U.S. WARNS MADURO OVER ARREST OF OPPOSITION LEADERS
Two opposition leaders detained following vote
CARACAS, VENEZUELA • The United States says it is holding Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro “personally responsible” for the health and safety of two opposition leaders taken by authorities from the homes where they were under house arrest.
White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Tuesday the detentions of Leopoldo Lopez and Antonio Ledezma followed the Maduro government’s “outrageous seizure of power through a sham election” over the weekend.
Sanders said Lopez and Ledezma were being “unjustly” held by the Venezuelan government and Maduro was responsible for their well-being.
Lopez was previously detained after anti-government protests and sentenced to more than a decade in prison. He was released last month to serve the rest of his term under house arrest. Ledezma, a former Caracas mayor, was also detained in 2015 and had been under house arrest.
Following his rearrest, supporters of Lopez released a video he taped a week before state security agents whisked him back to a military prison. It shows the opposition leader calling on Venezuelans to be firm in resisting Maduro.
He also announces that his wife is pregnant. Lopez says he recorded the sixminute video knowing he might be imprisoned again — as he was Thursday.
It’s not clear if Ledezma was also taken to prison. The government made no immediate comment on the detentions.
Both leaders recently posted videos online denouncing Maduro’s decision to hold a vote for a constitutional assembly with the power to overhaul Venezuela’s political system.
Maduro said Monday he had no intention of deviating from his plans to rewrite the constitution and go after a string of enemies, from independent Venezuelan news channels to gunmen he claimed were sent by neighbouring Colombia to disrupt the vote as part of an international conspiracy led by the man he calls “Emperor Donald Trump.”
“They don’t intimidate me. The threats and sanctions of the empire don’t intimidate me for a moment,” Maduro said on national television. “I don’t listen to orders from the empire, not now or ever ... Bring on more sanctions, Donald Trump.”
A few hours earlier, Washington had added Maduro to a steadily growing list of high-ranking Venezuelan officials targeted by financial sanctions, escalating a tactic that has so far failed to alter his socialist government’s behaviour. For now, the Trump administration has not delivered on threats to sanction Venezuela’s oil industry, which could undermine Maduro’s government but raise U.S. gas prices and deepen the humanitarian crisis here.
In another move that could undermine Maduro, three Venezuelan legislators said Tuesday they are breaking with the pro-government Great Patriotic Pole party and forming a new faction in opposition to the president’s rewrite of the constitution.
The Great Patriotic Pole is a coalition of 17 parties formed in 2012 to support the re-election of the late president Hugo Chavez, who bequeathed power to Maduro.
The legislators say their new faction will be called the “Parliamentary Socialist Bloc.”
The announcement came after electoral authorities said more than eight million people voted Sunday to create the constitutional assembly — a turnout doubted by independent analysts while the election was labelled illegitimate by leaders across the Americas and Europe.
Venezuela’s National Electoral Council said turnout in Sunday’s vote was 41.53 per cent, or 8,089,320 people. The result would mean the ruling party won more support than it had in any national election since 2013, despite a cratering economy, spiralling inflation, shortages of medicine and malnutrition. Opinion polls had said some 85 per cent of Venezuelans disapproved of the constitutional assembly and similar numbers disapproved of Maduro’s overall performance.