Illegitimate Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is holding six Americans hostage. The State Department is demanding their release.
"The United States demands that the former Maduro regime release the wrongfully detained 'CITGO 6' in Venezuela. These men are suffering serious health conditions and must be released immediately," State Department Spokesperon Morgan Ortagus released in a statement Monday. "Maduro loyalists continue to prevent the families and attorneys of American prisoners from assisting with basic access to food and medicine, without regard for mental health and general well-being of those detained. These affronts to basic dignity will not be ignored."
"The safety and welfare of Americans overseas is among the Department of State’s highest priorities. The Department of State continues to press Maduro’s representatives for their assurance of the safety and welfare of Americans wrongfully detained in Venezuela," she continued.
Meanwhile, according to a new piece in the New York Times, the Maduro regime killed thousands of people and covered it up.
Venezuelan special forces have carried out thousands of extrajudicial killings in the past 18 months and then manipulated crime scenes to make it look as if the victims had been resisting arrest, the United Nations said Thursday in a report detailing wide-ranging government abuses targeting political opponents.
Special Action Forces described by witnesses as “death squads” killed 5,287 people in 2018 and another 1,569 by mid-May of this year, in what are officially termed by the Venezuelan government “Operations for the Liberation of the People,” U.N. investigators reported.
Laying out a detailed description of a lawless system of oppression, the report says the actual number of deaths could be much higher. It cites accounts by independent groups who report more than 9,000 killings for “resistance to authority” over the same period.
Earlier this year, the United States and dozens of other countries officially recognized Juan Guiado as the legitimate President of Venezuela. Maduro has refused to leave power and continues to starve people throughout of the country.