José Miguel Vivanco, the Americas director of Human Rights Watch, has published an opinion article in today's Washington Post criticizing the human rights abuses of the Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.  Although I am certainly influenced by the fact that I represent political prisoners in both Russia and Venezuela, I can't help but read Vivanco's piece and see some strong comparative parallels between the processes, trends, and methodologies used by both Vladimir Putin and his Latin American counterpart with respect to managing their human rights and democratic shortcomings. 

The growing convergence of the Russia-Venezuela relationship is one that should be obvious just from the newspaper headlines.  No sooner had Chávez made his relatively small nation of 26 million citizens the #1 buyer