Top Venezuelan opposition leaders taken into custody
Fear of crackdown on dissenters grows after contested elections
CARACAS, Venezuela — Masked security forces carried out predawn raids Tuesday and hauled away two top Venezuelan opposition leaders, suggesting an expanded crackdown on dissent after widely denounced elections aimed at boosting the authoritarian government.
The moves against Leopoldo López and Antonio Ledezma, who were already under house arrest, could intensify the international fallout after Sunday’s election, which created a new super congress stocked with backers of the government of President Nicolás Maduro.
The vote for the Constituent Assembly was decried as fraudridden by the opposition and prompted the Trump administration on Monday to slap sanctions on Maduro.
A blitz of videos related to the arrests emerged, adding a cinematic quality to the events that opponents decried as the actions of a fast-cementing dictatorship. In one video posted online by Ledezma’s wife, security forces apparently drag the opposition leader between the glass doors of a building. A man cries “Help!” before another voice shouts, “They’re taking Ledezma!”
Both men were taken to Ramo Verde military prison southwest of Caracas, aides and family members said. The heavily guarded hilltop complex is a notorious detention center for political and military prisoners.
In Washington, the White House on Tuesday denounced the arrests and Maduro’s “outrageous seizure of power through sham elections.” Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the U.S. government considered Maduro “personally responsible for the health and safety of both men.”
After the election results were announced Sunday, Maduro gave a bellicose victory speech on national television that included threats to jail political leaders who were encouraging protests. Maduro, the anointed successor of leftist president Hugo Chávez, who died in 2013, also said that a “truth commission” would be created to “take parliamentary immunity from the legislators who shouldn’t have it.”
The newly minted legislators from Sunday’s vote, including Maduro’s wife and son, are set to take over the National Assembly building from lawmakers of the opposition-dominated body Thursday.
The outgoing lawmakers held a defiant session Tuesday, condemning the election as a “farce” and claiming that the government invented millions of votes. Opposition politicians also denounced the raids Tuesday.
“Imprisonments and persecution of the leadership will not stop the rebellion,” tweeted Freddy Guevara, vice president of the National Assembly and a member of López’s party.
Already near-worthless, the local currency — the bolivar — continued to collapse, with its black-market rate against the dollar falling nearly 10 percent overnight. Government channels, meanwhile, showed images of people celebrating the results of Sunday’s vote.
The pro-government election commission said the names of at least 364 of the 545 new Constituent Assembly members have been sent to Maduro. But the government also suffered defections. Three leftist legislators in the opposition-led National Assembly publicly disagreed with the government’s legislative bloc. “We’re socialists and believe in Bolivarian ideals,” said Eustoquio Contreras, one of the dissenting legislators, using the term reserved for Chávez’s ideology. “Our difference is in the way of confronting the crisis.”
In a sign of the socialist government’s growing isolation, ambassadors from Britain, France, Spain and Mexico went to the National Assembly on Tuesday to support the opposition lawmakers. “We diplomats are here to show support,” said France’s ambassador, Romain Nadal. “The Venezuelan people want peace, democracy and its institutions, and we are here to help.”