Leopoldo López meets his family in Madrid



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October 25, 2020 – 6:42 pm
By:

AFP Agency

The opposition leader Leopoldo López arrived in Madrid this Sunday after clandestinely leaving Venezuela, where he was a refugee for 18 months at the residence of the Spanish ambassador, who was accused by the government of President Nicolás Maduro of being an “accomplice” in the “escape.”

The Spanish Foreign Ministry confirmed the information in a statement, stating that the emblematic 49-year-old opposition leader was already able to “reunite with his family” living in Madrid: his father, his wife Lilian Tintori and their three children.

For its part, the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry pointed out to the Spanish ambassador to the Caribbean country, Jesús Silva, of being an “accomplice” in López’s “escape” and of “flagrant non-compliance with the fundamental provisions of the Vienna Convention on diplomatic relations.” .

“It is clearly verifiable that the head of the Spanish diplomatic mission in Venezuela served as the main organizer and confessed accomplice of the announced flight from Venezuelan territory of the criminal Leopoldo López,” says a statement released this Sunday.

López Gil declined to say which country his son came from. But on Saturday he had indicated that after leaving the residence of the Spanish ambassador in Caracas he left Venezuela “clandestinely” through the border with Colombia.

AFP journalists stationed all morning at the Madrid / Barajas airport could not see Leopoldo López, which suggests that he left through the authorities’ door to which there is no access.

According to a source close to the family, López will offer a press conference in the coming days in Madrid, a city that is home to other Venezuelan opposition leaders who surreptitiously left Venezuela, such as the former mayor of Caracas Antonio Ledezma.

Fight from any space

“Venezuelans, this decision has not been easy, but rest assured that you have this server to fight from any space,” Leopoldo López explained on Twitter López on Saturday night.

Charismatic former mayor of the wealthy Caracas municipality of Chacao, he was sentenced in 2015 to almost 14 years in prison, accused of inciting violence in protests against the Maduro government that left 43 dead and some 3,000 injured between February and May 2014.

In 2017, he received house arrest, after which he was released by his guards and participated in a failed uprising of about thirty soldiers on April 30, 2019, which was backed by the parliamentary head Juan Guaidó.

After the failure of the uprising, López took refuge in the house of the Spanish ambassador in Caracas, where he was as a guest.

Madrid condemned that after his departure “labor personnel from his embassy” had been detained and “addresses of personnel assigned to it” had been searched.

“Maduro, you do not control anything. By mocking your repressive apparatus, we managed to get López to international territory,” Guaidó said on Twitter, recognized as interim president by fifty countries, led by the United States and including Spain.

López’s exile comes a few weeks before the parliamentary elections on December 6, promoted by Maduro and his allies, but boycotted by some thirty parties when they denounced them as a “fraud.”

In addition, it occurs after Maduro “pardoned” on September 1 a hundred opponents, several of them collaborators of Guaidó.



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