What one of the Citgo executives detained in Venezuela said
Pereira decides to tell now what happened to them in order to leave Venezuela, regarding the controversy over the documents that Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutiawho won the presidential elections on July 28, signed for the brothers at the residence of the Spanish ambassador in Caracas Delcy Eloina and Jorge de Jesus Rodriguez Gomezso that he would be allowed to go into exile,
In conversation with Infobae, Jose Angel Pereira Ruimwyikformer political prisoner and former president of Citgo, the important Venezuelan oil company in the United States, says that one signs what the officials want “and one signs because one wants to leave,” emphasizing with conviction that “if at any time they want to take away what they made us sign or record, then they will do so, but that has no validity whatsoever.”
He says, not without some surprise, that people now seem to be realizing what the regime has been applying for years. with the people he threatens, detains and coerces. “They put people in jail without evidence? They have been doing this for years. They coerce families? They have been doing this for years. They put family members in jail? They have been doing this for years. They make people sign things? They have been doing this for years.”
Citgo is a subsidiary of PDVSA.
“We (Citgo executives) were made to sign a letter and film a video. Who can point the finger at us because we wanted to leave the country and be free? We signed what they told us and they have done the same with many people to allow them to leave the country,” says Pereira, who along with his Citgo colleagues He was in the El Helicoide torture centerby order of the Bolivarian Intelligence Service (Sebin).
Asked what the letter they were made to sign contained, he replied: “I don’t know, because they only gave us the last page and told us to ‘sign and put your fingerprints’. They didn’t let us read what we were signing. It all happened very quickly, they came with the last page, we signed and that was it,” which shows that the modus operandi of the regime is to exercise coercion in psychological operations and the use of power and threats.
The video is impressive. “That was almost in the style of a movie production.because there was a person with a camera and another person came, who I suppose is a Sebin official, a specialist in recording videos and was the one who gave us the script of what we had to say: they were going to say that they were treated well, and everything was positive.”
“That individual stood behind the camera and every so often he would tell us to repeat what we were saying: ‘no, no, say such a thing’, ‘say it looking at the camera’, ‘you forgot to say this’, ‘you should say it more naturally’, in short, he had a script for us to record the way he wanted.”
He says that the regime “has everything planned, so when you see someone in a video, ‘confessing’ or a signed letter, Rest assured that none of that is real“That everything is staged. What they did to us was like that and they have done it with many of the detainees and others who have been released.”
The six Citgo managers who were detained for five years by order of the SEBIN
Record and film
The six executives were summoned to Caracas for a meeting that was actually the bait with which the Venezuelan regime made them travel from the United States. They were arrested on November 21, 2017. They were senior executives of the company Citgo, a subsidiary of Petróleos de Venezuela, whom the attorney general accused of “embezzlement, money laundering and criminal association.”
Jose Angel Pereira He was the president of Citgo; Tomeu Vadell RecaldeVice President of Refining; Jorge Luis Toledo KohuryVice President of Supply and Marketing; Alirio Zambranovice president and general manager of the Corpus Christi refinery; Jose Luis ZambranoVice President of Shared Services; and Gustavo CardenasStrategic Director of Shareholder Relations and Public and Government Affairs, who was released on March 9, 2022. The others were redeemed seven months later, on October 1, 2022.
That day was not the only time they had been filmed, because they had already recorded another one before; on June 16, 2020, the then six executives of the Venezuelan oil company, dressed in orange, the one who speaks with his face uncovered and the others with masks because it was the time of Covid 19, also recorded a video, with a photo of Hugo Chávez behind, which was published by the then foreign minister. Jorge Alberto Arreaza Montserrat.