Maduro’s Vendetta in Venezuela

Intended or not, President Trump’s bullying of Canada, Mexico, Denmark, Ukraine and others seems to be making it easier for some of the Western Hemisphere’s despots to go about their barbaric business with little international attention.

Nowhere is this more evident, perhaps, than in Venezuela, where resident strongman Nicolas Maduro, who stole last year’s presidential election, has launched a vendetta against the family of his one-time challenger, President-elect Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia.

Though barely reported in the U.S. media, it has been more than two months since Mr. Gonzalez’s son-in-law was kidnapped in Caracas by hooded men belonging to Mr. Maduro’s security forces. Rafael Tudares Bracho, married to Mr. Gonzalez’s daughter, Mariana, was taking his two young children to visit their grandmother when he was grabbed on Jan. 7. He hasn’t been seen or heard from since.

Several days ago, Mariana said, government officials told her that her husband had been charged with complicity in high treason. The same charge was leveled against her father, who has been living in exile, seeking to focus world attention on the election fraud and on the horrific human rights violations subsequently unleashed on Mr. Maduro’s critics.

It’s impossible to know whether such charges were brought against Mr. Tudares because whatever may have happened was behind closed doors. No one was informed that criminal charges had been brought against him or that he would face a hearing. There is no evidence that Mr. Tudares was allowed an attorney. Withholding an attorney would violate Venezuela’s Constitution (Articles 44, 45 and 49, dealing with civil liberties and civil rights) and statutory law.

Despots, of course, thumb their noses at their own laws when it suits them and couldn’t care less about international legal agreements and standards banning kidnapping, detention without access to an attorney, denying families information about a detainee’s whereabouts, secret legal proceedings, charging critics’ relatives, and torture, which, in Mr. Tudares’ case, is highly likely.

After seeking information in every known detention center in Caracas and elsewhere around the country, Mariana heard what appears to be a credible rumor that her husband was being held in the notorious El Rodeo prison in the Caracas outskirts, a three-building hellhole synonymous with torture, disappearances and death. When Mariana asked to see her husband at El Rodeo, she was told: “He is not here.”

Assuming that Mr. Tudares is still alive and is being held on charges related to treason (a funny definition for supporting fair elections), it’s clearly because of who he is, not because of what he has done.

Mr. Tudares is not involved in politics and had no role in his father-in-law’s presidential campaign. There isn’t a shred of evidence to suggest he had anything to do with his father-in-law calling for peaceful demonstrations after the stolen election or going into hiding after the election (we now know he stayed at the Dutch Embassy before leaving Venezuela), much less that he was complicit in conspiring with his father-in-law in any other way that Mr. Maduro might see as a threat.

As I reported in August in The Washington Times, Venezuela’s rightful president, Edmundo Gonzalez, proved beyond any doubt that he defeated Mr. Maduro by a more-than 2-1 margin.

Subsequently, Mr. Gonzalez was forced into exile. His daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren stayed behind and continued to go about their daily lives. Early this year, his son-in-law, Mr. Tudares, was kidnapped to blackmail Mr. Gonzalez into abandoning his call for international recognition of the true election results and a change in government.

By holding Mr. Tudares hostage, likely torturing him, and subjecting his wife and children to the torment of not knowing his whereabouts or, God forbid, whether he is still alive, Mr. Maduro is aping the practices that the worst dictators of the last century made their own in their efforts to break the human dignity of those over whom they ruled. It’s the kind of stuff Arthur Koestler wrote about in “Darkness at Noon,” the allegory of political imprisonment under brutal Soviet strongman Josef Stalin.

Let’s not forget that while Mariana Gonzalez has shown courage and fortitude these past two months, countless other Venezuelan families are in similar situations. They deserve our solidarity and that of the U.S. government, which strangely seems more enamored with the oppressors than the oppressed.