The leader of the main chavist group recorded a video in which he called to defend Nicolás Maduro "with weapons".

Valentín Santana, head of the collective "The Piedrita", established in the parish on January 23 a few meters from the Miraflores Palace, was pronounced today before the movement of a group of soldiers who support Juan Guaidó, called Operation Liberty. "We had time to defend the revolution with weaponshe said, waving a rifle. I show my face, without a hood. I will defend my country and defend my revolution, with that, "he said, raising the weapon," because it is my son's dream ".

He shouts that his commander Hugo Chávez is alive and that he lives his Bolivarian revolution. "And they are going to wash this palló Yankee of me … They will not be able to reverse us. All in Miraflores to defend our president Nicolás Maduro"

Santana is the leader of a large group that has been in existence for more than two decades and has come into conflict with the powerful group Los Tupamaros, which was the main group on Jan. 23. The Piedrita has managed to impose and since then, Valentín Santana is a controversial leader, who never leaves without being armed and surrounded by men carrying weapons of war.

He was the defender of La Piedrita of the Bolivarian Revolution, even when Hugo Chávez ordered that Santana be imprisoned after controversial statements, in which the leader of the collective threatened several public figures including the director of the RCTV channel, Marcel Granier .

The collectives are a power in Venezuela and so they showed. Even when the powerful Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López said that the armed forces would not tolerate the presence of irregular armed groups, the collectives as well as other groups continue to live freely on the Venezuelan territory and support the Bolivarian revolution as political shock groups.