Eduardo González
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, confirmed yesterday in Madrid that General Miguel Rodríguez Torres, former Minister of Interior and Justice under Nicolás Maduro and recently released after five years in prison for alleged conspiracy, has been in Spain since last Sunday.
“I confirm that, since last Sunday at half past six in the morning, General Miguel Rodriguez Torres has been in Spain,” Albares declared during a joint press conference with his Moldovan counterpart, Nicolae Popescu, at the ministerial headquarters of the Viana Palace. Rodríguez Torres, he continued, arrived in Spain “just as more than 70,000 Venezuelans have arrived in these years” thanks to the “effort made by the Government of Spain towards a brotherly people such as the Venezuelan people”.
Regarding “in what capacity” the military is in Spain, Albares warned that “there is a right to privacy of each person, to not disclose certain data”, but also recalled that “there is a status for Venezuelans, these more than 70,000 who have arrived, which is a known and public status, which allows residence in Spain almost automatically”. Specifically, Venezuelan refugees in Spain are under a regime of “protection for humanitarian reasons”, which allows them to enjoy an exceptional temporary residence even in case of denial of the right to asylum, as provided for in the Asylum Law.
Rodriguez Torres, 59, a man very close to President Maduro (in fact, it was he who imprisoned the opposition Leopoldo Lopez and who led the repression of the 2014 anti-government protests, in which 43 people died and hundreds were injured) who fell from grace after being accused of conspiracy, was released from the dungeons of the Military Counterintelligence Directorate in Caracas, where he had been held since 2018, due to his deteriorating health and thanks to the mediation of former Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who maintains very close relations with the Venezuelan regime.
In this regard, Albares assured yesterday at the same press conference that Zapatero “has played a very important role in this mediation of a humanitarian nature so that the release of a person who had been in prison since 2018” took place. “What we hope is that the dialogue between Venezuelans allows that there is no one in Venezuelan prisons”, unless he has “committed a crime in the criminal code”, and that “dialogue is the solution for a future between Venezuelans and decided by Venezuelans”.
In this sense, the minister reiterated, as he did the day before in Brussels, that this coming Sunday he will receive at the Palacio de Viana Gerardo Blyde, the coordinator of the Venezuelan opposition delegation in the negotiations with the regime of Nicolás Maduro in Mexico, as well as “a group of the Venezuelan opposition, at their request”. “I do it very willingly, it is not the first time I meet with Mr. Blyde and I have already met, both separately and jointly, with the Venezuelan government negotiator,” Albares added.
Likewise, the minister assured that Spain “has no desire” to play any “determined role” in this process and that the Spanish government is “at the disposal of the Venezuelans in whatever they consider we can be useful”. “This is a dialogue between Venezuelans, between Government and opposition, which Spain welcomes and congratulates and encourages both the Government and the opposition to continue along this path,” he declared. The wish of the Government of Pedro Sánchez, he added, is that “we see more agreements, such as the humanitarian agreement that has been signed, and that a political agreement is reached, because any solution has to be a democratic, free solution between Venezuelans”.
