María Corina Machado says that Venezuela’s amnesty is due to pressure from the United States and she hopes it will be fulfilled

The Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado assured this Friday that the general amnesty law to free political prisoners proposed by the president in charge of that country, Delcy Rodriguezis “a product of real pressure” from the United States and that he hopes will become a reality.

The opposition leader added that in Venezuela “there are political prisoners who have been in prison for 23 years,” as is the case of three metropolitan police officers, and there are others “who have been disappeared.”

He even said that in the weeks after January 3, when a US military attack deposed President Nicolás Maduro, there were arrests of about 16 people.

The Nobel Prize winner regretted that Venezuelans have trusted Chavismo, which came to power in 1999, and have underestimated “the destructive capacity of the regime,” which she said “was integrated into a criminal system,” and only years later have they realized that it had to be confronted.

“We underestimated the magnitude of the criminal network that was taking shape in Venezuela, we underestimated the complicities that were forged,” he stressed.

However, he stressed that in recent years Venezuelans managed to persuade and convince the world that something had to be done to combat Chavismo.

“I do believe that the situation in Venezuela after more than 400,000 deaths in these 27 years with violent weapons of war, after more than 20,000 extrajudicial executions, after more than 18,000 political arrests just after Maduro came to power (in 2013) presents a core question to the global democratic order,” he expressed.