Revista Temas de Derecho Constitucional

157 La concesión de asilo como mecanismo de paz y desafíos recientes dentro del procesamiento de casos de asilo de los solicitantes venezolanos en Canadá y los Estados Unidos to those being pursued by the police. Alicia described an incident in which she was at a family reunion at her mother’s house when 20 colectivos arrived and harassed her. They pushed her and tried to take her baby daughter. She escaped with help from her father and brother. She stated that she believed that the colectivos were trying to punish her for participating in anti-government rallies. A second incident occurred when she was preparing to reopen Preincar after it had been vandalized. The police arrived and asked her the whereabouts of the owners who they believed had participated in anti-government rallies. She refused to provide the information as she stated that the police did not have an order. They demanded invoices for the merchandises from the sort and wanted her to sign an order that they would not let her read. She refused and tried to call a lawyer and her husband, but the police prevented her from doing so and arrested her. She was detained for seven hours. The company lawyer arrived and the company paid 500 USD ransom for her release. One of the police officers told her to leave the country because she had become their ATM, meaning that they could arrest her again on false charges and have to pay more bribes. She claimed to have received threatening phone calls every day in which she was asked about the company owners’ whearebabouts, threatened with death, or threat to take her daughter. She believed that it was the police that called her because they asked about her detention. She claimed to have been followed on the street by colectivos and threatened by them when they shot guns in the air while at home. The Immigration Judge said that he had serious concerns about her credibility, but found her to be credible. He determined that her past experiences were not severe enough to rise to the level of persecution. Nor did he find that the experiences were related to her political opinion. He held that the attempted kidnapping of her daughter did not have anything to dowith her political activities and that her arrest and detention were due to the police’s interest in finding information about Preincar’s owners. The judge stated that to consider the threatening phone calls and other threatening events as persecution would be speculation. The BIA affirmed the decision and she appealed. The Court of Appeals upheld the negative decision, noting that her testimony failed clarify how the colectivos knew about her political activity or why they targeted her. Furthermore, the Court concluded that her refusal to cooperate with the police to let them know about the location of Preincar’s owners was insufficient to establish a nexus to political opinion. The Court of Appeals states that “while some evidence supports Tosar-Cedano’s claim that she was targeted by the police and the colectivos because of her participation in anti-government rallies, we cannot say that the record compels a finding contrary to that reached by the BIA and IJ. Because substantial evidence supports the BIA and IJ’s finding that Tosar-Cedeno failed to establish a nexus between any mistreatment she suffered or feared and her political opinions, she is not eligible for asylum.” The Court of Appeals decision is unsatisfactory because it mentions that there is some evidence supporting her claim, but does not give her the benefit of the doubt. It is contradictory as the Court upholds the BIA’s finding that she was not being targeted by the police, rather it was the owners of Preincar that were being targeted according to Tosar-Cedeno’s testimony. It refers to substantial evidence supporting a negative assessment, without clarifying what that is. One may consider that this case raises a red flag for possible bias