The International Criminal Court in the Hague issued an arrest warrant Thursday for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. A big question being raised from Caracas to Miami now is:
Why not one for Venezuela’s leader, too?
For months now, Venezuelans have been expecting the ICC to issue an arrest warrant for Venezuelan Dictator-President Nicolás Maduro. He's been under investigation by the Court since he stole the July presidential election he lost — and had his socialist regime carry out a brutal crackdown on protesters.
Two thousand have been locked up and 27 killed.
Maduro and Venezuelan electoral authorities have rejected repeated calls from the U.S., the European Union, Colombia, Brazil and other nations to show the detailed vote records that back up the president's reelection claim.
Most human rights experts agree that while the crimes against humanity charge can be a high bar, it's apt in Venezuela's case.
"The regime is not feeling the costs it should for the repression, for the blatant fraud," Venezuela human rights expert Tamara Taraciuk Broner, who directs the Bell Rule of Law Program for the nonprofit InterAmerican Dialogue in Washington D.C., told WLRN.
"The ICC could elevate those costs, because there is evidence of alleged crimes against humanity."
Taraciuk Broner adds that ordering Maduro’s international arrest could motivate others in his regime to move Venezuela back to democracy.
“They won’t do that," she said, "if they don’t feel there is a real threat of accountability abroad.”
READ MORE: Police rage and ransoms: Venezuelans face a 'perverse mafia state'
Maduro released 225 political prisoners this week — for fear, say critics, that the ICC is in fact close to issuing a warrant for his arrest.
Venezuelan exile leaders like David Smolansky, who was the opposition mayor of the Caracas borough of El Hatillo until the Maduro regime forced him to flee the country in 2017, insist an ICC arrest warrant has to be part of the international community's Venezuela pressure.
"Venezuela is a mafia state," Smolansky, who is now a representative in Washington for Edmundo González, the opposition candidate who vote tallies show defeated Maduro in the July 28 presidential contest by a landslide (and is now in exile in Spain), told WLRN shortly after the election.
"At this point, Maduro has crossed the limits that civilization allows, so his arrest order should be forthcoming."
Luis Almagro, secretary general of the Organization of American States in Washington, echoed that sentiment in a visit to Miami in August — pointing out that a U.N. investigative team has already accused Maduro and his regime of crimes against humanity for other crackdowns in years past.
More than a dozen former Latin American heads of state have also called for the ICC to issue an arrest warrant for Maduro.
The U.S. this week recognized González as Venezuela's genuine president-elect.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
