SEOUL: A US citizen who said he had crossed illegally into North Korea held a press conference in Pyongyang yesterday to denounce his own country’s US political and economic systems.
The man identified himself as Arturo Pierre Martinez, aged 29 and from El Paso in Texas, CNN and the North’s official KCNA news agency reported.
He entered the North from China in November, according to a North Korean statement cited by the broadcaster, just two days after the US spy chief James Clapper arrived in Pyongyang to secure the release of two other detained Americans.
Martinez had earlier tried to swim across the Han river between the two Koreas to enter the North, only to be caught and sent back to the US where he was placed in a psychiatric hospital, his mother told CNN.
“But he got out,” Patricia Eugenia Martinez said, adding her son was bipolar. “
At the press conference Martinez admitted the illegal entry but said he was “extremely grateful” for the North to have pardoned him and to have offered him “the most generous reception”, according to KCNA.
The North aired the criticisms by Martinez of his own government at a time when Pyongyang is under growing international pressure to improve its human rights record. Martinez said he plans to seek political asylum in Venezuela, another ideological foe of the United States.
Martinez accused the US government of operating like “a Mafia enterprise” plundering other nations. “The democracy of this nation is an illusion and its representatives act as nothing more than powerbrokers for those who can offer them,” he was quoted by KCNA as saying. AFP
