Alejandro Peña Esclusa, engineer, writer, analyst, and political consultant was a pioneer of the first protests in Venezuela against Hugo Chávez’s regime. He was imprisoned for a year in El Helicoide (a prison notorious for torture and other abuse) and is still a political prisoner of conscience. He is an expert on the São Paulo Forum, an organization founded in 1990 by Fidel Castro and Brazilian President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva. It comprised 48 left-wing parties and movements from Latin America and the Caribbean (which has grown to 200 as of 2019), to push communist, socialist, and anti-imperialist policies across the region. He has written four books on the subject. His latest, The São Paulo Forum’s Cultural Warfare, is being widely distributed internationally.