The discovery of Ronald Ojeda’s body encased in concrete in Chile has raised new fears over how far President Nicolás Maduro will go to keep his stranglehold on Venezuela.
Shortly after 3 a.m., a battering ram burst open the door to a 14th-floor apartment and three men dressed in the black tactical gear of the Chilean police rushed in. Brandishing guns, they grabbed Ronald Ojeda in front of his wife and 6-year-old son and dragged him away in his underwear.
Mr. Ojeda, a 32-year-old former Venezuelan Army officer, was a political dissident living under asylum in a middle-class neighborhood of Chile’s capital, Santiago. He had tried to organize plots to topple Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s autocratic leader, and weeks earlier, Mr. Maduro’s government had publicly labeled him a traitor.
When his wife called the Chilean authorities, she told them that at least one of her husband’s captors had a Venezuelan accent.
Across town nine days later, the authorities, acting on a tip, discovered a carry-on suitcase buried under nearly five feet of concrete. Inside, packed amid quicklime to speed up the decomposition, was Mr. Ojeda’s folded body.
Now, after a year of investigation, Chilean authorities are confirming the fears of Venezuelan dissidents hiding out around the world: The evidence, the Chileans said, indicates that Mr. Maduro’s government ordered Mr. Ojeda’s assassination.
The Maduro government has vehemently denied that.
If true, the case represents a dark escalation in Mr. Maduro’s efforts to crush any threats to his authoritarian rule — and the accusations arrive just as President Trump opens a new dialogue with the autocrat in hopes of deporting undocumented Venezuelans.