Portuguese government demands ‘immediate’ release of former Portuguese-Venezuelan governor

The Portuguese government today called on the Venezuelan authorities to “immediately and unconditionally release Williams Davila Barrios, opposition politician and former governor of the state of Mérida, who holds Portuguese citizenship.”

In a statement on the European Union’s social network.

Paolo Rangel said in the text that Davila Barrios was arrested on Thursday “arbitrarily and in poor health.”

The Secretary of State for Portuguese Communities Lusa reported this afternoon that two Portuguese Venezuelans are being detained in Venezuela for participating in demonstrations against Nicolás Maduro, and that the Portuguese government is monitoring the case.

Jose Cesario said they were a man and a woman who were arrested this week, when they participated in actions “that the regime considers illegal.”

The detainees are of dual Venezuelan and Portuguese nationality, and are so far the only detainees the government is aware of.

Meanwhile, a family source told Lusa that another Portuguese-Venezuelan, a young man, was detained in a police facility in the town of Puerto Cabello in the state of Carabobo (central-north of the country), after the police arrested him, along with other people, during a peaceful demonstration to challenge the results of the presidential elections on July 28.

Venezuela, a country with a large Portuguese and Portuguese-speaking population, is experiencing an electoral crisis after the National Electoral Council gave Maduro a win with just over 51% of the vote, while the opposition claims that Venezuela’s former diplomat candidate Edmundo González Urrutia won nearly 70% of the vote.

The Venezuelan opposition and several countries in the international community have denounced electoral fraud and demanded that voting records be submitted for independent verification, which the National Electoral Commission says is not possible due to a “cyber attack” of which it was allegedly the target.

The election results were contested in the streets, where security forces suppressed the demonstrations, recording about two thousand arrests and more than twenty deaths.