Venezuela’s Maduro orders multiple arrests to squelch military dissent
The Nicolas Maduro regime has launched a witch hunt within the Venezuelan armed forces in recent days, arresting nearly a dozen officers and ordering the secret police to monitor anyone in contact with deserters and discharged military personnel, according to sources with close ties to the military.
Among the officers arrested are members of the Casa Militar, the unit based in the Miraflores presidential palace in charge of Maduro’s safekeeping.
“There’s a number of lieutenants detained who were already brought before a military tribunal,” said retired Gen. Antonio Rivero, who stays in contact with activeduty officers from his home in Miami. “That group is made up of about 20 people arrested.”
Most are low-ranking officers but they include a lieutenant colonel and a number of non-commissioned officers, Rivero added.
About 27 National Guard members were arrested in January after rebelling and posting videos on social media expressing their dissatisfaction with the hunger and economic difficulties that Venezuelan society is suffering under Maduro.
The new arrests also come amid a series of declarations issued by retired and activeduty officers, in Venezuela and abroad, rejecting Maduro’s presidency as illegitimate.
Armed forces members have enjoyed privileges granted to them by the late President Hugo Chavez since 1998, but are now evaluating their next steps as the world turns against Maduro, said Esteban Gerbasi, a Miami expert on Venezuelan security issues.
“The senior commanders don’t want to leave because they live well. But they are also starting to realize that Maduro has no way to maintain his totalitarian regime” because of the international economic sanctions imposed on the government, Gerbasi said.
“He has no money, not even gasoline for transportation. But most importantly, he seems to have no Plan B for a political solution to the crisis. Maduro is on a collision course,” Gerbasi said. “With no way out for his people, what he’s proposing is, ‘you either commit suicide with me or you commit suicide with me.’ And societies don’t commit suicide.”
The regime, in fact, appears to fear that its armed forces lack the commitment to go down with Maduro as internal and international pressure rises, and it’s starting to feel that its soldiers could turn against them, experts said.
Reacting to fears that retired officers are persuading active-duty armed forces members to take up arms against the regime, Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez ordered all military bases to work closely with military counterintelligence to detect signs of conspiracies.
The orders, known as radiograms, showed the Maduro regime fears the rise of rebel groups similar to that of Oscar Perez, a police officer who organized and armed a group of active and retired police and military officers before he was killed in January 2018 by government forces that rejected his offer to surrender peacefully.
The regime announced last week that it had broken up a similar rebel group.