Elections in Venezuela: how was the role of the international community?
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(CNN Spanish) -
The recently elected mayor of the Arzobispo Chacón municipality of Mérida state, Venezuela, was detained this Friday by Venezuelan authorities, according to the Democratic Unity Table, the party for which he ran and won in the last regional elections and municipal last Sunday.
“We denounce arbitrary detention by the SEBIN of the elected mayor of the municipality, Omar Fernández, in the morning in Canagua.
We demand his freedom and respect for the will of the people of Merida who elected him with their vote on November 21! ”They wrote on Twitter.
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CNN contacted the Public Ministry of Venezuela to find out under what charges the arrest of the mayor-elect was carried out, however, at the moment we have not received a response.
This week, Fernández had appeared in videos from the Mayor's Office saying that he was trying to prevent individuals from taking belongings from the municipal building such as vehicles and medicines.
On Wednesday, the attorney general of Venezuela, Tarek William Saab, had communicated on Twitter that a prosecutor was assigned to investigate the "assaults" on community radio stations in the Arzobispo Chacón municipality.
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Meanwhile, Héctor Azuaje Mendoza, the operative coordinator of the opposition Popular Will party in Mérida state, denied that they had attacked a community radio station in that municipality.
He told CNN that once Fernández was sworn in in the Arzobispo Chacón municipality, the outgoing mayor of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), Yolimar Belandria, proceeded to remove several things including an important batch of medicines from the Mayor's Office.
A situation that, according to him, generated the reaction of the neighbors together with the elected mayor who tried to avoid it and regained control of the drugs.
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CNN tried to contact Belandria to find out his version of what happened without having received a response so far.
Diosdado Cabello, first vice president of the ruling PSUV, had declared on Wednesday that opposition authorities that damage state assets must be held accountable.
In his television program “Con el mazo giving”, he stated: “Let us collect all the information and that the organizations collect the information and report who they have to report and if appropriate.
If he is mayor, he goes to prison, they do not have to waive his parliamentary immunity and he goes to prison for destroying state property, for attacking private property ”.