By: Staff Writer
August 9, 2024
Just two weeks after Venezuela’s disputed election, incumbent and presumptive winner Nicolas Maduro has started a coordinated crackdown on opposition dissent.
Authorities have arrested at least nine journalists and expelled 14 from the country in the lead-up to, and immediate aftermath of, contested elections.
Five of those arrests came in the past week, with authorities accusing the journalists of terrorism-related charges. Media workers have also been threatened, injured and expelled, according to data from media associations and free expression groups.
In the most serious incident, a journalist was shot and injured in Aragua state. Elsewhere, spokespersons for national and local governments are reported to have harassed journalists.
More than 1,100 people so far have been rounded up since the election, according to Caracas-based rights watchdog, Foro Penal.
Prominent political figures have been seized, including Freddy Superlano, the national coordinator of the opposition Voluntad Popular party, who was dragged from his home by masked men.
Venezuela’s attorney general, a Maduro loyalist, announced on Tuesday that opposition leaders María Corina Machado and Edmundo González would be investigated for “incitement to insurrection” after they called on security forces to “side with the people” instead of repressing protests.
Amnesty International told the BBC they had “well-founded reasons to believe [the detained people’s] lives and integrity are at risk”.
The pressure group says that they have been seeing a new pattern of more targeted arrests by the Venezuelan authorities since the election.
Many of those detained have reportedly not been told why they were being arrested.
In the live stream of the detention of María Oropeza’s, a campaign co-ordinator for opposition coalition Vente Venezuela, she can be heard asking those banging on her door if they have a search warrant. She receives no answer.
As Maduro continues his crackdown, the opposition candidate continues his insistence that after the Washington Post tallies suggest Edmundo Gonzalez was the clear winner.
The WP is reporting that Gonzales likely received more than twice as many votes as President Nicolás Maduro in the country’s election last week, according to their review of more than 23,000 precinct-level tally sheets collected by the opposition, a sample that represents nearly 80 percent of voting machines nationwide.