Venezuela’s opposition leader Maria Corina Machado was freed on Thursday after a brief detention, her Vente Venezuela movement said on social media.
Machado was detained amid gunshots after an anti-government march in Caracas, her first public appearance in months, the movement said.
Earlier, her ally and former presidential candidate Edmundo Gonzalez, demanded she be freed immediately as government officials including Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello said her arrest was “an invention, a lie”.
Vente Venezuela had said Machado was “violently intercepted” in eastern Caracas, and that the motorcycle caravan in which she was riding had been shot at.
The opposition is protesting around the country in an eleventh-hour effort to put pressure on President Nicolas Maduro ahead of his third inauguration on Friday. He is expected to serve another, six-year term.
The US and other governments have refused to recognise Maduro as the rightful leader of Venezuela after the opposition was widely credited with proving the despot lost elections in July.
“They wanted us to fight each other, but Venezuela is united, we are not afraid,” Machado shouted to a few hundred protesters from atop a truck in the capital moments before her arrest.
The White House called for a halt to what it described as the regime’s harassment of the political opposition. In a statement, it said: “We have and continue to condemn publicly Maduro and his representatives for attempting to intimidate Venezuela’s democratic opposition.”
Machado, 57, is a hardliner former lawmaker who stayed and fought against Maduro even after many of her allies in the opposition leadership fled, joining an exodus of some 7 million Venezuelans who’ve abandoned their homeland in recent years.
Her party collected tally sheets from 85 per cent of electronic voting machines and posted them online. They showed that its candidate, Gonzalez, had beaten Maduro by a more than two-to-one margin.
Experts from the United Nations and the Atlanta-based Carter Centre, both invited by Maduro’s government to observe the election, have said the tally sheets published by the opposition are legitimate.
Loyalists who control the country’s judiciary banned her from running against Maduro last year. In a deft move, she backed Gonzalez, an unknown outsider.
“To the security forces [of Venezuela], I warn you: don’t play with fire,” Gonzalez said in a social media post shortly after reports of Machado’s arrest emerged.
Additional reporting by Associated Press.
