“Freedom is never willingly given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” —Martin Luther King, Jr.

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 The asylum seekers at the Argentine embassy in Caracas negotiated their exit.

 Tiempo Argentino: They were not extracted or escaped, as the US attempted to claim and the media repeated, but rather made a pact with the Maduro government. 

 The five members of the far-right group Vente Venezuela were not extracted or escaped in a James Bond-style operation, but rather negotiated their departure from the Argentine embassy residence in Caracas, where they remained for more than a year. 

 They are Claudia Macero, Pedro Urruchurtu, Magallí Meda, Humberto Villalobos, and Omar González. The five entered the embassy during Holy Week 2024 to evade an investigation by the Venezuelan prosecutor's office into a violent destabilization plan prior to last July's presidential elections. 

After those elections, Nicolás Maduro severed diplomatic relations with the government of Javier Milei, and the embassy and the asylum seekers were placed under Brazilian supervision. Since then, media outlets close to the extremist María Corina Machado and the asylum seekers themselves have routinely reported, without evidence, a siege on the residence, which the Venezuelan government has always denied. 

 For weeks, there has been talk in Caracas that the asylum seekers were seeking direct dialogue with the Minister of the Interior and second-in-command of Chavismo, Diosdado Cabello. Cabello himself hinted at this in January of this year on his weekly television program "Con el Mazo Dando." 

A source with knowledge of the case confirmed that they had all been negotiating their departure from the embassy for several months. Meanwhile, Brazilian diplomats also confirmed that negotiations had taken place, in which Itamaraty was not directly involved. 

Sources in Caracas assured Tiempo Argentino that the asylum seekers left the embassy at different times, and not as a group. They even indicated that Claudia Macero, formerly in charge of communications for María Corina Machado, had been in Buenos Aires for several weeks. 

 This contradicts the version of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who tweeted Tuesday night, just hours after a rumor circulated that the five were in the US, "following a precise operation," in military language.

  Along the same lines, the Milei government in Argentina went further and issued a statement in the same vein, welcoming the "operation that allowed the five Venezuelans who had taken refuge at the Argentine Embassy in Venezuela to be successfully extracted from Caracas and transferred to US soil." Another militarist.

 Meanwhile, the far-right leader and political leader of the asylum seekers, María Corina Machado, reposted Rubio. Four of the five "released" refugees did the same. Such caution was striking in Caracas. Hours tick by, and none of the five have made a statement or provided "proof of life" to reinforce the US official's version. It's not even known for sure where they are (we insist, several sources place at least Macero in Buenos Aires, not in the north).

 Another element that did not go unnoticed was that after Rubio's post on X, several journalists close to Machado changed their initial version and began referring to an "escape," when they had previously claimed it was a negotiation. The feverish rumors about "commando operations by foreign military personnel" to "extract" the asylum seekers also faded as the hours passed and there was no new information beyond the tweet. 

 On Wednesday morning in Caracas, several analysts asserted that Rubio's version sought to muddy the waters and distract from President Maduro's meeting with Vladimir Putin in Moscow. 

 tiempoar.com.ar ---