President-elect Donald Trump issued a warning ahead of the inauguration of contested Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who took up the top job for a third term on Friday.
Despite significant opposition both at home and abroad to the July election in which Maduro claimed victory without providing ballot-box proof, the Venezuelan leader, deemed a “dictator” by American lawmakers, is now set to hold office until 2031.
On Thursday, opposition leader María Corina Machado emerged from months of hiding to join hundreds of anti-Maduro protesters in the capital city of Caracas and demand that opposition candidate Edmundo González be sworn in instead.
Machado was briefly detained by government security forces after they “violently intercepted” her convoy as she attempted to leave the protests, the Associated Press reported.
Trump took to social media to demand she remain “safe and alive.”
“Venezuelan democracy activist Maria Corina Machado and President-elect Gonzalez are peacefully expressing the voices and the will of the Venezuelan people with hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating against the regime,” he wrote. “These freedom fighters should not be harmed, and must stay safe and alive.”
The opposition figure was apparently forced to record several videos before she was released, though