SANTIAGO, CHILE — About thirty people gathered on Friday in a cemetery on the outskirts of Santiago to say goodbye to the remains of former Venezuelan lieutenant Ronald Ojeda, a refugee in Chile who was a dissident of the Nicolás Maduro regime, who was kidnapped and found dead buried in a suitcase for ten more days. late, in a case that shocked the country.
The Legal Medical Service handed over the soldier’s body, which was proof of the expertise, on Thursday when a wake was held to which only his relatives and close people could attend, many of them under police protection after the case, which has generated unknowns about whether there was a political motive behind his death.
Ojeda was kidnapped by people who pretended to be police officers and his body was later found in a suitcase 1.40 meters deep under a large slab of cement. For the crime, which the Ojeda family’s lawyer relates to a contract murder, a 17-year-old Venezuelan minor remains in provisional detention, which is equivalent to preventive detention for adults.
There are two arrest warrants pending against two Venezuelans, with a history of kidnappings, which authorities link to the Aragua Train with a criminal record.
“This is the greatest pain I have ever experienced in my life,” said his sister Mayra at Ojeda’s funeral, in a speech in which she stressed that her younger brother never stole, wished anyone ill or committed crimes to deserve this end. . He was fired, he stressed, “as the great man he was, with the great thoughts he had and the unattainable desire to see a free Venezuela.”
About thirty people from the Venezuelan community accompanied the coffin in the cemetery of the Pudahuel commune, on the outskirts of Santiago.
“His life was marked by torture on two occasions,” said the sister, first mentioning his escape from Venezuela and then his death. Ojeda escaped from a prison where he was with other Maduro dissidents and on his social networks he defined himself as a “political prisoner” and claimed that he had suffered torture.
The woman also accused the Chilean police of negligence in the kidnapping, stating that they laughed at her and her sister-in-law, the military man’s widow, when they were told that the kidnappers, who entered their home in a humble neighborhood of Santiago at high hours of the morning, they were Venezuelans and did not belong to the Chilean investigative police.
Secret to you
Ojeda’s wife, who did not want to give her name, also spoke and noted that “Venezuela is a dictatorship.” She stated that “it is an open secret, everyone knows who is guilty (of her husband’s crime). I only ask you to defend your sovereignty and your country,” she insisted.
“We know that the Venezuelan regime is behind this. “I want my husband to be remembered as a hero,” said the widow.
Ojeda’s family is under police protection, as are other former Venezuelan dissidents who have taken refuge in Chile and have asked the government for help after hearing about the case.
President Gabriel Boric referred to the case publicly for the first time on Friday, which he described as “very serious.” He assured that from the first moment his ministers acted condemning the crime, sending their condolences and promoting the investigation.
Source: AP
