A Venezuelan dissident army officer who’d taken asylum in Chile was kidnapped there on Wednesday, and fears abound that the Maduro regime itself is behind the abduction — a prospect sending chills through the diaspora and the countries that have taken those exiles in.
Former Venezuelan Army Lieutenant Ronald Leandro Ojeda Moreno is a political refugee in Chile. He opposes Venezuela’s authoritarian socialist government, which is widely blamed for the country's catastrophic economic collapse and for brutal human rights abuses that have prompted U.N. investigators to accuse its security services of crimes against humanity.
Seven years ago, that regime imprisoned Ojeda along with several other military dissidents, but he later escaped and was granted political asylum by Chile last year. Early Wednesday, Chilean authorities say Ojeda was kidnapped from his apartment in the capital, Santiago, by persons posing as police officers — and those authorities say they’re not discounting the widespread belief that Venezuelan regime agents abducted him.
"We're not dismissing any hypothesis at this time," said Chilean Interior Vice Minister Manuel Monsalve, adding the Chilean government "has to be super-responsible with respect to this case."
In a signal that it's not discounting the theory that this was not a typical ransom kidnapping but rather an internationally operated abduction, Chilean authorities said they were reinforcing border controls and had alerted the international police agency Interpol about the crime.
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Venezuelan regime watchdogs say the Chilean government is aware of what Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro's henchmen are capable of.
"It's not the first time that this happens," Venezuelan exile journalist Jefferson Díaz, who from his base in Quito, Ecuador, follows the Venezuelan regime's actions abroad, told WLRN.
"We've already seen cases of people being chased in countries like Colombia and here in Ecuador by military guys from Venezuela."
But Díaz, who writes the Visa a Cualquier Parte newsletter, says the Venezuelan regime is getting more aggressive as it feels more criticism of its disastrous and dictatorial rule.
“This is a very serious and dangerous path, adopting transnational repression tactics like those we've seen from other dictatorships like Russia," said Díaz. "They want to create an order where no one who goes against them has a place to hide in the world.”
Ironically, that order has dark precedent in Chile itself. Half a century ago, right-wing military dictator Augusto Pinochet conducted Operation Condor, which hunted down his regime's opponents across the world — including the U.S., where in 1976 dissident Orlando Letelier was killed in Washington D.C. by a car bomb.
Chile's government today is headed by leftist President Gabriel Boric — who, though he leans socialist like Maduro, may be in the Venezuelan leader's crosshairs because he has called on other Latin American leaders to criticize his regime's repression.
Venezuela’s government has not made any statement about Ojeda’s abduction.
