The government of Venezuela on Friday prevented four former Latin American presidents, critical of Nicolás Maduro's government, from traveling to Caracas. They intended to serve as observers in the elections on Sunday, invited by the opposition.
The CM-223 flight of the Panamanian airline Copa Airlines, which was transporting four former presidents to Venezuela, could not take off from Tocumen Airport "due to the blockade of Venezuelan airspace," assured Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino X.
The group was made up of former presidents Miguel Ángel Rodríguez (Costa Rica), Jorge Quiroga (Bolivia), Vicente Fox (Mexico), and Mireya Moscoso (Panama), who are members of the Democratic Initiative of Spain and the Americas, a forum of former right-wing leaders.
The former Colombian Vice President Marta Lucía Ramírez was also part of the delegation.
The flight was able to depart when the former presidents, who had initially resisted, decided to disembark the plane.
From there, they moved to the presidential palace in Panama, where they held a press conference in which they criticized Maduro.
"The plane was full, completely full, of Venezuelans who were going to vote on Sunday," said Mireya Moscoso.
"We were in first class and at the very back of the plane, people stood up and started to applaud. We had already said our goodbyes and saw tears, passengers crying, telling us: 'Please, stay, don't go!'" he added.
"Venezuelans on the same flight applaud and sing the anthem in support of world leaders. Many of those citizens are coming to exercise their right to vote on Sunday, July 28," noted the official account of the campaign of opposition leader María Corina Machado and candidate Edmundo González.
On Wednesday, Diosdado Cabello, vice president of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), had warned that if the former presidents traveled, they would be expelled.
"They are not invited, they are show-offs [...]. If they show up at the airport, my God! What is going to happen? We expel them, we expel them, no problem" because "they are enemies of this country, they are fascists [...] They are not coming here to mess around," he affirmed on television.
After the incident, the Chancellor of Panama, Javier Martínez-Acha, summoned the representative of the Venezuelan diplomatic mission in Panama to request an explanation of the incident.
Panama "cannot allow its flag airline's planes with Panamanians on board to be detained for political reasons unrelated to the country," said the minister at the press conference.
Later, in a new post and after the former presidents had already left the plane, Martínez-Acha reported that, through Venezuela's Minister of Transport, Ramón Celestino Velásquez, they were informed that from that moment on, there would be "no impediment" for flights.
The banned former presidents from traveling to Venezuela are part of the Freedom and Democracy Group, which, in addition to Moscoso, includes the Dominican president, Luis Abinader, and the former Spanish government presidents José María Aznar and Mariano Rajoy, as well as former leaders Mario Abdo Benítez from Paraguay; Jeanine Áñez and Jorge Quiroga from Bolivia; Felipe Calderón and Vicente Fox from Mexico; and Iván Duque and Andrés Pastrana from Colombia.
Also part of that group are former presidents Osvaldo Hurtado, Jamil Mahuad, and Guillermo Lasso from Ecuador; Rafael Calderón and Miguel Ángel Rodríguez from Costa Rica; and Mauricio Macri from Argentina; as well as Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó and former governor of Puerto Rico Luis Fortuño.
The decision of Caracas to prevent some of them from leaving Panama comes after the Freedom and Democracy Group stated on Wednesday that any attempt at fraud in the presidential elections in Venezuela must be sanctioned by the international community.
Not only right-wing observers have been banned from entering Venezuela.
This week, former Argentine president Alberto Fernández also stated that the government of Venezuela asked him not to travel to act as an observer because they had "doubts about (his) impartiality."
In the elections on Sunday, ten candidates will participate, including the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, and former ambassador Edmundo González Urrutia, the representative of the opposition coalition Plataforma Unitaria Democrática (PUD) and who is leading the voting intention to replace the disqualified María Corina Machado, according to traditional pollsters.
Nicolás Maduro is seeking a third consecutive term.
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