Maduro hunts Guaido allies, exacting revenge for revolt

Bloomberg

A week after an audacious attempt to topple Venezuelan autocrat Nicolas Maduro, his regime is cracking down on those it holds responsible, searching homes, issuing arrest warrants and sending opposition leaders into hiding.
Top allies of Juan Guaido, the head of the powerless legislature who says he is the nation’s rightful president, are circulating among safe houses, holing up in embassies and preparing for life on the run since the detention of National Assembly Vice President Edgar Zambrano by the Sebin secret police.
“We’re living in brutal persecution,” Freddy Superlano, a lawmaker who supports Guaido, said from a location he wouldn’t disclose. “We are hiding, and we will be doing so for a while.”
Guaido is calling his supporters back into the streets, but they must brave one of the most aggressive roundups of government foes to date. In recent years, the ruling socialists have been quick to jail elected officials, and Venezuela’s high court this week called for the prosecution of 10 lawmakers.
Zambrano, like many of those pursued, appeared with Guaido and two dozen defecting soldiers on an east Caracas highway in an overture to the armed forces to revolt.

‘Illegal Arrest’
The US responded to the regime by imposing sanctions on two shipping companies that haul Venezuelan oil and warned security forces they would be punished for taking part in repression.
The Treasury Department said in a statement that the punishment was “a direct response to Sebin’s illegal arrest of National Assembly members.”
The US facilitated the botched uprising and has explicitly warned against touching Guaido, so Maduro is trying to punish his rivals without incurring the nation’s full fury. He also must walk a fine line at home as the economy crashes and his approval plummets toward a single digit.
For two months, Guaido and other opposition leaders held secret talks with high-ranking regime officials, but, according to the Trump administration and the opposition, some reneged on a power-sharing deal at the last minute.
On April 30, Guaido and his team appeared outside a Caracas airbase before dawn, but the uprising sputtered hours later when top military brass ignored the call to abandon the regime and security forces retook the streets.
The opposition leader has few fresh methods to maintain pressure on Maduro. Guaido called for the Organization of American States to study “all options” and asked his supporters to, yet again, keep the faith in the streets.
The government “wants to persecute congressmen to try to make itself seem stronger,” Guaido told reporters at his Popular Will party headquarters in Caracas. “This will not stop us.”
Zambrano, 63, was leaving his Democratic Action party’s main office in eastern Caracas in an armoured vehicle when dozens of Sebin agents surrounded the area.
Venezuela’s Supreme Court said that Zambrano had been formally charged with treason, conspiracy and instigating rebellion, and would remain in prison as the trial proceeds.
His lawyer, Doria Benahim, said in an interview with Union Radio, that his defense hadn’t been able to communicate with him since he was taken to a preliminary hearing and did not know where he was being held.