Maduro’s Human Rights Farce

Earlier this month, Venezuela's President Nicolás Maduro suddenly discovered a concern for human rights. Maduro’s regime recently declared UN Human Rights chief Volker Türk persona non grata, a retaliatory gesture for the UN’s apparent failure to protect Venezuelan migrants deported from the US. The image of Maduro, a champion of jailing political opposition and crushing dissent, posing as a human rights hero would be laughable if it were not so dangerously cynical.  

This latest action against a UN official is more of the same from Maduro’s regime. Last February, after Maduro’s foreign minister, Yván Gil, described the UN advisory office as “the private law firm of coup plotters and terrorist groups,” the regime forced the office to close. Their allegations of anti-government activity were, of course, never substantiated. 

The timing of this shuttering was no coincidence. The Maduro regime was gearing up to pull off what was perhaps the largest electoral fraud in Latin American history. Despite hollow promises to appease the US, the regime never had any intention of holding free elections. Maduro’s government spent the weeks and months leading up to the July 2024 presidential election banning opponents from the contest and using the power of the state to ensure a Maduro reelection.