Thirty workers from the Gurimetal company, owned by businessman Ricardo Albacete Vidal, who hosted opposition leader María Corina Machado in his home on June 27 and 28 during her visit to the state of Táchira, were detained for more than 12 hours during a raid that began at 12 noon on Thursday, July 11 by officials of the Bolivarian National Police (PNB).
Human rights defender, president of the El Amparo Foundation and general director of the International Committee Against Impunity in Venezuela (CICIVEN), Walter Márquez, denounced that the workers were subjected to illegal interrogations, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and were kept incommunicado from their families until the early hours of the morning.
He added that the company was looted, some of its equipment was damaged and confiscated, which means that these employees will also be left without a means of supporting their households.
He said there was a large police presence inside and outside the house and the company in Albacete, which was cordoned off with three security rings that prevented the free movement of the inhabitants of the area.
Márquez stressed that instead of the Public Prosecutor’s Office investigating the complaint he made regarding the assault on the Albacete home that occurred on July 4, what was unleashed was a persecution once morest the owners and employees. “Yesterday, Ricardo Albacete was simultaneously arrested in a hotel in Caracas along with some workers who were fixing the vehicle in which María Corina Machado is traveling to continue her electoral tour in the country, and at the same time, in an unusual display of force, they stormed the company and subjected more than 30 workers from the Gurimetal company to inhuman and degrading treatment.”
For Walter Márquez, these events are intended to hide the failure of Nicolás Maduro’s presence in the state of Táchira. “He did not even fill four narrow blocks in Barrio Obrero, while María Corina filled more than 20 blocks of Fifth Avenue and the entire platform of the Old Viaduct and the sector of the Provincial bank and Banesco,” he added.
The human rights defender explained that these events contravene the Constitution of the Republic, international treaties, the agreements of Mexico and Barbados, as well as the commitment that Nicolás Maduro made with the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, on April 30, 2024 in Miraflores when he assured him that peace, freedom and full participation for the electoral process of July 28 will be guaranteed in Venezuela.
Without court order
For her part, Solvey Colmenares, councilor of the Guásimos municipality, denounced that there was a “huge” deployment by the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (Sebin) and the PNB, who entered the premises of the house where María Corina Machado was staying with a court order to search the premises.
He explained that the entire procedure was carried out according to orders received through telephone calls, and not with documents specifying the reason for the raid or the interrogations.
“For us, this is a flagrant violation of the rights of workers and of the people who live in the sector, because they even wanted to film, they wanted to communicate with their families, and this was effectively denied,” he added.
He said that the workers’ families are worried because they don’t know what will happen to them, because the warehouses were vandalized. “Cars left, came in, got in, and they didn’t even let people get close to their homes, but simply asked them where they were going,” he explained.
In this regard, Councilman Sergio Guerrero reported that at 2 p.m. the electricity service in Palmira was also cut off, leaving residents without cellular data and Wi-Fi service, while it was unknown what was happening to the workers.
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2024-07-15 23:18:47
