Go to Article
Excerpt from news.google.com
Millions of Venezuelans went to the polls to vote their widely loathed authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro out of power last Sunday – but Tibisay Betancourt was not one of them.
“I voted for him,” said the 60-year-old masseuse, a loyal supporter of the president’s Chavista movement who lives in a housing estate apartment given to her by Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chávez.
Within hours of casting her vote, Betancourt had cause to rue her choice. As turmoil gripped the streets of Caracas after Maduro’s disputed claim to have won the election, she sent her son, Alfredo Alejandro Rondón, to a nearby shop to buy a bottle of Sprite for his sick father. Minutes later his brother, Yorluis, said he had seen Alfredo being beaten and dragged away by members of the Bolivarian national police.
By Thursday morning, the high school graduate was one of hundreds of prisoners languishing behind bars at a police base on the east side of town, facing possible terrorism charges that could land him in jail for up to 30 years.
