The opposition leader María Corina Machado condemned this Monday the arrest of the leader Juan Pablo Guanipa, an event that he described as kidnapping, and accused the regime now headed by Delcy Rodríguez of tyranny.
“We see this reaction of tyranny, where on the one hand, they immediately arrest again, to kidnap my friend, my partner, Juan Pablo Guanipa”, Machado said after appearing before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington.
Guanipa had been released on Sunday along with another group of opponents close to Machado and immediately led with other political activists a caravan of motorcycles and cars that headed to prisons to support the families of political prisoners.
The son of the opposition leader, Ramón Guanipa, assured that a group of unidentified men, without uniform and carrying long weapons, took his father away after they intercepted and hit the vehicle in which he was traveling with another group of people.
“What was Juan Pablo’s crime? Telling the truth. “So, are they releases or what are they?” Machado assured regarding the releases that are carried out under the supervision of Washington after the capture of Nicolás Maduro.
“Can’t we talk in Venezuela about those who have been in prison? Tell what they have experienced? Can’t you describe the horror of what is happening in our country today? That’s why I’m here today,” added the leader.
The opposition “is unstoppable”
He indicated that the government is terrified because it knows that the opposition “it is unstoppable”.
Machado stressed that, despite the promises of a general amnesty law and that the majority of prisoners demanded by the opposition will be released in the coming weeks, There are still 644 political prisoners, of which 187 are military.
The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner recognized the work of the IACHR after her appearance and assured that the inter-American system is a powerful mechanism that the Venezuelan regime has denounced “because it is terrified of the truth.”
He assured that Venezuelans they need documentation “more than ever” of this organ. “I want to ask you not to forget this. We are talking about more than 20,000 arbitrary arrests. We are talking about more than 8,000 extrajudicial executions by parapolice groups, more than 2,000 people tortured. “This is a systematic and massive pattern of torture.”
