Can the murder of Lieutenant Ojeda finally lead the International Criminal Court to bring the Venezuelan dictatorship to trial?

By: Ricardo Israel - 03/03/2025

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Few situations better describe the biases of the International Criminal Court (ICC) than its constant delay and refusal to prosecute the Venezuelan dictatorship for its human rights violations, despite the many years that have passed, the evidence provided and the impossibility of justice being done in Venezuela. It seems as if there is a protective cloak over the persons of Nicolas Maduro, Diosdado Cabellos and other figures, especially if one sees the speed with which they have acted in other cases. The aforementioned situation has led experienced human rights activists to denounce the possibility of corruption.

But all that could change, since Carolina Tohá, Minister of the Interior (and presidential candidate) of Chile, reconfirmed that Chile will file an appeal before the Hague Court against the Venezuelan State, as a result of the investigations into the murder of Lieutenant Ronald Ojeda, a former political prisoner of the dictatorship to whom Chile granted asylum, and would now prove the participation of Nicolás Maduro's regime in that crime, and specifically there would be more than one piece of evidence in the sense that the order came from Diosdado Cabello personally.

There are two international courts of justice in that city: the International Court of Justice (ICJ), a UN judicial body that resolves disputes and complaints between states, and the International Criminal Court, which prosecutes individuals. Chile has not officially announced which one it would go to, but since Venezuelan democrats have been making unsuccessful submissions to the ICC for many years, Chile's case would be a powerful argument to formally reactivate what is dormant.

The first anniversary of the crime was recently celebrated, which took place on February 21, 2024. In Chile, criminal prosecution is the monopoly of an institution that is constitutionally independent, the Public Ministry, and here the prosecutors have been consistent, methodical, and have followed an investigation where they have discovered the operation of many people with great resources at their disposal, an investigation that has taken them to several countries, and finally seems to be giving serious enough results to make the announcement of going to international justice. The kidnapping and murder of Ojeda strained both countries.

Not only was there a withdrawal of ambassadors, but Caracas practically put an end to diplomatic relations, affecting hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who have sought refuge in Chile, in terms of procedures. This includes many declarations and a worsening, starting with the consequences of false police officers removing the ex-military man from his apartment in Santiago, since surveillance cameras in the elevator show that he was forcibly removed and in his underwear by heavily armed people, and nine days later, on March 1, the victim's body was found buried in another commune in Santiago.

Prosecutors have long suspected political motives, as Ojeda was imprisoned in Venezuela with 33 other soldiers who were members of the Movement for Freedom and Democracy, where he was subjected to intense torture, including asphyxiation, beatings and electric shocks. Once in Chile, he participated in protests and became an international symbol of resistance, being so closely monitored that he had to change his address.

In Chile, the Venezuelan population has gained prominence, being today the largest migrant population. Thus, according to a recent report by the National Migration Service and the National Institute of Statistics, migrants represent almost 10% of the population, with Venezuelans being the population that has grown the most, with 38% of that total. Their increase has been such that they have gone from 348,506 in 2018 to 728,586 in 2023.

These numbers help to understand why a government originally in favor of Venezuelan Chavismo is now in a situation of confrontation, including the opinions of someone who, like President Boric, was even a little sympathetic, although he continues to be a supporter of the Cuban revolution. The issue is also electoral, since the Chilean Constitution states in Article 14 that “foreigners residing in Chile for more than five years, and who meet the requirements, may exercise the right to vote in the cases and forms determined by law,” adding in the second paragraph that after five years of having become a citizen “they will have the option of holding public office by popular election.”

According to polls, the majority of that vote went to candidates opposed to Boric, mainly from the right, so much so that today the government is seeking to reform the legislation to make it more difficult for foreigners to vote, since this vote helped several candidates for mayor and governor win in the recent local elections that took place on October 27.

This fact may help to understand why the government is doing what it has announced, despite the fact that it faces internal dissent from the Communist Party, which is strongly opposed to confronting Caracas, since it supports that dictatorship, where there is also evidence that it has received financial contributions in the past. However, the government has been forced to act in this way, since the press confirms that the national prosecutor himself has revealed that a witness, whose identity is reserved in the case, indicated that the order to commit the crime and the payment for it came from Diosdado Cabello, not only the number two of Chavismo, but also would have done so in his capacity as Minister of the Interior, which links the government itself to this crime.

Furthermore, the information held by the highest authority of the Public Ministry must be very solid, to have provided other details in an interview on Tele 13 radio, where he declared on January 23 that "The prosecutor (Héctor) Barros confirmed to me that there are indeed three people (…) who attribute the order to authorities of the Venezuelan government and at least one of those people (…) would state that the order and the payment would have come from Mr. Diosdado Cabello."

