The president of the National Assembly of Venezuela, Jorge Rodríguez, shows evidence of opposition politcian María Corina Machado's collusion with coup plotters. Photo: Radio Miraflores.
The Venezuelan government delegation at the Barbados dialogue intends to present its opposition counterparts with evidence of terrorist plots planned by certain opposition groups. These plans, according to the government, aimed to disrupt national peace and to assassinate President Nicolás Maduro and Governor Freddy Bernal of Táchira state.
This announcement was made by Jorge Rodríguez, head of the government delegation and president of the National Assembly. He further noted that one point of agreement reached in Barbados is the mutual commitment of both parties to refrain from any actions that could jeopardize Venezuela’s sovereignty, peace, and territorial integrity.
“I am going to give Dr. Blyde [head of the opposition delegation] all the evidence of these conspiracies, and I am going to wait and see what the position of the eight people of the Unitary Platform who signed that agreement will be,” Rodríguez said at a press conference at the National Assembly on Thursday, January 25.
“I hope and expect that Gerardo Blyde, Roberto Enríquez, Stalin González, Tomás Guanipa, María Magallanes, Luis Aquiles Moreno, and Luis Emilio Rondón will keep their word and respect their signature,” he added. “And I hope and expect that the facilitators from Norway will come to verify the status of the agreements and allow us to hand over the evidence.”
He also expressed the willingness of the Venezuelan government to continue the process of dialogue and negotiation with sectors of the opposition.
He reiterated his call to the right wing to respect the agreements that they sign. “If you are going to sign something, respect it. If not, say so, so that we do not waste our time,” he stressed.
“We mistakenly assumed that with the signing of the Barbados agreement in October 2023, these right-wing sectors would stop all violent actions, but this was not the case. They had reserved the hardest blows for the end of December,” he added.
Coup participants were recruited by CIA
Rodríguez explained that all the Venezuelan military personnel who participated in the five conspiracies that were recently unveiled had been recruited by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as part of the ongoing coup promoted by opposition leader Juan Guaidó in 2019.
“Of those five plots, two very powerful ones were aimed at the kidnapping and assassination of the president of the republic,” he commented. “The testimonies of the detainees were subject to polygraph, and everything indicates that they were recruited in 2019 and 2021 by intelligence personnel of the Colombian Army and by CIA agents operating in Colombian territory.”
Rodríguez added that “the exception was ex-officer Ángelo Heredia, who was recruited by Ivan Carratú Molina and José Antonio Colina from Miami.”
At the press conference, he presented the testimonies of two Venezuelan army deserters recruited by the CIA, who served as security guards at the La Viñeta presidential residence in Tiuna Fort. The Venezuelan defector, José Gregorio Montiel García, who was head of security at the La Viñeta presidential residence, confessed that on February 19, 2021, he was contacted for the first time by paramilitary groups from Colombia. Meanwhile Daniel Rivas, who was an industrial operator at the Yagua gas distribution plant, admitted that on a trip to Cúcuta, the commander of the commission, Luis González, contacted him to sabotage the gas station’s distribution system.
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María Corina Machado’s chief of logistics involved in coup attempt
Rodríguez also revealed that the conspirator General Tomás Enrique Martínez Macías, involved in one of the conspiracies, was the logistical chief of opposition politician María Corina Machado’s tours.
Rodríguez also mentioned the case of a defector who passed the information of President Maduro’s work trips to Colombian intelligence and the CIA on a daily basis.
He added that he has the names of the CIA officials who recruited Venezuelan military personnel to carry out attempted coups and other acts of destabilization.
In this regard, he urged the US Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Brian A. Nichols to clarify his position on the actions of a high-ranking official who intends to abduct and assassinate the Venezuelan head of state.
Opposition victimizes itself
Rodríguez denounced the strategy of certain opposition groups that are trying to victimise themselves in the face of the revelations that compromise them in relation the five conspiracies recently unveiled.
Rodríguez said that the right-wing political sectors are seeking to victimise themselves in order to evade their responsibilities.
He said that there are “strange confluences between sectors of the right and sectors that seek nothing but division” in order to create the duplicitous narrative that “it is wrong that they are trying to stage a coup d’état, but Chavismo is the source of the conflicts.”
Venezuelan far-right wants to come to power through violence
Rodríguez stressed that the Venezuelan extreme right wants to take power through violence in order to exterminate democracy and hand over the country’s wealth to foreign interests.
It is because of this reason that for the oligarchy, elections are only “fair and democratic” if the elections favor them.
“For them free and fair is to steal military secrets from the country, for them free and fair is to attempt to assassinate the governor of Táchira, for them free and fair is to be associated with drug trafficking and Colombian paramilitaries,” Rodríguez said. He stressed that the right wing attacks and accuses the Venezuelan government of being anti-democratic for “not allowing itself to be overthrown, not allowing itself to be killed.”
On the other hand, he stated that, despite the order received from the United States, María Corina Machado has refused to lower her hostile and warmongering tone.
Likewise, he stressed that if, in a hypothetical case, the ultra-right María Corina Machado were to come to power, she would set in motion the plan, as she has stated, to initiate an extermination against the Venezuelan people.
“According to them, the only ones who have the right to life, to power are them, not the Venezuelan people,” Rodríguez stated.
(Últimas Noticias) by Gustavo Rangel
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/SC/DZ
