Venezuelan leader María Corina Machado and other senior members of the opposition could soon face legal charges for the deaths that happened during the wave of violence over the past few weeks, the attorney general for the Nicolás Maduro regime, Tarek William Saab, said.
Speaking In an interview with the newspaper Últimas Noticias , Saab said the actions of Machado and opposition candidate Edmundo González are the latest link in a chain of attacks launched against Venezuela from the United States that began during the administration of former President Donald Trump.
Saab said investigations carried out by the Venezuelan prosecutor’s office into the events that followed the July 28 elections are advanced and noted that the protests against the Maduro regime were planned by the “extreme right” group headed by Machado.
“At any moment, any of them could be charged and held responsible as the intellectual authors of all these events,” Saab answeredc. when asked if Machado is in the process of being charged with homicide.
In op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal weeks ago Machado said she was in hiding and feared for her life and her freedom.
Saab is among dozens of Venezuelan officials sanctioned by the United States for a list of offenses that go from human rights violations and the destruction of the Venezuelan democracy to corruption and drug trafficking.
Human rights organizations as well as international groups have accused Saab of being one of the key people in the regime’s efforts to use the Venezuelan justice system as an instrument of political persecution.
Twenty-five people have died and dozens of others have been injured in the aftermath of the regime’s violent crackdown on protests that were triggered when the government-controlled National Electorate Council announced that Maduro had won reelection with almost 52% of the vote.
The regime has announced that it has arrested 2,000 people and Maduro has said that they would soon be taken to Tocuyito and Tocorón, two of Venezuela’s worst prisons.
Calling the electoral council’s announcement another attempt by the regime to remain in power through fraud, the opposition has declared that González was the real winner of the election. It has published the official vote tallies, known as actas , gathered in more than 80% of the country’s voting stations, showing the opposition candidate defeated Maduro by a margin of more than 2-1.
Doubts about the electoral council’s results have also spread to the international community, leading a number of governments to repeatedly ask Maduro to produce the actas proving his victory. To date, the regime has failed to do so.
Machado: Opposition would offer Maduro incentives to negotiate transition to democracy
Saab made the statements about the opposition leadership shortly after a report released by the group Peace and Reconciliation Foundation of Colombia that said that there were 82 violent acts that left 129 victims during the elections and that more than 91% of them were perpetrated by some the regime’s security forces.
The majority of victims were members of the main opposition parties, but among those affected were also 26 citizens as well as 10 journalists.
Miami Herald staff writer Ana Claudia Chacin contributed with this story.
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