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Caracas – Venezuela’s legislative National Assembly, currently with an opposition majority, welcomed Tuesday as a new member the opposition lawmaker Rosmit Mantilla, the Caribbean country’s first openly gay legislator, who was released from jail last week after being imprisoned for two-and-a-half years.
Mantilla was received with applause and was sworn-in before the leadership of the legislature headed by speaker Henry Ramos Allup, who invited him to take a seat and participate in the debate scheduled for this Tuesday.
«Outside (in the street) there’s hunger, there’s insecurity, I was imprisoned by the Sebin (national intelligence service), but Venezuela is imprisoned by hunger and insecurity,» Mantilla told reporters after being sworn-in.
He said he is committed to freedom and political change, and thanked the Catholic Church and the Vatican for his release from jail.
The legislator was considered by the MUD opposition alliance as an iconic political prisoner and was declared a «prisoner of conscience» in 2015 by Amnesty International, which asked Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on several occasions for his immediate release.
Mantilla, a member of the Voluntad Popular (VP) party of jailed opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez, was the first political prisoner to be released after the government and MUD reached the first accords of their dialogue last Nov. 12, which included the release of several imprisoned members of the opposition.
The newly freed prisoner, who before his arrest was a VP militant, was presented as a MUD candidate for the western state of Tachira when he was in jail and subsequently won a seat in the National Assembly in the elections of Dec. 6, 2015. EFE
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