Did so at random, the three guys I checked are low level college professors in the US. Scruggs did spend some time in Venezuela researching afro-pop music.
If you read the material you'll see a very interesting comment, he moved to Merida in the Andes because it's safer - kept his family there for a year while he did his research and traveled around. So he knows enough about Venezuela to realize his children would be in danger if he moved to say Caracas or Barlovento, where the true Afro-Venezuelan music centers are found, and where crime is high and therefore his children would be potential kidnap victims.
I don't find the people who signed the letter to be credible experts regarding Venezuelan human rights. I do see a good probability they were bought and paid for to sign letters as needed. Scruggs, for example, also signed a letter to Interpol which said there was no way the computer found by the Colombian army in Ecuador's FARC camp was genuine.
It may be that Venezuelan cash is being used to buy left-leaning university types in the US and elsewhere to sign letters as needed - and this probably involves letters undermining NGOs which point out Venezuela's human rights situation is not good, as well as letters defending the Venezuelan government when its spoors are tracked by Interpol and other agencies.
Dr William H Watkins
http://williamhwatkins.com/background.htmlWilliam "Bill" Watkins was born in Harlem, New York and raised in South-central Los Angeles. A former high school teacher, he completed the Ph.D in 1986, University of Illinois at Chicago. Bill served on the College of Education and Black Studies faculties at the University of Utah before returning to the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1995.
Tim Scruggs
http://www.afropop.org/community/contributors.php?ID=95 Dr. Scruggs is an ethnomusicologist whose geographical specialty is music of the Americas, encompassing Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as Latino and other musics in the United States. He directed the Latin American Studies Program at Iowa in 1991-92.
"There had been ties between the University of Iowa and La Universidad de los Andes in Mérida in the Andean region, and that helped us construct a successful Fulbright proposal. Both myself and my wife, Laura Graham, who is a linguistic anthropologist, and our two sons were able to go to Venezuela in October of 2005. Our grant ended in August the next year, but we liked Venezuela and the Venezuelans so much that our kids went along with us and we stayed an extra semester. We came back in January of this year, 2007, and visited again this August.
Miguel Tinker-Salas
http://www.pomona.edu/administration/communications/for-the-media/media-experts/expert-miguel-tinker-salas.aspxMiguel Tinker-Salas, one of the nation's foremost authorities on political issues confronting Mexico and Latin America, is author of "Under the Shadow of the Eagles, The Border and the Transformation of Sonora During the Porfiriato" (1997). His expertise includes: contemporary Mexican politics, Mexican border society, Mexico in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Latin American history, Chicanos/as and Latinos in the United States, Chicano/a history, Latin American immigration and the Diaspora. He is fluent in both Spanish and English.