Among the dozens of people taken into custody earlier this year over accusations stemming from the alleged plots is also human rights attorney Rocío San Miguel, whom Saab has identified as a “spy” for one of the conspiracies. Saab has also accused her of having more than a dozen maps that highlighted sensitive military locations that she should not have known about.”Should the state lower its guard and let these operations go forward, to bathe the country in blood?” Saab said days after San Miguel’s Feb. 9 arrest.San Miguel’s attorney, Juan Gonzalez, said he has not been allowed to see her since her arrest but that she denied all allegations during an initial hearing.Wednesday’s detentions came hours after an independent panel of experts investigating human rights violations in Venezuela told the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva that Maduro’s government had increased repression efforts against real or perceived opponents ahead of this year’s presidential election.”The mission confirms that, as has happened in the past, the authorities invoke real or fictitious conspiracies to intimidate, detain and prosecute people who oppose or criticize the government,” panel head Marta Valiñas told the council, which authorized the investigative mission. “At the same time, the Attorney General’s Office continues to operate as part of the government’s repressive machinery to grant the appearance of legality to the persecution of critical voices.”The panel last year reported that Maduro’s government was using defamatory campaigns, detentions, arbitrary criminal proceedings and even torture to curtail democratic freedoms ahead of the election.”In some cases, the acts of torture or ill-treatment were intended to extract fabricated confessions or false statements,” the panel said in its report.Maduro became interim president in March 2013 after the death of charismatic leader Hugo Chávez’s. He narrowly won election weeks later and was re-elected in 2018 in an electoral process widely criticized as fraudulent.The country has not been without conspiracies against the government in the past.Less than three months after his re-election, Maduro tied opposition leaders to what the government described as an assassination attempt against the president in which drones with explosives detonated when he was delivering a speech live on television. In 2020, his government foiled an attempted armed invasion to overthrow him, an effort that ended with six insurgents dead and two former Green Berets behind bars.
Source link
