The Bolivarian revolution tightens the siege around María Corina Machado, determined to counteract at any cost the enormous popular support achieved by the new opposition leader. “In these hours the attack against Vente Venezuela (his party), against our teams and against members of the command is brutally increasing. They are attacking our headquarters, blocking bank accounts and threatening with arrest warrants against citizens who all they want is change,” Machado claimed before his followers at a mass event in Mérida, in the Andean zone of the oil-producing country.
The opposition leader’s complaint comes hours after Roberto Abdul, president of the electoral NGO Súmate, was deprived of his freedom by decision of an anti-terrorist court that met inside the sinister Helicoide prison, headquarters of the political police of Nicolás Maduro. Without his rights and without even his lawyer or his family.
“Roberto is an honest, selfless, responsible and professional citizen who fulfills the activities inherent to the functions for which we were nominated,” the National Primary Commission (CNP), of which Abdul was a part, protested in a statement.
“He is being persecuted for having had impeccable primaries. They violated all of his rights, they prevented his right to defense, to have his lawyers accompany him at a hearing and they secretly presented him to the SEBIN (Bolivarian Intelligence Service) itself where They have kidnapped him,” stressed the leader of Vente Venezuela, founder of Súmate a couple of decades ago.
Both Abdul and the three members of Vente Venezuela indicated by Maduro’s prosecutor are attributed crimes of treason to the country with the excuse of the patriotic referendum in Essequibo and the escalation of war against Guyana, the scenario forced from the Miraflores Palace to justify his latest attack against the Venezuelan democrats.
Henry Alviárez (national coordinator of Vente Venezuela), Claudia Macero (head of communication) and Pedro Urruchurtu (international relations coordinator) remain refugees in a European embassy in Caracas. “We don’t leave people behind, in this team no one is left aside, we all go together. When they go against one, they go against everyone!”, highlighted Machado.
The Bolivarian power has another card up its sleeve against the opposition leader, which is the takeover of his party. This was announced by one of his allies, the false opponent Luis Ratti, who claimed to have put himself at the service of the Vente Venezuela affiliates to begin an “internal process of renewal and self-purification.”
“The Nicolás Maduro regime is doing very badly when they use characters like Ratti, a very low-level mercenary. Ratti is the ventriloquist’s dummy,” Perkins Rocha, a member of the executive management of Vente Venezuela, responded vehemently to EL MUNDO.
Maduro himself attacked Machado with special viciousness during the rally on Friday, which commemorated that 11 years earlier Hugo Chávez had chosen him as his successor. “The traitor of Machado!” shouted the town president in a festival of homophobic and misogynistic insults, especially against the former candidate Henrique Capriles, who despite going to vote last Sunday called him the “failure of Capriloca.” Against María Corina he dismissed her by calling her “Machada.”
The “son of Chávez” took advantage of the same political act to order his followers to persecute the supposed traitors to the country “in every street, in every community. Enough of betrayals and the fifth column, of the corrupt caste of the extreme right!”