Without presenting evidence, Maduro says that opposition member María Corina Machado “returned to Venezuela” and “is moving” with the help of foreign governments

( Spanish) – The president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, said this Monday without presenting evidence that the opposition leader María Corina Machado, investigated by the Prosecutor’s Office for alleged treason, “returned” to Venezuela and that she “is moving” in the country with the support from foreign governments.

Maduro, who also did not present evidence that Machado had left the country before, stated that Machado had arrived in Venezuelan territory from Colombia and upon arrival “they kept her in the Embassy of the Netherlands, she was in the residence of the ambassador of the Netherlands and “Then he was sleeping at the headquarters of the United States Embassy.”

“So, she slept there for several days,” added the president during his weekly program broadcast on state television station VTV.

“He is here, he came back, although he has the promise that he will suddenly leave again,” he added.

The United States Embassy in Caracas has not had accredited diplomatic personnel since 2019, and Maduro did not specify how this supposed support would have been given to the opposition.

has contacted the Netherlands Embassy and the US State Department for comment and has not yet received a response.

This is not the first time that Maduro has insinuated without publicly offering evidence that his government knows the whereabouts of Machado, whom the Public Ministry is investigating for alleged treason, after she supported a law in the United States that prohibits the country from make deals with any entity that has commercial ties with the Maduro Executive. The opposition has rejected these accusations.

Until this Monday, Machado had not spoken publicly about Maduro’s statements and his team had not responded to a request for comment sent by .

The opposition leader, who opted to go underground after protests following the controversial July 28 elections, in which Maduro was declared the winner by entities related to Chavismo amid accusations of fraud, spoke about her situation in an interview with Andrés Oppenheimer, on , which aired this weekend.

“Let them agree, Andrés. Every day they say I’m in a different place. A couple of days ago, Maduro said that he was going to kick me out of Venezuela, so I think that they themselves have an alignment problem between their formations,” Machado said.

“A government with all the powers, with an impressive repressive apparatus like that of Venezuela, theoretically, unless they are inept, would have to be able to locate the leader, the best-known face in the country, perhaps,” added the opponent.

Machado denounced on Sunday that the house of his mother, Corina Parisca, was besieged by forces of the Maduro government.