Two prisoners released in Venezuela arrive in the United States | Venezuela on DW | Dr..

0
Two prisoners released in Venezuela arrive in the United States |  Venezuela on DW |  Dr..

Two Americans, one of whom is one of the six former directors of the Citgo oil company, arrived in the United States on Wednesday (03.09.2022) after being released from prison in Venezuela, days after the Washington delegation met with President Nicolas Maduro. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the energy crisis it has brought about has led to an unexpected rapprochement between the governments of the United States and Venezuela.

El secretario de Estado de Estados Unidos, Antony Blinken, confirmó que Gustavo Cárdenas y Jorge Alberto Fernández llegaron al país y lo calificó de “importante paso positivo” pero insistió en que “se libere a todos los enestados ciudas in Venezuela” the scientist”. On Tuesday, US President Joe Biden claimed that Cardenas and Fernandez were “unjustly detained”.

Cárdenas, former vice president of strategic relations at Citgo, a subsidiary of state-owned PDVSA in the United States, was arrested in 2017, Cuban-American Fernandez was arrested in early 2021, in the state of Tachira (border with Colombia), on charges with “terrorism,” according to the NGO Coalition for Human Rights and Democracy, “just because of carrying a drone.” Four US Citgo employees and one permanent resident remain in Venezuelan prisons, as well as three former Marines.

The release comes after Maduro received a delegation from the Biden government in Caracas over the weekend. The meeting in Caracas marked a shift in bilateral relations, which broke in 2019 after the White House deemed Maduro’s re-election the previous year a fraud. The Venezuelan opposition has demanded that any energy deal be linked to the state’s democracy because it believes Maduro is leading a “dictatorship accused of crimes against humanity”. Juan Guaido’s diplomatic representative in Washington, Carlos Vecchio, asserted that “dictatorships kidnap local and international citizens for later use as symbols of exchange and extortion.”

lgc (afp/efe)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *