In a speech at the Miraflores presidential palace on Thursday, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro said that intelligence services had obtained documents revealing a plan by an opposition sector to launch a movement for secession in six states. Maduro linked that plan to opposition protestors’ setting up of guarimbas, or barricades, in city streets to block traffic and call attention to their cause in recent months. “They say in their plan that the consequence of the violent chaos caused by the barricades must be for people to feel obstinate and assent to the separation,” he said.
“In Carabobo the first autonomist meeting has already been concretized, and then the rest of the states in crisis will follow,” he said. “One of the spokesmen, in a declaration which is now public and which we’re confirming in the investigation…‘the only possible way out in states like Táchira, Mérida, Carabobo, Lara, Nueva Esparta and Zulia is secessionism’,” Maduro added as he read from what he described as an intelligence report.
The Venezuelan president called those responsible for the plan, which is being investigated, “neo-fascist groups” who hoped to impose a dictatorship reminiscent of Chile under General Augusto Pinochet, whose government tortured and killed thousands of opposition members. Six states which were allegedly the focal points of the plan have seen especially fierce conflict between opposition protestors and government forces. Maduro alleged that according to the plot, some of the states “would join Colombia and others the United States”.
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