The Portuguese government today demanded the Venezuelan authorities “immediately and unconditionally release opposition politician and former governor of Mérida province Williams Dávila Barrios with Portuguese citizenship.”
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In the text, Dávila Barrios says Paulo Rangel was detained “arbitrarily and in poor health” on Thursday.
The Secretary of State for Portuguese Communities told Lusa this afternoon that two Portuguese-Venezuelan nationals have been detained in Venezuela for participating in protests against Nicolás Maduro.
They are a man and a woman who were detained this week when they participated in activities “the regime considers illegal,” Jose Cesario said.
The detainees consist of Venezuelans and Portuguese nationals, the only detainees currently known to the government.
Meanwhile, a family source told Lusa that another Portuguese-Venezuelan was arrested, a young man in a police facility in the city of Puerto Cabello in Carabobo state (center-north of the country), after being caught by police during a peaceful demonstration with other people to contest the July 28 presidential election results.
Venezuela, a country with a significant community of Portuguese and people of Portuguese descent, is facing an electoral crisis, with the National Electoral Council (CNE) attributing Maduro’s victory to just 51% of the vote, the opposition says. The candidate, former diplomat Edmondo González Urrutia, won nearly 70% of the vote.
Venezuela’s opposition and several countries in the international community condemned the election fraud and demanded that voting records be submitted to independent verification, which the CNE says is impossible due to an alleged “cyber attack” on the target.
The election results were contested in the streets, with demonstrations suppressed by security forces, with around two thousand arrests and two dozen deaths reported.
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