CITGO oil executives: from left: Jose Angel Pereira, Gustavo Cardenas, Jorge Toledo, Jose Luis Zambrano, Tomeu Vadell and Alirio Jose Zambrano standing in front of the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service on June 18, 2020 in Caracas, Venezuela. These five leaders were released by Venezuela in defiance of the United States’ release, announced on October 1, of two nephews of Venezuelan President Nicola Maduro. PA
The identity of the prisoners weighed in the exchange. On Saturday, October 1, President Joe Biden announced the release by Caracas of six American citizens and one Venezuelan who holds a residency card in the United States, while President Nicolas Maduro announced that two young Venezuelans living in New York convicted would find their freedom. Efrain Campo and Franqui Flores, who are accused of attempting to import 800 kg of cocaine into the United States, are nephews of Cilia Flores, First Lady of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
Is the prisoner exchange another sign of the warming in bilateral relations between the two countries that began a few months ago? In any case, he confirms that dialogue between American power and socialist Venezuela has been restored. The United States refused to recognize Nicolas Maduro’s re-election in 2018, then tightened economic sanctions and imposed an embargo on Venezuelan oil exports. But that was before the war-related energy crisis in Ukraine. At the beginning of March, an American delegation met Nicolas Maduro in Caracas and three days later two American prisoners held in Venezuela were released.
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In Caracas and Washington, the two press releases fell almost simultaneously on Saturday. The prisoner exchange would have taken place a few hours later on an island in the Caribbean. Referring to “the various talks that have been held with US officials since March 5,” the Maduro government welcomed the release of “two unjustly detained young Venezuelans” and declared that they wanted the Americans “on humanitarian grounds”. have released.
rebellion in the opposition
The “narco-nephews,” as the Venezuelan opposition called them, are now over 30 years old. They were arrested in November 2015 in Port-au-Prince (Haiti) during an operation by the United States Anti-Drug Agency (DEA) and sentenced to eighteen years in prison by a New York court in 2017. Your lawyers have repeatedly denounced a montage. To journalists surprised by the presidential pardon, a senior American official replied: “The President [Biden] made a difficult, painful decision to offer something that Venezuelans were actively seeking. »
Five of the seven prisoners freed by Caracas were executives of Citgo Petroleum, the American subsidiary of Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA, at the time of their arrest in 2015. Charged with embezzlement, they were sentenced in 2021 to prison terms of up to thirteen years. The Venezuelan human rights NGO Foro Penal had entered “the Citgo” in the list of political prisoners, which includes 271 names. The other two detainees, Matthew Heath, a former Marine arrested in 2020, and Osman Khan, arrested in January, were charged with “terrorism”.
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