image source, News 24
Simonovis is considered one of the most prominent «political prisoners» by the Venezuelan opposition.
Commissioner Iván Simonovis, one of the most prominent figures of the Venezuelan opposition in prison, was sent home to jail this Saturday due to his health condition.
Simonovis was security secretary of the Caracas mayor’s office (then in the hands of the opposition) in 2002, when a brief coup d’état removed President Hugo Chávez from power for a few hours.
In 2009, a court sentenced him and two other senior police officers -Henry Vivas and Lázaro Forero- to 30 years in prison for several of the 19 deaths that occurred on April 11 of that year.
The three are considered by the opposition as «political prisoners» of the government of Hugo Chávez -who died in 2013-, a description that official spokesmen reject.
«Our system does not have any connotation that allows a person to be deprived of liberty for their way of thinking,» the Ombudsman, Gabriela Ramírez, reiterated in August of this year.
the last of the three
Commissioners Vivas and Forero received humanitarian measures in 2011. But Simonovis remained interned in the Ramo Verde military prison, in the center of the country.
Since then, the opposition has intensified the campaign for his release, due to the notable deterioration of his health conditions.
According to the doctors, who had repeatedly requested a «humanitarian measure» for Simonovis, who suffers from 19 chronic medical conditions that cannot be effectively treated in prison.
According to the Ombudsman, «his conditions, according to what we have learned, are a problem of tension.»
The issue of his release from the Ramo Verde prison was one of the conditions that the opposition included in its list of demands to resume a dialogue with the government, suspended last May.
His wife, Bonny de Simonovis, indicated that the former commissioner was transferred to his house the same Friday night, under the surveillance of the intelligence services.
The former police official may not issue political opinions or give statements to the media by any means, nor may he use social networks.