In Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro represses the opposition but has a plane seized by Washington

A little over a month after a presidential election that the opposition believes was marred by fraud, the Venezuelan president, whose popularity and legitimacy are crumbling, saw one of his planes seized by the American authorities. The latest episode in a long-distance standoff between Caracas and Washington.

The image is unusual. A plane immobilized, Monday, September 2, on the tarmac of a Florida airport, supervised and closely monitored by American internal security officers. The aircraft, a Dassault Falcon 900EX, is believed to belong to Nicolas Maduro, the president of Venezuela. In a press release, the American Minister of Justice, Merrick Garland, specifies that “The Justice Department has seized a plane that we believe was illegally purchased for $13 million through a shell company and smuggled out of the United States for use by Nicolas Maduro and his clique.“The statement added that the device was seized in the Dominican Republic and transferred to Florida.

The Venezuelan Ministry of Foreign Affairs denounces “an act of piracy” after this affront to Nicolas Maduro. Behind this seizure, we must clearly see an American pressure move at a time when the Caracas regime is trying to impose the narrative of a Maduro victory in the presidential election organized at the end of July. A vote tainted by serious suspicions of fraud, the minutes of the polling stations having never been transmitted, which the electoral commission pitifully justifies by the theory of a computer attack on the day of the vote, when the opposition claimed victory.

An opposition whose sole presidential candidate, Edmundo Gonzales, is now under direct threat from the Venezuelan prosecutor’s office, which officially issued an arrest order against him on the night of Monday to Tuesday, after three summonses to which he failed to appear.lack of guarantees on the independence of justice“.

Opposition figures have been forced into hiding since the end of July, as a blanket of silence has fallen over the country. Some 27 people have died on the fringes of demonstrations, and at least 2,400 arrests have been made, something unheard of in 30 years. Arbitrary arrests, including in working-class neighborhoods, where Nicolas Maduro can no longer count on the support of a base that Hugo Chavez had taken care to feed with generous social aid, with oil money.

Venezuela has the largest reserves of black gold in the world. But it can no longer sell this oil, or even refine it, because of the American sanctions imposed by the Trump administration in 2017, which have left the country bled dry. Washington had loosened the grip, opportunistically, after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, and the embargo on Russian gas and oil exports. This was at the cost of democratic progress that has not taken place in a country emptied of more than 20% of its population since 2015, with around 7.5 million Venezuelans forced into exodus.