The Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice dismissed the appeals filed by five soldiers accused of planning a coup against President Nicolás Maduro, according to sentence 023 drafted by magistrate Carmen Castro.
The soldiers prosecuted are Lieutenants (Army) Igbert José Marin Chaparro, Juan Carlos Peña Palmentieri, Deibis Esteban Mota Marrero, Víctor Eduardo Soto Méndez and Erick Fernando Peña Romero, arrested on March 7, 2018, two months before the presidential elections, date for which they intended to execute the coup plan, according to the tax investigation.
Because of this, they were charged with rebellion, treason and against military decorum. But the 3rd Military Control Court of Caracas dismissed them for the crime of treason, which entails a sentence of 30 years in prison. That decision was made by the aforementioned court on 9/6/2018 during the preliminary hearing where it ordered them to be prosecuted.
The trial of the five soldiers was held between November 6 and December 16, 2020, the day they were sentenced to seven years and six months in prison, according to the ruling of the 1st Military Court of Itinerant Trial based in Caracas.
That conviction was annulled on July 28, 2021 by the Caracas Court-Martial by declaring the appeals filed by the lawyers for the military group admissible and ordering a new trial.
Two months later, the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice declared the absolute annulment of the sentence issued by the Martial Court and other judges reviewed the appeals and declared them inadmissible, imposing the sentence on the five soldiers.
Seeing that they could not reverse the sentence, their lawyers went to the Criminal Chamber and denounced a series of irregularities that occurred during the prosecution of that group of soldiers. But the magistrates dismissed all the complaints because they did not meet “the requirements for a correct foundation.”
The investigation
· The investigation began on March 5, 2018, when intelligence agencies identified a group of senior officers, from the ‘Colonel Miguel Antonio Vásquez’ class, from the Military Academy of Venezuela, who graduated in 1999, as linked to a conspiratorial military movement.
· Those involved were plant officers of the Army Military Academy in 2003.
