“We had the hope of meeting on Sunday, he had to fly to Caracas,” declared María Gómez, crying inconsolably, about her husband Nahuel Agustín Gallo, the Argentine gendarme detained in Venezuela. That same Sunday, on which they would meet, was the last day that she heard from her husband, with whom she has a two-year-old son. “We were overcome by the feeling of meeting again, We didn’t think that was going to happen,” Gómez said.
“The last I heard from Nahuel was on Sunday at 10:57 in the morning, when he told me that they would take him away for a second interview,” the woman continued. She explained that her husband was in the Venezuelan Immigration area, at a border crossing with Colombia, when they told him that they were going to detain him.
And there the nightmare began: “They hold him, they take his cell phone, they search him arbitrarily… And I have to say it: I am Venezuelan and I am grieving from this nightmare that we live through. I arrived in Venezuela seven months ago, for personal reasons. , to help my mom.”
Gómez then regretfully recounted what could have motivated her husband’s arrest: “I wrote to Nahuel to tell him, at the time of the last elections: ‘This country is going to shit,’ and that we have a horrible government, a dictatorship. Those were the messages they found on his phone, which harmed him.” And he started crying.
She has been an Argentine citizen for six years, she told the signal DNewsto which he gave a television interview. And until seven months ago, both she and her husband lived in Argentina. “We have lived in Mendoza for a year and a half, because he works on the crossing between Chile and Argentina,” he said.
“We were overcome by the feeling of meeting again. We had the hope of meeting on Sunday, he had to take a flight to Caracas: we never imagined what was going to happen“We thought that doing things legal and him crossing the border would be good, because if you come as a spy you are not going to cross the border…” Gómez added, rueful, about her husband.
Gallo was detained by Counterintelligence personnel when he tried to cross through a land crossing between Cúcuta (Colombia) and Táchira (Venezuela). Nicolás Maduro’s regime accuses him of being a spy.