What is happening also shows how dictatorships resemble each other, since Chile is experiencing what the Pinochet dictatorship made others suffer, since this case recalls the attack that its security services organized against Orlando Letelier, Allende's former foreign minister in Washington on September 21, 1976, which not only killed him but also the American citizen Ronni Moffitt, in what was the first terrorist attack in the history of that capital.

This incident should be linked to the attack that killed the former commander-in-chief of the Chilean army, General Carlos Prats, and his wife on September 30, 1974, in Buenos Aires, where he had taken refuge. Among other people abroad, the dictatorship also carried out an attack on October 6, 1975 against the former Christian Democrat vice president Bernardo Leighton, who was in exile in Rome, and who was seriously wounded along with his wife.

These attacks undoubtedly received approval at the highest level and followed a pattern, seeking to eliminate all those who seemed to have the capacity to unite the majority of political forces in a broad project of returning to democracy, and they were right in their perspective, since it resembles the coalition with which Patricio Aylwin was able to defeat Pinochet in 1988.

The similarity between the Letelier case and the Ojeda case is that it forced the US to change its position, to investigate with such thoroughness that it was able to identify those responsible in the regime's repressive apparatus, and the change of position led to denouncing the Chilean dictatorship and withdrawing the support that had been provided to it in those years. In addition, it showed us how much there was a similarity between dictatorships in terms of repression and murders, even though they differed in their economic policies, privatization in the Chilean case and nationalization in the Venezuelan case.

If the Chilean dictatorship feared the formation of a broad alliance for a future transition to democracy, the Caracas dictatorship feared that the dissent came from the military ranks, which is further proof of the complete control and quasi-occupation of Venezuela by the mother dictatorship, the Cuban one, since in Havana there has always been a special concern to eliminate any different voice among the military or the police.

This crime and the information gathered by the prosecutors' investigation also altered Boric's political design, who until coming to power was an admirer of Chavismo, but Caracas seriously harmed his government, starting with the way they have boasted of their participation in the outbreak of violence in October 2019, in the export of crime such as the Aragua Train that brought with it forms of violence that were unknown in Chile, and which forced Boric to increasingly question those who harmed his political project, which finally went into crisis, both due to its inefficiency and the crushing defeat suffered by the maximalist proposal for a new radical constitution, whose referendum delivered a rejection by 62% of the electorate.

The death, accompanied by torture, of the dissident lieutenant was a wake-up call for Chile, where, as in the outbreak of violence in 2019, it found the country ill-prepared, in both cases paying the price of not having an intelligence service worthy of the name, a legacy of a reaction to what happened during the dictatorship, where the security services were used to persecute democrats. In any case, today nothing justifies the country not having something that is proper to every modern State, nor, and also as a legacy of that period, does the law prohibit the Armed Forces from conducting intelligence in Chile and about Chile, even in cases of acute violence, including the medium-intensity challenge of a Mapuche insurgency in the south of the country, since although they perform security functions in that macro-zone under the direction of the government, the real problem is that, except for States of exception, they can only be used in a war situation, mainly in neighboring countries.

This perspective also prevents us from fully understanding who the Chilean allies and collaborators were in the Chavista decision to end the life of Lieutenant Ojeda, as well as whether there was foreign collaboration in the violence that Chile experienced in October 2019, which on that occasion could have ended Chilean democracy.

The government's reaction, as prosecutors gathered evidence of Venezuelan involvement, also represented an opportunity for President Boric's political credentials outside Chile, particularly at the level of first-world media and governments.

These sectors, as well as the Venezuelan exile, have contributed to the anti-dictatorial image of the Chilean president, since perhaps this way the circumstances that led Boric to criticize Caracas are unknown, which is why it would be necessary to explain that Chavismo harmed his political project, as well as that, to this day, no criticism of the mother and occupying dictatorship of Venezuela, the Cuban one, has come out of his mouth, in addition to being, like Petro, a furious adversary not only of Israel, but in the case of Boric, the first clearly anti-Semitic president in the history of Chile.

By forgetting the above, only his public disagreements with Diosdado and Maduro predominate, which has greatly benefited Boric.

