Activist cuts throat in Belarusian court 0:55
(CNN Spanish) -
The last dictator in Europe.
This is how many describe - condemn - the president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, whose repressive methods are causing enormous headaches these days in an international community that does not always know how to act.
Listen to the new episode of
Global Challenges
with José Levy.
Alexander Lukashenko, President of Belarus.
(Photo by ANDREI STASEVICH / BELTA / AFP via Getty Images)
Greetings, this is José Levy in a new episode of the CNN Global Challenges podcast.
They are one of those cases in which reality seems to surpass fiction.
The setting: the Olympic Games in Tokyo.
The protagonist: a 24-year-old young woman, Krystina Tsimanouskaya, a sprinter for the Belarusian team, who made a big mistake: daring to criticize on the networks, not her government, but far from that, the decision of her coaches to put her on a career for which, he says, he was not prepared.
Apparently it was a lack of discipline, an unforgivable mistake, which caused her delegates to decide to interrupt her participation in the Olympic Games and immediately try to return her to their country.
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Later, he told CNN that on the way to the airport he phoned his grandmother, who warned him not to return for fear of ending up in a sanatorium for mental problems or, alternatively, in jail.
She says that her grandmother told her that the local media referred to her as someone who suffered from emotional and psychological problems, and that this could be a bad sign.
At the airport in Tokyo, she asked the security officers for help and was thus able to prevent her from being returned to Belarus.
Tsymanouskaya requested diplomatic asylum to Poland and, when granted, he moved to Warsaw, but did not do so - for security reasons - on a direct flight, but with a stopover in Vienna.
Now he claims to fear for the relatives who are still in his country.
Presumably, she was not reassured to learn that this Tuesday a Belarusian dissident, Vitaly Shishov, also young, was found hanging in a Kiev park.
Shishov headed the House of Belarus in Minsk, which tries to shelter those Belarusians seeking asylum in Ukraine.
An activist, a member of the Belarusian diaspora in Ukraine, holds a poster depicting Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko during a demonstration in front of the Foreign Ministry in Kiev.
(Photo by SERGEI SUPINSKY / AFP via Getty Images)
His friends say that he had come to the place running, doing sports.
They say that his lifeless body showed a broken nose and other bruises.
The police claim that the bruises could have been from a single fall and verify whether it was a suicide or, alternatively, a murder that was intended to pass as suicide.
And attempts to escape from Alexander Lukashenko's regime sometimes fail their goal even outside its borders.
In May, another dissident, Roman Protasevich, felt it in his own skin when he was traveling on a plane of the international company Ryanair, which was diverted from its original route and forced to land in Minsk, the Belarusian capital.
The government's excuse was that there was a bomb threat.
The fact that the plane was in the air and closer to its original destination than to Minsk was not enough reason to prevent a Mig 29 warplane from escorting the aircraft, with 171 people on board, to the Belarusian capital.
Needless to say, no explosives were found on board.
The outrage of many governments was enormous.
The Lukashenko regime was blamed for dangerous air piracy by, they said, "hijacking" a civilian aircraft and forcing it to change its route in order to actually take over one of its passengers.
But who has been the president of Belarus for 27 years now?
Listen to the rest on the podcast.
Good.
So far this podcast.
I
await
your comments on
Twitter:
@joselevycnn.
Next week we will return with more
Global Challenges
to present us with this terrible or exciting corner of the universe where we lived.
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