Nicolas Maduro is intensifying political repression in Venezuela. An opponent is targeted by a measure without a legal basis
Nicolas Maduro addresses supporters gathered outside the Miraflores presidential palace after electoral authorities declared him the winner of the presidential election in Caracas, Venezuela, Monday, July 29, 2024. Photo: Fernando Vergara/AP/Profimedia
The President of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, asked the highest court in Venezuela to revoke the citizenship of an opposition leader, Leopoldo Lopez, whom he accused of encouraging a US military invasion, writes AFP.
Caracas accuses Lopez of supporting the deployment of US warships, fighter jets and troops to the Caribbean in what the White House describes as anti-drug operations.
Maduro claims that the deployment of US forces is actually aimed at removing him from power. Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yvan Gil wrote on his Telegram channel that Maduro “filed an appeal before the Supreme Court of Justice to revoke Leopoldo Lopez's citizenship”
The request was made “because of his grotesque, criminal and illegal call for a military invasion of Venezuela, promotion of the economic blockade, as well as because of his call for the massacre of Venezuelans with the complicity of foreign governments,” the minister wrote.
Juan Carlos Apitz, dean of the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences of the Central University of Venezuela, told AFP that the law does not provide for the possibility of revoking the citizenship of a Venezuelan by birth. “Only naturalized citizens can lose it, and only through a final court decision,” Apitz explained.
Representatives of the regime in Caracas also demanded the withdrawal of the citizenship of several opponents, accusing them of betraying their homeland. Maduro's request is reminiscent of the hundreds of dissidents who have lost their citizenship in Nicaragua, one of the Venezuelan president's main allies.
A former mayor of Chacao, one of the neighborhoods of the capital Caracas, Lopez was sentenced in 2015 to 14 years in prison for inciting violence during the 2014 demonstrations that left 43 dead and 3,000 injured.
In 2017, he was placed under house arrest and two years later took part in the failed military insurrection against Maduro. After this failure, he took refuge at the residence of the Spanish ambassador in Caracas, from where he fled in 2020 to Madrid.
