FOR YEARS, Venezuela’s democrats have struggled to salvage their country through peaceful means. The South American nation’s social and economic crisis is so profound, and its dictatorship so stubborn, however, that it would have been a miracle if at least a faction of the opposition did not resort to violence. That may be the reason for the bizarre detonation of explosives aboard two drones flying near President Nicolás Maduro as he addressed a military assembly in Caracas last week. Or it may not. Whatever the truth behind the apparent assassination attempt, in which seven people were injured, the relevant — and disturbing — consequence has been to give Mr. Maduro a pretext to clamp down on Venezuela’s already besieged opposition.

Responsible for dozens of deaths in a violent crackdown last year, the Maduro regime has unleashed its secret police again in the days since the explosions. Tuesday night, masked men presumed to be government secret police agents seized 29-year-old Juan Requesens, a leading regime opponent who sits in Venezuela’s near-paralyzed national legislature. Also, the government has issued an arrest warrant for Julio Borges, the former president of the National Assembly, who lives in Bogota, Colombia. In an especially clumsy attempt to divert attention from its own failings, Mr. Maduro pointed a finger of blame at the outgoing Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos, and the Maduro regime asserted that purported assassins were trained in that neighboring nation as well. He leavened these accusations with similar ones against his “ultra-right” opponents in Miami.