They did not give statements to the media because “they have restrictions”
The complicity between Pedro Sánchez’s socialist government and the socialist dictatorship of Venezuela led to a shameful episode yesterday.
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The media were unable to interview the newly released prisoners.
This Friday, five political prisoners released by the Maduro dictatorship arrived in Madrid. They are free thanks to the United States operation to capture the Venezuelan dictator, the same operation that some criticize, including Sánchez, perhaps because it threatens to topple a regime with which Spanish socialism has very murky relations, some of them with ramifications in several cases of political corruption that are currently being investigated by the Spanish Justice system.
The released prisoners did not speak to the media because “they have restrictions”
Yesterday, many journalists awaited the arrival of the five political prisoners at Barajas Airport. However, they were unable to obtain any statements from them. The released prisoners were escorted from their plane onto the airport tarmac, instead of through the exit where journalists were waiting. The socialist newspaper El País commented on the incident as follows:
“The group met with Spanish authorities inside the airport and were then taken ‘each to their respective destinations,’ according to Sergio Contreras, the spokesperson for the family of Rocío San Miguel, the released lawyer and human rights defender. Contreras also explained that they have not made any statements because ‘they are under restrictions,’ although he did not specify the reasons or who asked them not to speak to the press.”
Some media outlets broadcast live for several hours to interview the released prisoners. One of these outlets was the pro-government radio station Cadena SER, which, after broadcasting for almost three hours from arrivals hall 10 at Terminal 4 of Barajas Airport, recorded Sergio Contreras’s statements in this video (point 2:47:24, I have inserted it so that it starts playing at that moment):
A setup to prevent the released prisoners from making the government look bad.
Hours before this happened, the Sánchez government was already taking credit for this release. Minister Ángel Víctor Torres Pérez attributed it to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who has been acting as a defender of Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorship for years. Obviously, the government risked ruining its propaganda operation if the released prisoners spoke to the media gathered at the airport. The solution? After a meeting with the authorities (that is, with government representatives), they were secretly taken out of Barajas Airport to prevent them from speaking, and were even warned that they were restricted from making statements to the media, according to Contreras.
Furthermore, in this way the government prevented the media from reflecting the physical condition of those released prisoners after passing through the detention and torture centers of a dictatorship that has among its Spanish accomplices the parties of the government and their allies. Let’s remember, in case anyone has forgotten this fact or didn’t hear about it, that in December 2024, the PSOE and its allies voted against asking Maduro to end the repression in Venezuela. This gives us an idea of how little, if anything, this government has done for those five political prisoners and the many others who are still in Venezuela.
How is it possible that the media isn’t making a fuss about this?
This silencing operation came to light thanks to Sergio Contreras. His statements brought it to light. However, it’s difficult to understand why, in a democratic country, the media hasn’t raised a scandal about what happened. A government complicit with a dictatorship has hidden five recently released political prisoners to prevent them from making Sánchez and his allies look bad, supposedly even telling them they are restricted from speaking to the media—an order that violates Article 20 of our Constitution, which recognizes and protects the right to “freely express and disseminate thoughts, ideas, and opinions through speech, writing, or any other means of reproduction,” a right that “cannot be restricted by any type of prior censorship.”
With the shameful propaganda and cover-up operation we witnessed yesterday, the Spanish left once again demonstrated that its political model is the Venezuelan dictatorship, an anti-democratic regime that has been committing electoral fraud for years to perpetuate itself in power, a regime that has murdered more than 10,000 Venezuelan citizens, torturing and subjecting thousands of people to degrading treatment for political reasons, such as the five who arrived in Madrid yesterday from Caracas. A democratic country like Spain does not deserve to be governed by accomplices of criminals like Nicolás Maduro. What those accomplices deserve is to be brought to justice to answer for their support of a regime that has been violating the most basic human rights for years.
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Image: Cadena SER.