Reuters/Montevideo
Uruguayan President Jose Mujica said he fears left-wing military officers in Venezuela will stage a coup against President Nicolas Maduro, whose government is under fire for an opposition crackdown.
“The problem Venezuela could have is that we could face a coup by left-wing military officers, and if that happens the defence of democracy goes to hell,” said Mujica in an interview with Uruguayan newspaper El Pais.
His comments came after Maduro earlier this month accused his opponents of colluding with disgruntled air force officers to oust him with US backing.
Like his mentor, the late leftist firebrand Hugo Chavez, Maduro regularly denounces alleged coup plots against him.
Last Thursday security forces arrested the opposition mayor of Caracas, Antonio Ledezma, on charges of conspiring to overthrow the government.
Mujica, who hands power back to predecessor Tabare Vazquez tomorrow, criticised the arrest of opposition figures in a separate interview with El Observador TV.
“The less political prisoners, the better,” said the 79-year-old leader, a former leftist guerrilla who was himself imprisoned for 14 years.
On Wednesday Mujica said the Venezuelan opposition was divided between those seeking an “institutional path” to change and those “who want the government to resign or to overthrow it now.”
Maduro is facing a wave of dissent as his government struggles to rein in annual inflation of 68.5 percent, end crippling shortages of basic goods and exit a recession exacerbated by the falling price of oil, Venezuela’s main export.
Speaking on the six former Guantanamo Bay prisoners sent to Uruguay as part of a push by President Barack Obama to close the US military’s prison camp in Cuba, Mujica said they were “turned halfway into vegetables” during their detention.
Mujica said the six men lacked the strength to learn Spanish and integrate.
“These people are destroyed,” Mujica said. “They could be here for two years and they won’t understand a thing, because even though you want to teach them Spanish, they lack the inner strength, the will to move on with their lives. They have been turned halfway into vegetables.”
Mujica has called Guantanamo Bay a “human disgrace.”
The six were flown to the South American country for resettlement in December.
One, Jihad Diyab, spent much of his final two years at Guantanamo on hunger strike being force fed, and now suffers sharp back pains which he puts down to his treatment.
The men who are housed in an old property in the centre of the coastal capital, Montevideo, have yet to find work or be reunited with their families as they struggle to adapt to their new lives in exile.
“They need to recuperate,” said Mujica. “But I don’t know if they will.”
Mujica is one of Latin America’s most popular leaders due to his straight-talking style and empathy with the country’s poor. A former Marxist rebel, he spurned the presidential palace and stayed in his ramshackle farmhouse on the edge of Montevideo. He has driven himself around in a battered VW Beetle and donated most of his president’s salary to charity.