However, not everything is over, and perhaps a key issue could be just beginning, since the actions of the prosecutors have been joined by the efficient activity of the legal team of Ojeda's wife. Thus, in a recent formal presentation before the Public Ministry, the lawyer Juan Carlos Manríquez asked to clear up a series of issues linked to the former Undersecretary of the Interior Manuel Monsalve, who is currently in preventive detention, charged with rape and sexual abuse, and who by law was the person in charge of the criminal issue, in addition to having sought cooperation agreements with Caracas on these issues. The intention is to investigate lines of action that could shed light on Chilean accomplices, and even involve the government in ways that have not been clarified to this day. The reason is that there are "circumstances prior to, concomitant with, and subsequent to his kidnapping and execution, which the family demands to be clarified, and they have the right to ask for it in their condition as victims."

In addition to acknowledging the good work of the prosecutors, it is estimated that those questions that serve to clarify pending issues “that are central to fully clarifying what happened” should also be investigated in depth. According to what was reported by La Tercera and by Ojeda’s family, the submitted document says: “In order to advance in the deepening of some lines of investigation… I ask that the following proceedings be ordered”:

The first diligence seeks the “exact identification of the three people who entered Ojeda’s home” through two actions: a) to report on the status of the analysis of the third fingerprint found in the elevator, which according to the family would belong to the Venezuelan Army officer Alexander Granko Arteaga, close to Diosdado Cabello, and b) to obtain information held by another prosecutor on confidential expenses that were used by Monsalve during the period in which he served in the government.

This would actually correspond to a second investigation, since, according to the Chilean press, Monsalve and the government have said that a significant amount of this money had been transferred to Ojeda's family, which is denied by the widow. As plaintiffs, the family and their lawyer are asking the Public Prosecutor's Office to investigate the trip that Monsalve made to Caracas to sign a cooperation agreement, which was of no use.

The attempt to clarify what Boric really did or did not do is present in the request that the courts send to various ministries “to add to the case the complete background information that served to prepare the texts signed in this collaboration between Chile and Venezuela,” on “criminal records and other data of Venezuelans in Chile that confirm or rule out that none was delivered that would have served to detect Mr. Ojeda or would have violated the legal confidentiality of the refuge” to find out if Chile complied with those “obligations (that are) inherent to the refuge.”

Finally, there is a fourth item, with two points that could lead to taking a new statement from Monsalve. The first is whether “he knew or was alerted when, how and by whom, that there was surveillance by third parties on Ojeda and/or the presence of foreign state agents behind him” and the second, to investigate the background by which the State of Chile could have detected “illegal actions of planning the murder in Chile and the entry, even under false names, of Alexander Granko, Diosdado Cabello or former officers who had been in “training courses at military and/or police academies in Chile.” There is evidence of Granko not only being in Chile, but also that last January he was decorated in Caracas.

Finally, there should be even more activity at the international level, as prosecutors have managed to get an Appeals Court in Chile to accept a request for pretrial detention and extradition of the defendant in the Ojeda crime who was captured in the US, and hopefully it will be accepted favorably and without delay in Indiana, since it is the one who handed over the vehicle used for the kidnapping and murder. As a summary, prosecutor Alex Cortez has said that “one year after the crime, there are already 11 people deprived of liberty, including the defendant extradited in December from Costa Rica and a teenager already convicted,” to which should be added the abundant amount of resources that were made available to enter and leave Chile.

In this regard, one thread that still needs to be investigated is that Chilean investigators believe that they acted from the Venezuelan Embassy in Santiago, focusing on the person of the ambassador and general ® Arévalo Méndez, a military man very close to Hugo Chávez, who had an open embassy and had close relations with well-known politicians of the Chilean Communist Party.

Diosdado Cabello's thing is not a surprise, since in February 2024 on Venezuelan TV he said "When the president of Chile at the time, Piñera, came to the border to invade Venezuela, he was authorizing anything we could do in Chile," so I allow myself to emphasize "anything we could do in Chile," and although there is no evidence, it has always been suspected that burning and destroying Santiago Metro stations required professionals and not simply angry protesters in October 2019, and perhaps that is what María Corina Machado was thinking when she said that what took place was "Cuban brain, Venezuelan muscle."

I really don't know, I have no evidence in this regard, but I hope that the investigation into the involvement of the Chavista dictatorship will serve as a precedent to proceed to investigate what happened in October 2019, including what the institutions of the armed forces have in this regard. And if they have little or nothing, Chile should worry. And seriously.

For now, I hope that the Hague case will be finalized so that, once the complaint is filed, it will help the Criminal Court to finally have no more excuses and proceed to prosecute those in power in Caracas.

@israelzipper

-Master and PhD in Political Science (U. of Essex), Bachelor of Laws (U. of Barcelona), Lawyer (U. of Chile), former presidential candidate (Chile, 2013)

«The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author».