Armando.info: The fifth judge of horror was a good-natured guy

His friends warned him. They told him not to accept the offer, that he would pay a high price, that it would take its toll on him. But against all the warnings, the young lawyer Edward Miguel Briceño Cisneros decided to step forward and accept the assignment: to put himself at the service of the self-proclaimed Bolivarian revolution and judge in its name acts of terrorism that, for Chavismo, have a more defined definition. broader than the traditional one, to encompass any dissidence or opposition activity.

Today he serves as Special Judge of the First Court of First Instance with Jurisdiction over Terrorism, part of the false circuit of terrorism courts that gained prominence after the repressive wave undertaken by the Nicolás Maduro regime to silence the protests, after the electoral blow of the 28th. of July.

Without a public face although he did not wear a hood, unknown among many forum professionals, a recent story from Armando.info who profiled four other of his colleagues in the anti-terrorist jurisdiction, had to settle for saying, after fruitless reporting, that Briceño “has managed to maintain a low profile that is proof of scrutiny.”

But that low profile did not respond to strategic caution on his part. It was only a natural consequence of a gray career within the Venezuelan judicial system. Now we know that it comes from nowhere.

Briceño, for the rest, took care of attracting all eyes and erasing the mystery about his figure on September 2. Then he signed with a dense and unintelligible scrawl, superimposed on the line where his name was clarified in block letters, the arrest warrant against the opposition candidate and, according to all available evidence, winner of the presidential elections, Edmundo González Urrutia. Thus, he responded expressly to the request for an arrest warrant made by prosecutor Luis Ernesto Dueñez, which would ultimately lead to González’s exile in Spain.

That signature led Briceño to almost immediately face the first high-priced bill that his friends predicted he would have to pay: on September 12, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) The United States included him in a new list of Venezuelans sanctioned by the so-called Global Magnitsky Act. According to the bulletin issued that day by OFAC from Washington, Briceño and the other 15 people whose names were added to the list of Specially Designated Nationals (in Spanish, specially named foreign nationals) were “key officials involved in Maduro’s fraudulent and illegitimate claims of victory and his brutal repression of free expression after the elections.”

Due to the initial letter of his last name, Briceño was the first name on the list.

More details in Armando.info.