A one-man Venezuelan court demanded 16 years in prison for Venezuelan democracy campaigner Maria Corina Machado. The one-stop-judge/jury/jailer also violated her rights by refusing to allow her to speak in the courtroom as is her right.

The jail sentence he’s demanding is much higher than anyone expected. The politicized judge also demanded to detain her — in an abysmal Venezuelan prison — when she returns to court on Feb. 14.

This doesn’t look good. Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez is desperately looking for enemies and his actions have begun to sharply escalate as the U.S. becomes preoccupied with Iran, Castro totters in Cuba, Putin grows emboldened against NGOs in Russia, and Chavez’s call for reelection beckons. He’s having money problems and he has squandered the treasury. The infrastructure of the nation is crumbling. Food is disappearing off the shelves, jobs are absent, crime is rampant, welfare checks aren’t satisfying the purposelessness of life without jobs and Chavez cannot make the lives of his political base any better.

So he is looking for “enemies.”

Ron, in the comments below, asks what Maria Corina Machado did to earn more wrath from Chavez than any other Venezuelan. Here’s what she did:

She is a trained engineer – brilliant – who dumped her career to first run an orphanage for the poor, and then to start a small non-government-organization to ensure clean, fair elections. She’s never taken a side publicly on sides, she was only interested in the election process being fair. Her organization was called Sumate.

The U.S. Congress, hearing of her good work, gave her $36,000 in organizational money from the National Endowment for Democracy to keep trying to strengthening Venezuela’s democratic institutions, so that through this kind of civil society work, (instead of armed struggle), the country would become a stronger democracy and not a dictatorship. That’s all it was about.

To Hugo Chavez, that was a crime. That’s why she’s threatened with 16 years’ prison — Venezuelan prison.

But before she came on the scene, Venezuela was an ocean of unrest, daily demonstrations, hundreds of thousands of angry people in the streets desperate to get rid of Chavez any violent or nonviolent way they could. They were despairing and some were acting wildly.

Machado stopped all that. She told the desperate people that there was a way to preserve democracy, to do it the right way, the peaceful way, the institutional way, and it was written right in the Chavista constitution.

It was called a recall referendum. So – instead of trying to overthrow Chavez – Venezuela’s opposition signed petitions organized by Sumate’s 40,000 volunteers, to seek a recall referendum. It was the same thing we did in California when we needed to get rid of Gray Davis.

The Chavistas were outraged and tried hard to stop her, saying all the signatures were no good. They also tried to force barrio dwellers to renounce their signatures, tribunal style. But with the international spotlight on them and their pretense of being a democracy, they had to admit the whole thing was done cleanly and they allowed it to happen. There was too much international pressure on them.

Bear in mind that signing the petition was not proof that one would vote against Chavez, it was only a signing for a petition for a recall to happen at all.

But Chavez treated everyone who signed as an enemy and extacted political revenge on them – turning the petition list into a blacklist to deny people passports, jobs, any right to participate in the system at all.

Now, he wants to exact the final revenge – to put this woman in an brutal Venezuelan prison. It’s a crime.

It’s very dangerous times in Venezuela. The story is here and here.

UPDATE: Miguel Octavio has more information about this – it was a dual-pronged attack accompanied by another one on the free press. Chavez is trying to throw more than just Machado in jail. He sees his chance with the West preoccupied. The story is here.

UPDATE: Daniel in Yaracuy has a stunning post giving Hugo Chavez a pointed warning about what happens when he throws a dissident like Machado in jail. He defiantly says doing this will be the creation point of a new leadership that truly will destroy Chavez. The story is here.

UPDATE: Aleksander Boyd has a new essay out explaining why this case matters, concisely showing from all the legal viewpoints why this is a blatant violation of law and human rights. It’s well done and well worth reading here.