Venezuelan Cardinal Baltazar Porras on Wednesday denounced that the socialist regime seized his passport and prevented him from traveling out of the country.
The Catholic priest denounced that regime officials demanded he sign a document claiming that he could not travel due to an alleged “failure to comply with travel regulations” under threat of arrest.
Cardinal Porras, who for decades has stood as a fierce critic of the Venezuelan regime, gave a detailed account of the events in a lengthy letter published on social media. Porras explained that the incident occurred Wednesday morning at Venezuela’s main international airport in Maiquetía, Vargas.
Porras said that he intended to travel to Madrid, Spain, to tend to ecclesiastical commitments over the next few days and planned to return to Venezuela on December 21. The priest noted that, over the past 25 years, it has become common to “almost always suffer, with a few exceptions” when arriving at Venezuelan immigration controls, where it is common for regime officials to tell travelers that there are problems because the “system is not working” or “you do not appear on the list.”
Local laws state that Venezuelans need a Venezuelan passport to enter and leave the country, even if they hold dual citizenship and reside abroad.
“On two occasions, they told me that I appear deceased [in their files]. Anyway, I always arrive at the airport in the best of spirits to see what I will encounter,” Porras recounted.
The cardinal said that the migration official claimed that his passport “was not up to date” and took the passport and boarding pass away to consult with, the Cardinal presumed, his superior. Moments later, the official returned and told him that the passport had “issues” and that there was nothing they could do — suggesting the Catholic priest should go to the offices of the regime’s SAIME migration and identity services in Caracas. A soldier then approached Porras and told him he could not travel.
“I asked him to give me back my passport so I could go and claim my suitcase. Even when I went to the bathroom, the official followed me closely, asking me why I was going there,” Porras wrote. “As it was already 8:00 a.m. and the flight was scheduled for 8:30 a.m. he told me, ‘You can’t travel, follow me.’”
The priest detailed that the officials took him to an upper floor of the airport, where they made him sign documentation claiming that he was not allowed to travel due to “non-compliance with travel regulations.” Porras demanded to take a photo of the document, which the officials refused to, “and not in a very nice way.”
“If I insisted on taking the photo, they threatened to arrest me,” Porras said.
Porras further recounted that he followed a Venezuelan soldier and repeatedly asked him to give him back his passport. The priest said that the only thing he returned was the boarding pass, which allowed Porras to claim his suitcase.
“He [the soldier] accompanied me to the exit for passengers arriving from abroad. I asked him several times what I had to do and where I could go,” Porras said. “He replied that they were waiting for me outside. As I passed through the sliding door, he turned back, and when it closed, I was left alone outside, not knowing where to go.”
Porras noted that a “kind lady” from the passenger information service informed him to go to the airline counter, where he received good attention and was able to receive his suitcase after an hour — but no one could give him any information about his passport. Someone then suggested, he explained, that Porras “shouldn’t waste my time here in Maiquetía” and instead should go back to Caracas.
The Cardinal stressed that he delivered his account of the events to avoid misinterpretations, stressing that it is “something that hurts because it violates our rights as citizens, and no response has been given.”
“It is Christmas time. Strength lies in the weakness of the manger, in the fragility of truth built in peace, without violence or abuse. Hope comes through continuous work for the good of all, especially the excluded,” Porras wrote.
In October, the Vatican canonized Venezuela’s first two saints, Saint José Gregorio Hernández and Saint Carmen Rendiles. At the time, socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro publicly accused Cardinal Porras of having conspired “together with his brotherhood” to prevent the canonization of Saint Hernández, with regime officials further accusing the priest of seeking to “politicize” the canonization against the rogue socialist regime.
In reality, days before the canonization, Cardinal Porras participated at an event at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome where he denounced the “morally unacceptable” situation in Venezuela and denounced the Maduro regime’s ongoing persecution of political dissidents and its unjust detention of political prisoners, drawing the ire of the Maduro regime.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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