In February, some men dressed as police officers, but with a Venezuelan accent, They took former lieutenant Ronald Ojeda, an opposition member who had taken refuge in Chile, from his apartment in Santiago in his underwear in the middle of the night. When he was later found murdered, it was inevitable that suspicion would fall on the government of Nicolás Maduro.
The ironies lasted until The Chilean Prosecutor’s Office announced, a month and a half later, that two of the hitmen escaped to Venezuela. And not only that, the prosecutor in charge of the case, Héctor Barros, is convinced that Ojeda was killed for political reasons and by an order that came from the country governed by Chavismo.
In a television press conference, the prosecutor maintained that “so far we have established that This was not a self-kidnapping or a kidnapping for ransom. It was organized by the ‘Tren de Aragua“with a foreign organization and in the context of organized crime.” When journalists asked him if it was a political motive, he responded: “The only thesis that remains valid is the one you indicate.”
Although the prosecutor was careful to name the Maduro regime directly, for the majority of Chileans relating the Venezuelan dictator to this crime is like adding 2 and 2. “It is common sense,” says the National Renewal deputy, José Miguel Castro. , and adds: “it is serious, our sovereignty was violated.” Gabriel Boric’s own government did not rule out the hypothesis of an intervention by the Venezuelan regime within the borders of Chile, and that is why he called the ambassador in Caracas for consultations.
This is not the first time that suspicions have fallen on the Venezuelan regime according to which, In a kind of Operation Condor, Chavista version, it kidnaps or intimidates opponents outside its borders. Of course, the specific antecedents had occurred in Colombia, its neighboring country. But between Caracas and Santiago de Chile there are seven thousand kilometers of distance.
Ronald Ojeda was kidnapped in Santiago on February 21 and his body was found 10 days later.
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Zeballos agrees that the political motivation, “perhaps to send a message of intimidation”, is the strongest hypothesis. “Let’s not forget that while Ojeda was being transferred, they took photographs of him with cell phones and sent those images somewhere.”
Besides There are suspicions regarding the existence of a “cordial” relationship between Chavismo and the ‘Aragua Train’. Those who affirm this point out that when the Venezuelan authorities evicted the Tocorón prison last year, the main center of operations of this criminal gang, the mafia boss ‘Niño Guerrero’, imprisoned in that prison, did not appear anywhere. It is believed that state agents notified him in advance of the operation. “The question remains as to whether it was actually an action to regain control of the prison facility or whether it was actually one of the largest criminal escapes in the history of Venezuela,” says Zeballos.
Operation in Tocorón prison
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Amid suspicions about Ojeda’s death, the Venezuelan government not only tried to lower the profile of the influence of the ‘Aragua Train’ in the region, but Even Foreign Minister Yván Gil denied the existence of the organization and considered it “an international media fiction”. Shortly after, the prosecutor, Tarek William Saab, maintained that the ‘Train’ had already been dismantled when the Tocorón prison was intervened and that its power had been oversized.
Opponent in the crosshairs
As for Ojeda, what was the regime’s interest in this 32-year-old former military man? In January 2024, Ronald Ojeda’s name appeared in a statement from the Ministry of Defense demoted and accused of treason along with 32 other former soldiers. Angelo Heredia, currently in prison, was also on that list. Heredia confessed that both he and Ojeda were part of Operation Blanco Bracelet, which would try to overthrow the regime in an armed uprising. In this confession, released by the regime and questioned by family and friends of the detainee who claim that it had been obtained through torture, Heredia also names civilian actors as part of the plan. One of them is the activist Rocío San Miguel, currently detained.
“The authorities invoke real or fictitious conspiracies to intimidate, detain and prosecute people who oppose or criticize the government”
Heredia and Ojeda had escaped from a military prison a few years earlier. They met again in December 2023 in Cúcuta, Colombia. From there they tried to re-enter Venezuela to organize a coup against the government, but they failed.. Heredia was captured, and Ojeda managed to escape and ended his journey in Chile, where he requested refuge.
According to the report Operation Hunt of the Colombian channel Caracol, An illegal Colombian group in complicity with the Venezuelan government would have participated in the capture of Heredia: the National Liberation Army (ELN). This leftist guerrilla has been operating for years on the border between the two countries and there handles various criminal activities, such as drug trafficking. All with the permission of Caracas, according to sources consulted by Caracol.
The report explains that the ELN not only helped capture Heredia, but also Before, in 2021, he helped kidnap another Venezuelan dissident soldier, Franklin Caldera, in Colombian territory. to deliver it across the border to the General Directorate of Venezuelan Military Counterintelligence.
For the Colombian journalist Ricardo Calderón, leader of the report team Operation Huntthe conclusions that the Chilean Prosecutor’s Office is reaching They corroborate that the Chavista regime is capable of allying itself with illegal gangs to act against deserters or opponents in exile. Calderón investigates, among other cases, that of Pablo Parada, a Venezuelan student leader who claims that criminals hired by Chavista intelligence tried to kidnap him in Bogotá. “One of those who was chasing me told me ‘Stop, mamahuevo’, a very Venezuelan word,” said Parada.
In turn, Calderón explains that after the report “many more evidence, sources and testimonies have emerged, which are in the process of verification, which indicate that “The complaints we made are not isolated, but rather a permanent policy of including Venezuelan intelligence agencies in Colombian territory.”
Not only Venezuela
This year Joao Maldonado, a Nicaraguan dissident who lives in Costa Rica and who according to Sandinism participated during the 2018 protests in the murder of Bismarck Martínez, one of its militants, suffered an attack while driving his vehicle. Some subjects shot him from a motorcycle, Maldonado was shot at least seven times and his wife was shot twice. Miraculously they were able to escape to a hospital and were saved. It is not the first time that the opponent had suffered an attack in Costa Rica.
Journalist Ismael López interviewed Maldonado for La Nación (Costa Rica), shortly before the attack. He explains that in that conversation the dissident assured him that In Costa Rica “intelligence cells of the Daniel Ortega regime operate.”
López adds that the actions of the Nicaraguan dictatorship are also suspected in a series of murders in Honduras of opponents of Sandinism. In one of them, Rodolfo Rojas Cordero died, whom the regime also accused of having participated in Martínez’s crime. Rojas Cordero lived in Costa Rica, but someone allegedly tricked him into traveling to Honduras, where death awaited him. Added to this are the former contras (right-wing paramilitaries during the Nicaraguan civil war) murdered in Honduras. But official investigations have yielded no results.
It is impossible not to compare these events with the infamous Operation Condor, through which the military dictatorships of the Southern Cone, in the seventies and eighties, They agreed to persecute opponents outside their borders. In that operation, the dictatorships denied the murders and tried to pass them off as internal confrontations between leftist militants.
More recently, These cases also recall the strange deaths of opponents of Vladimir Putin both inside and outside Russian borders. For example, that of former spy Alexandre Litvinenko, poisoned in 2006 in London. For this, the Russians used polonium 210. Precisely the proximity of the Nicaraguan and Venezuelan regimes to Russia, famous for its relentless persecution of dissidents, is a factor to take into account.
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