Venezuelan opposition leader Manuel Rosales sought asylum in Peru on Tuesday, claiming he was being persecuted by the government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on baseless corruption charges.
Rosales, who ran against Chavez for president in 2006, is former governor of the oil-rich state of Zulia and current mayor of the western Venezuelan city of Maracaibo.
Rosales’ attorney, Peruvian legislator Javier Valle Riestra, said the asylum request was presented to local authorities at midday.
“Now all that is left is to wait for the answer from the Peruvian government, which has two months to decide,” Valle Riesta said.
Valle Riestra — himself a prominent legislator with the ruling APRA party and briefly prime minister in the 1990s — said that granting Rosales asylum should not be considered a move by Peru against Chavez.
“If he is granted asylum ... that does not mean that Chavez is being considered as a gorilla, a thug or a despot,” Valle Riestra said.
Rosales has been hiding from Venezuelan authorities for the past month after the corruption charges were filed.
An outspoken Chavez critic, Rosales ran afoul of the leftist president after he was linked to a 2002 attempted coup against the Venezuelan leader.
Chavez accused Rosales on the campaign trail for regional elections in October of plotting to assassinate him and threatened to have him jailed.
Chavez, who first took office in 1999 and survived the 47-hour coup in 2002, routinely accuses the opposition — and the US government — of trying to overthrow him and even have him killed.
In Venezuela, Interior Minister Tarek El Aissami said on Tuesday that authorities were seeking Rosales’ arrest on charges of illicit enrichment linked to the period he was Zulia governor between 2002 and 2004.
“If he does not present himself to the relevant authorities,” El Aissami told reporters, Rosales “will be considered a fugitive of justice and the mechanisms for his international capture will be activated.”
El Aissami insists that Rosales is not being politically persecuted.
“He is wanted by Venezuelan justice for crimes of corruption” unrelated to politics, he said.
Rosales faces between three and 10 years in prison if found guilty of corruption.
The Maracaibo mayor was supposed to appear in a Caracas court on Monday to determine if he would be jailed pending trial. A new hearing on preventive detention was set for May 11, a member of Rosales’ defense team said.
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done
RSS