Five top Venezuelan opposition leaders escaped the country last week after sheltering for over a year at the Argentine embassy in Caracas. Now, one of the escapees is sharing new details or the ordeal, arguing their escape is the latest indication of the weakened state of President Nicolas Maduro's authoritarian government.
The operation, organized by opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, ended a 14-month standoff that had turned the Argentine embassy, operated by Brazil after Argentine diplomats were expelled from Venezuela, into both sanctuary and a prison for the five activists. Ultimately, Omar Gonzalez Moreno, Magalli Meda, Claudia Macero, Pedro Urruchurtu and Humberto Villalobos were able to escape the country and find refuge in the U.S.
"There were no shots fired, there was no chaos," Gonzalez Moreno told The Miami Herald. "Just perfect synchronization, as if time itself had stopped to grant us a miracle."
Gonzalez Moreno further reflected on his departure, hoping that soon, it will be Maduro and his team fleeing quietly, not opposition activists and leaders.
"As I got into the first vehicle that would pull us from the bowels of oppression, I cast one last look at the embassy and imagined Maduro fleeing in one of his planes along clandestine routes to Russia," he wrote. "If we managed to escape from the second most guarded installation in Venezuela, what could prevent the rest of its structure from collapsing?"
The announcement of their departure and arrival to the U.S. came from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who praised them for their bravery. "The U.S. welcomes the successful rescue of all hostages by the Maduro regime," he wrote on X last Tuesday. He added that the "Venezuelan heroes: were now in the U.S. "following a precise operation." He provided no further details.
The Maduro regime, however, is rejecting the suggestion that the opposition members managed ot escape against its will, arguing instead that the events were negotiated.
"Everyone more or less knows this was the result of a negotiation," said Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello during his weekly TV show Con El Mazo Dando ("Htting with the Club"). "Those claiming otherwise are just bitter they weren't in the loop."
Gonzalez Moreno didn't provide many details about the escape itself either. However, he did give more details about life inside the embassy, which was surrounded, he says, by elite units of Venezuela's intelligence agencies, the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service and the General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence. He said snipers lurked in the shadows, drones flew in the sky and guards patrolled the area with trained dogs.
"Food was scarce, but more unbearable than hunger was the silence— broken only by the screams of agents, the growling of dogs, and the buzzing of their drones," he said. "They wanted fear to devour us, to make us abandon our struggle, to betray Maria Corina, Edmundo [Gonzalez], and the people who cried out for us from the streets."
Asides from Cabello's comments, the Maduro regime has opted to stay silent on the operation, which has raised experts' eyebrows, who argue it may show some cracks in the authoritarian government.
"The fact that the government has remained silent on this suggests there is more to the story, or that it took Maduro by surprise," Geoff Ramsey, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington, told Bloomberg. "The longer that silence drags on the more it looks like the government really dropped the ball."
Adding to Maduro's grievances, local media has reported on a personnel crisis within the Armed Forces, which have largely allowed the president to previously hold a tight grip on the public and dissidents, with dozens of officers deserting their posts. Likewise, in an April interview with Bloomberg, Machado, whose whereabouts are unknown, identified Venezuela's security forces as one of Maduro's biggest weaknesses.
"If the asylum seekers were able to escape from under the nose of Venezuelan intelligence, it suggests the cracks inside Maduro's coalition are more significant than previously known," Ramsey said.
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