WASHINGTON: Venezuela's former intelligence chief, Cristopher Figuera, is in the United States, "a free man," a senior US official confirmed Tuesday, holding him out as an example for others prepared to turn against President Nicolas Maduro.
Figuera, who surfaced in an interview with the Washington Post after nearly two months in hiding, fled Venezuela after the collapse of an April 30 military uprising that he helped organize against Maduro.
"I'm proud of what I did," Figuera told the Post. "For now, the regime has gotten ahead of us. But that can quickly change."
The highest-profile defector against the Maduro regime, the Cuban-trained Figuera served as a security chief of the late Hugo Chavez and was elevated in October to chief of Maduro's feared intelligence service -- the Sebin.
"He's not under detention. He's in the US and, you know, a free man," said Elliott Abrams, the Trump administration's pointman on Venezuela.
"I would like to talk to him myself. I assume other officials would like to because he quite obviously, as we can see from his position and we can see from the Post, he has a lot of interesting things to say about the Maduro regime and life in Venezuela," Abrams told reporters at the State Department.
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