URGENT ACTION

OPPOSITION ACTIVIST GETS DEATH THREATS

A teacher, who has been an opposition activist and written articles critical of the 28 June 2009 coup that installed a de facto government, has received a series of death threats and had her car interfered with. A colleague who was also an opposition activist was killed on 23 March.

Rosa Margarita Vargas was driving home on 6 April, after work at the secondary school where she teaches. A taxi driver called to her to stop because there was a problem with her car. Rosa Vargas drove straight to a garage, where the mechanic told her that her right-hand front tyre had been slashed. The school where Rosa Vargas works had opened that day for the first time since the end of March, when another of the teachers was killed.

On 11 April, Rosa Vargas's former neighbours told her, two armed men came to the house where she had lived until December 2009, and asked where she was. Rosa had received a series of phone calls on 9-12 April, from a man who threatened her, telling her that she should do nothing to investigate the killing of her colleague, José Manuel Flores Arguijo, and that if she persisted, or carried on working with the Resistance movement, she would be eliminada ("eliminated").

Rosa Vargas has told Amnesty International that in December 2009, shortly after she had moved house, a neighbour told her that three men wearing balaclavas and blue uniforms like those worn by the police had come to her old house: they had shouted and kicked at the door. They asked neighbours if Rosa Vargas still lived there, if the neighbours knew where she had moved to, and where she worked. Later that month, she said, the left-side wheel bolts were loosened when the car was parked outside her new house.

Rosa Vargas had received handwritten threats about five times between October and November 2009, left under her car's windscreen wipers. The messages contained threats that Rosa should not write any more articles, and should stop working with the Resistance movement, or she would be killed.

PLEASE WRITE IMMEDIATELY in Spanish or your own language:

• Urging the authorities to order a thorough and impartial investigation into the threats and acts of intimidation against Rosa Margarita Vargas as a matter if the utmost urgency;

• Urging them to act immediately to give all necessary protection to Rosa Margarita Vargas, in accordance with her wishes.

PLEASE SEND APPEALS BEFORE 28 MAY 2010 TO: