BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) – Argentina’s president on Tuesday demanded that Venezuelan authorities immediately free an Argentine soldier arrested earlier this month after he entered Venezuela to visit family, in the latest flare-up between the two South American nations.
At a military school event, President Javier Milei said security forces under the command of the “criminal dictator Nicolas Maduro” arrested Nahuel Gallo, a soldier with the Argentine national force known as the Gendarmeria. Milei said Gallo was in Venezuela visiting his wife and son.
Milei’s foreign and security ministries have previously called for the release of Gallo, who was arrested on Dec. 8 after entering Venezuela’s western state of Tachira from neighboring Colombia.
“We demand his immediate release and we’ll exhaust all diplomatic paths to return him safely to Argentina,” said Milei.
Although the two nations have not formally cut diplomatic ties, Argentine diplomats were expelled from Caracas last August following Venezuela’s July presidential election that Milei’s government forcefully rejected as fraudulent.
The libertarian Milei has frequently criticized and insulted his socialist Venezuelan counterpart.
While Venezuela’s information ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Milei’s comments, Venezuelan Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello claimed on Monday that Gallo had been sent on an aborted “mission,” but without going into further detail.
“We’ve dealt them a heavy blow thanks to state security forces,” said Cabello.
Maduro was declared the winner of the July 28 vote by the government-aligned electoral authority and the Supreme Court, while the opposition says its candidate won a landslide victory after it published thousands of scanned voting machine receipts its observers obtained.
(Reporting by Walter Bianchi in Buenos Aires; Additional reporting by Vivian Sequera in Caracas; Editing by Leslie Adler)
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