is a Venezuelan lawyer and polítical activist with the Voluntad Popular party. He was held as a political prisoner in Venezuela for four months. Throughout this time he was detained in four facilities under three organizations. This is the story of what he lived through and witnessed. Before his imprisonment, Marquez was Chief of Staff for the Mayor of El Hatillo in Caracas. He obtained his law degree at Catholic University Andres Bello and his Master in Public Policy degree at Harvard Kennedy School.

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Incredible progress has been made throughout the world in recent years. However, globalization has failed to deliver on its promises. As problems like unequal access to education and healthcare, environmental degradation, and stretched finances persist, we must continue building on decades of transformative development work. The Center for International Development (CID) is a university-wide center based at the Harvard Kennedy School that seeks to solve these pressing development problems—and many more. At CID, we believe leveraging global talent is the key to enabling development for all. We teach to build capacity, conduct research that guides development policy, and convene talent to advance ideas for a thriving world. Addressing today’s challenges to international development also requires bridging academic expertise with practitioner experience. Through collaborative, in-country partnerships, CID’s research programs, faculty, and students deploy an analytical framework and context-dependent approaches to tackle development problems from all angles, in every region of the globe.