Rodríguez Torres is convinced that the opposition knew about Lorent Saleh

Interior Minister Rodríguez Torres declared yesterday that he is “sure that all the Venezuelan right had knowledge of the terrorist plans by Lorent Gómez Saleh.”

Rodriguez Torres did not provide any evidence for this claim during a televised interview with José Vicente Rangel, but explained that he was convinced the opposition new of the plans because “It is the highest phase of the struggle of Venezuela’s fascism, it is something that goes beyond the guarimbas. That is where the actions of the right were aiming at.”

According to the Minister the opposition was planning a “surprise” after the violent protest in the beginning of this year: “I believe this was the surprise they were planning, they were going to [unleash] armed terrorist cells.”

“A serious opposition, one that acts politically and that really wanted to become an option for the country, would have immediately rejected the terrorist plans by Gómez Saleh. But we haven’t seen this. I am sure that all of the opposition knows what he [Saleh] was up to,” reiterated Rodríguez Torres.

Opposition leaders have rejects having links with Lorent Saleh or knowledge of his plans. 

The Lorent Saleh Videos

The series of videos of the now jailed student leader Lorent Gómez Saleh is the closest Interior Minister Rodríguez Torres has come to showing evidence of somebody actually conspiring against the Venezuelan government.

In the videos Saleh makes claims of contacts with the Colombian Army and of plans to buy weapons, including sniper rifles and explosives, to use them in the “armed struggle” against the Venezuelan government. Part of Saleh’s bizarre plan, according to his own declarations in one of the videos, was the violent occupation of Táchira State’s “banks and liquor stores.”

The government is now in the process of linking Saleh with opposition leaders. Minister Rodríguez Torres and National Assembly president Diosdado Cabello explained this week that they are convinced the videos are evidence of a wider conspiracy by the opposition to destabilize the country.

Cabello declared: “We have stopped a conspiracy plot very well planned by the right. (…) The opposition knows nothing of love and care. The revolutionaries will always defend the legacy and the love of Chávez. The opposition continues to conspire through different forms of irrational struggle against the constitutional government. (…) Today we are again revealing to the country the intentions of a terrorist and irresponsible right. The opposition has made a fool of us all with its conspiracies and now they tried to destabilize [the country] using Saleh.”

Rodríguez Torres said he will soon show another video revealing “all the dark side, all the connections of Álvaro Uribe with drug trafficking, with the paramilitaries, with crime.”

Opposition leaders have rejected links with Lorent Saleh. Mayor of Caracas Antonio Ledezma admitted he had met Saleh before, but denied this meant he knew about his plans. “If these things are true they are indefensible. Who could defend something so removed from common sense? We are far from [supporting] terrorist and coup plans,” Ledezma declared. 

Cuban experts in detecting bacteriological warfare have arrived

President Maduro has informed that experts form different parts of the world, including Cuban experts in bacteriological warfare, have arrived in the Venezuela to investigate recent events at Maracay’s Central Hospital.

“There is an international war, compañeros, compatriots, a war waged by people who are trying to bring Venezuela down to its knees. But they will not achieve [their purposes], (…) we have defeated this psychosocial war that they have waged. [They] have made up a sickness in Venezuela, and we are investigating this. Doctors, friends from all over the world have arrived, including from our sister country Cuba, which has sent experts in bacteriological warfare in order to determine what is it the fascist right tried to do in Maracay,” explained Maduro.

The President also claimed victory in several wars he claims are being waged against the country by its enemies: “Bacteriological war, psychological war, international financial war: No and No again! Venezuela is a solid country in all aspects of its social, economic, political, and financial life.”

(Image El Universal)

Bacteriological Warfare!

On September 11, the president of the Colegio de Médicos of Aragua, Ángel Sarmiento, informed that 8 patients at the Central Hospital of Maracay had died of an unknown disease. Sarmiento spoke of an "unidentified virus or bacteria."

The PSUV governor of Aragua, Tarek El Aissami, was quick to deny the existence of a “supposed bacteria at the Central Hospital of Maracay.” Instead he accused Sarmiento of being the leader of “a campaign of rumors and terrorism.”

President Maduro declared today that the whole episode was part of an international media campaign of “psychological warfare,” against the Venezuelan people. CNN en español, BBC, NTN24, and the Miami Herald were all mentioned by Maduro as part of this campaign to psychologically “poison Venezuelans.”

But according to Maduro, there may be an even more sinister plot behind the media campaign: “We have a line of research now, because we seriously suspect that the Right was trying to introduce some kind of virus, a bacteriological warfare, into the Maracay Hospital, or who knows where else, and for that they already had prepared the [media] campaign, the videos, who was going to declare, but that campaign fell through in empty space,” said the President.

To develop this “line of research” into the plot, Maduro announced that he will ask for the assistance of international medical organizations, including the World Health Organization, “because this was an attack against the Venezuelan health system,” he added.

Rodríguez Torres: Putting together the conspiracy puzzle

Interior Minister Miguel Rodríguez Torres presented a second video of Lorent Gómez Saleh, an opposition student activist who was recently deported from Colombia and handed to Venezuelan authorities. In the videos, Gómez Saleh brags about having contacts with the Colombian Army and of having secured arms (fusiles) to start an insurrection in Venezuela. He also expresses the need to “take over”, and even blow up, liquor stores, banks and the local elections authorities’ offices of the frontier State of Táchira.

For Rodríguez Torres the videos show more than the confessions of an extremist activist, they are irrefutable evidence that the opposition is planning “terrorist actions against the Venezuelan people.”

The Minister said that investigations by Venezuela’s security agencies have determined that Gómez Saleh has links with “activists of the extreme right, such as María Machado and Leopoldo López.” Other links include Colombian ex-president Álvaro Uribe, and even the Colombian Catholic Church: “We have determined that this young man has links with the Church in Colombia, with two deputies well known in the country, who precisely made the link with Uribe. We have no doubt that Lorent is a pupil of Álvaro Uribe Vélez.”

“We are putting together the puzzle of the conspiracy and insurrectional actions that we already wittnessed with the guarimbas, and that they are now trying to revive,” said Rodríguez Torres.