Venezuelan opposition leader arrested on return from exile
Venezuelan opposition leader arrested on return from exile
Former governor Manuel Rosales had been a fugitive for six years
Rosales claims charges of stealing public money are politically motivated
Associated Press in Caracas
Thursday 15 October 2015 18.28 EDT
A Venezuelan opposition leader who had been living in self-imposed exile has been arrested after returning to the socialist South American country.Former governor Manuel Rosales returned to Venezuela on Thursday after six years as a fugitive. He was arrested by intelligence police who met him at the airport and was expected to appear in a Caracas court later in the day.
Before his arrest, Rosales vowed to continue fighting the country’s 16-year-old socialist administration.
Rosales was governor of the western state of Zulia, where he returned on Thursday. He ran for president in 2006 and lost to Hugo Chávez.
He went into exile in 2009, fleeing to Peru and then Panama after prosecutors accused him of stealing public money. He says the charges are false and politically motivated.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/15/venezuelan-opposition-leader-arrested-on-return-from-exile
(Short article, no more at link.)
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Chávez opposition leader flees to Peru
• Manuel Rosales requests political asylum
• Prosecutors say Rosales enriched himself with public funds
• Chávez moves to consolidate self-styled socialist revolution
Rory Carroll in Caracas
@rorycarroll72
Tuesday 21 April 2009 13.39 EDT
Venezuela's opposition leader has fled to Peru to escape corruption charges which he said were part of a campaign of political persecution by President Hugo Chávez. Manuel Rosales, a former presidential candidate and the mayor of Maracaibo, Venezuela's second city, requested political asylum in the Peruvian capital of Lima, claiming he would not receive a fair trial in Venezuela.
"He entered as a tourist and as a tourist he can remain for 180 days," Peru's foreign minister, José Antonio García Belaunde, said today.
Rosales's prosecution and decision to flee have dramatically raised the stakes in a bitter tussle between the Chávez government and opposition leaders.
In recent weeks several foes of the president have been jailed on corruption charges, threatened with legal action or had their powers clipped. "It is very obvious that Manuel Rosales is being politically persecuted," said Omar Barboza, who will succeed Rosales as leader of the party A New Time.
Prosecutors prepared a 21-page report detailing how Rosales, a veteran and powerful figure in his home state of Zulia, allegedly enriched himself with public funds. He went into hiding three weeks ago and is understood to have arrived in Peru last week with members of his family.
Government supporters scorned depictions of Rosales as a refugee, saying his flight showed guilt as well as cowardice. "He fled to evade justice," said Carlos Escarrá, deputy leader of Chávez's United Socialist party of Venezuela.
More:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/apr/21/hugo-chavez-manuel-rosales-asylum-peru
It may be only Rory Carroll, but sometimes parts of the truth leak through his efforts to avoid it.
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Fugitive Rosales “Regrets” Having Signed Coup Decree in 2002
By AVN
Fugitive from the Venezuelan justice system, Manuel Rosales expressed regret for having signed the coup decree which dissolved all public powers in the country on April 2002, during the brief dictatorship of businessman Pedro Carmona.
“My utmost regret is having signed the Carmona decree,” Rosales said nine years after the media, political and economic far right sector overthrew the democratically elected president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez.
According to Rosales, he wasn't "familiar with" the decree read publicly in a meeting he attended at the Miraflores Presidential Palace, in Caracas, when dictator Carmona proclaimed himself president of the Republic.
However, secretary general of the opposition party Democratic Action, Henry Ramos Allup, confessed, in an interview with the newspaper “Ciudad CCS”, that all political and economic sectors who planned the coup d"état in 2002 were acquainted with the content of the decree a week earlier.
“I was invited to that meeting and I surprisingly appeared there (in the decree), I was mentioned and my name written down but I did not know it,” said Rosales, according to the website “noticias 24”.
Yet, Rosales did not explain why was he at the presidential palace that day, though he should had been governing in a city about 438 miles away from the Capital District. Nor did he explain who invited him to that meeting.
More:
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/6130
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