Maduro releases and sends to Spain the former head of Chavista espionage Miguel Rodríguez Torres

The Venezuelan government has authorized the release of General Miguel Rodríguez Torres, once one of the most powerful officials in the country, former Minister of the Interior and Justice of Nicolás Maduro and one of his trusted men, imprisoned for 5 years for being charged with conspiracy.

Rodríguez Torres, who was being held in the cells of the Military Counterintelligence Directorate in Caracas, will immediately leave for Spain as an exile.

He transcended to the media that his health had deteriorated.

In intermediation with the high government for his release, according to the sources, the management of former Spanish government president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero stands out, who has fluid relations with the Miraflores Palace in Caracas.

General of the Army, a personal friend of Hugo Chávez, Miguel Rodríguez Torres, 59, participated with him in the coup attempt on February 4, 1992 against the democratic government of Carlos Andrés Pérez.

This military movement meant the irruption of Chavismo in the national debate and was destined to produce important upheavals in Venezuelan politics in the time to come.

Starting in the year 2000, with Chávez as president, he honed his skills in the field of espionage and for years served as director of the intelligence services of the Venezuelan State, first of the Directorate of Services and Intelligence and Prevention, Disip, - inherited from the time of Democracy - after the renamed Bolivarian Intelligence Service, Sebin, the political police of the regime, instance of which he is the founder.

Rodríguez Torres later became one of Maduro's trusted men, -who assumed the Presidency in 2013, once Hugo Chávez died- and, as one of the most prominent cadres of the intelligence services, he was his Minister of the Interior and of Justice.

He had to carry out the strong official repression against the first massive day of popular protests against Maduro, in 2014, baptized by the Opposition as La Salida – carried out in the midst of a serious economic crisis, citizen security and supply of goods - , which caused the death of dozens of people, several of them students.

It is Rodríguez Torres who takes Leopoldo López to prison, and is credited with the paternity of the creation of "La Tumba", a maximum security prison of the Chavista regime with demanding prison conditions, in which several opposition leaders have had to purge punishment. , such as student leader Lorent Saleh.

Once a "black beast" and villain par excellence of the opposition story, Rodríguez Torres is particularly accused of his alleged responsibility for the death of students Jorge Redman and Bassil Da Costa, who were executed by Chavista police snipers when they were protesting. furiously in front of the Attorney General's Office at the beginning of 2014.

The scandalous worsening of governance in Venezuela in the years that followed, and the chronic inability of the Maduro government to attend to them, progressively and silently undermined the spirit of the hitherto indispensable and loyal Rodríguez Torres, who, once out of government, began to separate progressively from Chavismo.

His distancing from Maduro led him to found a new political current, the Movimiento Amplio Desafío de Todos, thus becoming one of several prominent Chavismo figures that clearly began to distance themselves from Maduro.

At that time, the former attorney general, Luisa Ortega Díaz;

the former president of PDVSA, Rafael Ramírez, the former Ombudsman, Gabriela Ramírez, or the former Minister of Communications, Andrés Izarra.

In 2018, Rodríguez Torres was captured by the political police that he had created as a minister, once he was preparing to attend a meeting with his supporters at the Hotel President, near Plaza Venezuela.

He was immediately charged with sedition and treason and he began his ordeal.

By then, he had already cultivated relationships with some civil and political actors in the anti-Chavista opposition.

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