Venezuelan 65-year-old doctor Marggie Orozco was sentenced to 30 years in prison for criticizing the regime of socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro in a WhatsApp voice note in 2024, Venezuelan outlets reported Monday.
Venezuelan regime courts reportedly found Orozco guilty of “treason to the fatherland, incitement to hatred, and conspiracy” for having used the WhatsApp messaging platform to send a voice note last year critical of the Maduro regime, calling for people to participate in the July 28, 2024, sham presidential election that Maduro claims he “won.”
Vente Venezuela, the country’s only mainstream center-right party led by 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado, reportedly explained that Orozco simply complained about the regime’s distribution of the often hard to find domestic gas cylinders in her community through the audio voice notes.
The Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional detailed that Venezuelan law enforcement officials unjustly detained Orozco on August 5, 2024, in San Juan de Colón, Táchira, amid the Maduro regime’s brutal repression campaign against dissidents and protesters in the aftermath of the fraudulent election.
Orozco was transferred to the women’s ward of a penitentiary center in Táchira in December. El Nacional, citing information from local non-government organizations, detailed that the 65-year-old doctor suffered two heart attacks in the past two years, one of which occurred in September 2024 when she was already under unjust detention. Local organizations, such as Doctors United of Táchira, demanded Orozro’s release, stressing her medical conditions.
Venezuelan law establishes 30 years as the maximum possible prison time for committing a crime. Since 2017, the Maduro regime has used an “anti-hate speech” law to persecute and punish dissidents, often charging its targets with spreading “hateful content.” The Maduro regime deliberately left the law’s text ambiguous and as such, there is no clear definition as to what constitutes “hateful” speech in Venezuela.
In October, Nicolás Maduro ordered the commissioning of a new “snitch” smartphone application so that local citizens can report “everything you see, everything you hear” to the National Bolivarian Armed Forces (FANB), which presumably includes sharing information on opinions critical of the Maduro regime. Maduro’s instructions call for the new citizen surveillance app to be based on the existing infrastructure of VenApp, a regime-built social media platform that the Venezuelan government retrofitted in August 2024 with features to “hunt” dissidents. Following widespread reports from Venezuelan citizens, VenApp was taken down from both Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store platforms. The app nevertheless remains accessible through alternate installation methods at press time.
El Nacional reported that Orozco was unjustly imprisoned last year after a sympathizer of the Maduro regime filed a complaint with authorities over the content of the doctor’s WhatsApp messages. The unnamed person is reportedly in charge of the Maduro regime’s CLAP program in the community where Orozco resides in San Juan de Colón.
CLAP, or “Local Committees for Supply and Production,” is the Venezuelan regime’s corrupt subsidized food program widely condemned for distributing bags full of low quality, often rotten items to Venezuela’s impoverished population. The program was originally implemented by Maduro in 2016 as a “response” to the growing hunger in Venezuela — caused by his own regime’s failed socialist policies.
CLAP has been also widely denounced as a form of social control that allows regime sympathizers in charge of the program in their local communities to use food to extort the communities under penalty of a person losing access to the program’s “benefits.”
In 2019, during President Donald Trump’s first term, the Department of the Treasury sanctioned Maduro regime individuals linked to the corrupt CLAP program — including Alex Saab, believed to be Maduro’s top money launderer and “financial brain.” Saab had been detained by U.S. law enforcement officials in 2020 and was undergoing trial proceedings on charges of using the U.S. financial system to launder $350 million from Venezuelan state coffers when former President Joe Biden released him and returned him to Venezuela in December 2023 as part of a prisoner swap deal. Presently, Saab serves as Maduro’s Industries Minister.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
