Lawmakers loyal to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro stripped Juan Guaido of immunity Tuesday, paving the way for the opposition leader\u2019s prosecution and potential arrest for supposedly violating the constitution when he declared himself interim president.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Guaido has embarked on an international campaign to topple the president\u2019s socialist administration amid deepening social unrest in the country plagued by nearly a month of power outages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He declared himself Venezuela\u2019s interim president in January, and vowed to overthrow Maduro. So far, however, Maduro has avoided jailing the man that the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump and roughly 50 other nations recognize as Venezuela\u2019s legitimate leader.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tuesday night\u2019s vote was unanimous. Constituent Assembly president and socialist party boss Diosdado Cabello accused the opposition of naively inviting a foreign invasion and of inciting a civil war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Constitution guarantees immunity for elected officials, and says that in order to withdraw immunity the accused lawmaker must be given a preliminary hearing before the Supreme Court.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Earlier Tuesday, Guaido dismissed the Maduro-stacked high court and Constituent Assembly as illegitimate, and continued his calls for Maduro to step down.\u201cThis is not even persecution,\u201d Gaido said before the vote. \u201cThis is inquisition.\u201d Guaido has come under increasing pressure in recent weeks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Officials jailed his chief of staff, Roberto Marrero, accused of involvement in a \u201cterrorist\u201d scheme to overthrow the government. Maduro\u2019s government also barred Guaido from holding public office for 15 years for allegedly hiding or falsifying data in his sworn statement of assets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The opposition leader has drawn masses of Venezuelans into the streets and garnered broad international support, demanding Maduro give up rule of the crisis-wracked nation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lawmakers loyal to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro stripped Juan Guaido of immunity Tuesday, paving the way for the opposition leader\u2019s prosecution and potential arrest for supposedly violating the constitution when he declared himself interim president. Guaido has embarked on an international campaign to topple the president\u2019s socialist administration amid deepening social unrest in the country […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":58357,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58356"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58356\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58358,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58356\/revisions\/58358"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}