Venezuelan government looks for culprits and decides to hold Guaidó responsible

CARACAS – Venezuelan authorities have opened an investigation into opposition leader Juan Guaidó and arrested journalist Luis Carlos Diaz, claiming that they had helped sabotage the electrical system. Critics of the government said it was a guilt strategy for the recent national power outage that lasted four days.

Tarek William Saab, Venezuelan Attorney General, accused Guaidó, president of the National Assembly and leader of the opposition who heads a parallel government backed by the United States and fifty other countries, to be the brain responsible for the failure, without showing up tests.

A few hours earlier, members of the armed intelligence services had arrested Diaz, a prominent radio producer and social media activist, while he was cycling from the station to his home, according to his wife, Naky Soto. He was also charged for his alleged involvement in the breakdown.

No one has received a formal charge.

Guaidó, who has not yet been arrested, said in a Twitter message that the charges were unfounded and accused the government of using the courts to prosecute political persecutions.

The human rights group Penal Forum said that Diaz was one of eighty people arrested for Thursday because of damage to the electrical system. The vast majority did not receive charges.

The arrest of Diaz has convulsed Venezuelan civil society, whose leaders describe it as the most egregious attempt by Nicolás Maduro's government to turn its critics into scapegoats for the country's accelerated economic collapse.

Failure occurred on 7 March at the Simón Bolívar hydroelectric power station, located in the Guri dam, plunged much of the country into the dark for four days, which caused the collapse of the country's health system. and decimated the meager supplies. in an already halved economy since 2013.

The government said it was able to restart the Guri plant on Monday morning after several unsuccessful attempts, and that electricity returned to most major cities on March 12. Maduro and his ministers blamed industrial sabotage for the failure of the power supply. They talked about cybernetic and electromagnetic attacks on the network, without showing any proof.

Energy badysts and trade unionists in the energy sector said the failure was a tragedy announced due to years of mismanagement, corruption and brain drain.

Naky Soto, also a journalist and wife of Diaz, who fights bad cancer and a chronic neurological condition, held back her tears as she asked the outside prosecutor's office for her husband to be released. Soto was accompanied by hundreds of supporters, Venezuelan clergy, journalists and opposition politicians, and accused Maduro of using her husband to discourage Venezuelans from sharing information on social networks, which are have become the main source of information. news for the majority in the country.

"The fact that this is happening for such a public person, who has created so many networks, is a message that could happen to any citizen," said Soto. His desperate voice caused tears in many people who went to the prosecution to accompany him.

Many foreign journalists have been arrested or deported from Venezuela, but Díaz is the most prominent Venezuelan journalist who has been arrested. On Tuesday morning, Soto and other witnesses said that sixteen heavily armed police officers took their handcuffed husband to his home with a search warrant and took away all their electronic equipment and all the savings from the family.

Díaz has been taken to an unknown location and no one knows where he is, Soto and his lawyers said.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and former President of Chile Michelle Bachelet, said she is deeply concerned about the alleged detention of Diaz, thus offering a common rejection to the Maduro government. His team is currently on a data collection mission to Venezuela.

Since the beginning of the blackout, no official has been fired nor publicly criticized by the central government because of the administration of the electrical system.

Isayen Herrera collaborated on this report from Caracas.

Copyright: 2019 New York Times News Service