A year under siege: Meet the Venezuelan leaders trapped in an embassy

The last sunrise she saw outside the embassy is remembered by Meda.

She had awoken early to meet with opposition leader Maria Corina Machado to discuss the Venezuelan government’s growing persecution and elect a coalition representative for the upcoming presidential election.

Despite her landslide victory in the opposition’s primary, the government had already forbid Machado from running.

Then, news arrived that altered everything. Meda’s name was on the list of arrest warrants that Venezuela’s Attorney General Tarek William Saab had announced on television.

We had to flee, hide, and find shelter. According to Meda, who served as Machado’s campaign manager during the election, “it was a brutal situation.” She communicated with Al Jazeera via electronic correspondence.

She continued, “I will never forget the phone call I made to my husband to let him know.”

That day, two of her coworkers were already being held. As agents bundled her into a silver vehicle in a viral video, Dignora Hernandez, the political secretary of the opposition, could be seen yelling for assistance.

Meda and the others had to take action right away. In the past, opposition members had sought refuge inside embassies by using a 1954 Caracas Convention, an international treaty that allows diplomatic missions in Latin America to grant asylum to people who had experienced political persecution.

Additionally, the host nation’s authorities are prohibited from entering the building by the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations without prior permission.

The Argentine embassy would provide the crucial refuge in Meda’s case. Meda and five others were given asylum in the embassy residence after the country’s government had long been critical of alleged human rights violations committed by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

At first, Meda and her coworkers found a place to continue their work on the presidential campaign before the 2024 election in addition to physical safety within the embassy walls.

However, Maduro is still in power, and the situation has gotten worse.

Despite the election results that were released on July 28, Maduro won, beating the opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez, who had previously reported voting records,

The UN Human Rights Committee opened an investigation into the legitimacy of the vote in December. While the investigation is ongoing, it directed the Maduro government to refrain from destroying any election tallies.

Its diplomats were kicked out after Argentina refused to acknowledge Maduro’s win in a contested election. Brazil’s diplomats from Argentina were given access to the embassy when the country’s diplomats were unable to enter because the local authorities had blocked entry.

Five opposition members are confined to the empty embassy today.

On the street outside, Venezuelan intelligence and armed forces are stationed. Authorities in nearby homes have been seize, and inside the embassy residents claim the state electricity company has taken the fuses out of the electricity box, leaving them with only a generator to run their equipment.

Venezuela has been accused of breaking international law, including the right to safe passage, by human rights organizations.

The situation was described as a “siege,” according to Carolina Jimenez Sandoval, president of the Washington Office on Latin America, a lobbying organization based in the United States.

According to Jimenez, “one of our goals is to break them psychologically by letting them leave the embassy and then detain them” (poenez).

Source: Aljazeera