Hit-style shooting of Venezuelan activists in Colombia fuels fear of wider persecution by Maduro

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MEXICO CITY (AP) — The hit-style shooting of two Venezuelan activists in Colombia's capital is fueling fears among Venezuela's diaspora that a crackdown on dissent by the government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is seeping beyond the South American nation's borders.

On Monday afternoon, Venezuelan human rights activist Yendri Velásquez and political consultant Luis Peche Arteaga were shot leaving a building in the north of Bogota by two unidentified people waiting for them in a car.

Around 15 shots were fired at the activists, who fled widening government repression last year, and Peche Arteaga was hit six times, said Laura Dib, a colleague of Velásquez and Venezuela Program Director for the Washington Office on Latin America. Both went through surgery and were in stable condition.

“It’s tragedy after tragedy,” said Dib. “It has been a really hard day for all of the human rights movement in Venezuela. This sends a very clear message about the risks of transnational repression."

It was not immediately clear who was behind their shooting and Colombian authorities said they were investigating the attack. Dib and other civil society leaders said they were waiting for the results of the investigation, but that the attack appeared to be targeted based on their political profiles.

The two men were among an exodus of political opposition and civil society leaders who fled Venezuela after Maduro was widely accused of stealing last year's election and the government detained more than 2,000 people, including human rights defenders and critics.

Velásquez was already arbitrarily detained by Venezuelan authorities for hours as he tried to leave the country for a human rights conference in August last year, according to an Inter-American Commission on Human Rights report. Velásquez had also said that the Venezuelan government canceled his passport.

In fleeing, they joined an exodus of nearly 8 million people from crisis-stricken Venezuela in recent years, many seeking refuge in neighboring Colombia.

But civil society groups and diaspora leaders say that those who once found respite in other Andean nations increasingly fear for their security following the attack.

Arles Pereda, president of the Colony of Venezuelans in Colombia (ColVenz) said that concern has simmered for years as the government has targeted civil society groups. It’s not hard to contract a hired gun in Colombia, in part due to the prevalence of criminal groups in the region.

“We've always been watching out for possible persecution against us. An attack like this was something we knew was coming for a while, that we knew could happen at any moment. Now it has in Bogota," he said.

“We worry that we can all become a target,” he added.

Now, Pereda said civil society groups working with him are looking for ways to boost security protocols, including hiring body guards and looking for third escape countries in situations in which human rights defenders feel they face serious danger.

Shockwaves rippled across the diaspora community last year when a dissident Venezuelan military officer Ronald Ojeda was kidnapped and killed in Chile. Chilean investigators said the killing was political in nature, orchestrated from within Venezuela and was likely carried out by the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua.

James Story, former U.S. ambassador of the Venezuela Affairs Unit under both the Biden and first Trump administrations, said that it was well within the Maduro government's capabilities to carry out such an attack in Colombia, and that the government had long kept tabs on its adversaries in the neighboring country.

“Everybody from the opposition who was living in Bogotá was concerned that they were either going to be potentially attacked by the Maduro regime, that they were under surveillance or some kind of nefarious activity would happen,” Story said.

He noted that while the Tren de Aragua was circling through headlines and political discourse in the U.S., Maduro’s government had a number of different actors that could carry out such attacks.

That concern was echoed by Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who said in a post on the social media platform X that the “attack constitutes a serious aggression” and demanded protection for the activists and other Venezuelan exiles in Colombia.

The attack comes as Venezuela has once again come roaring into the spotlight. Days before the attack, Machado was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize by a committee elected by the Norwegian parliament. The same day of the shooting, Maduro announced he was closing the Venezuelan embassy in Oslo with little explanation.

Meanwhile, tensions have simmered between the United States and Maduro over fatal strikes of boats the Trump administration alleges were carrying drugs from Venezuela. Trump announced Tuesday that a strike on a fifth boat was carried out Tuesday, killing six people.

Dib, Velásquez's colleague, noted that finding aid for Venezuelan exiles has only grown more difficult in recent months as the Trump administration has slashed international aid funds and protections for Venezuelans within its own borders.

Simultaneously, governments in the Andes have grown more hostile in recent years toward Venezuelan migrants as they've taken on the brunt of the largest migratory crisis in Latin American history with few resources and have cast blame on migrants for upticks in crime.

Despite seeking help by Colombia's Ombudsman's Office in his application, Velásquez had still not been granted international protection at the time he was shot, Dib said.

“There is just so much that could have been done,” she said. “I think this is a wake-up call.”

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