Shortly after 3 a.m., a battering ram burst open the door to a 14th-floor apartment and three men dressed in the black tactical gear of the Chilean police rushed in. Brandishing guns, they grabbed Ronald Ojeda in front of his wife and 6-year-old son and dragged him away in his underwear.
Mr. Ojeda, a 32-year-old former Venezuelan Army officer, was a political dissident living under asylum in a middle-class neighborhood of Chile’s capital, Santiago. He had tried to organize plots to topple Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s autocratic leader, and weeks earlier, Mr. Maduro’s government had publicly labeled him a traitor.
When his wife called the Chilean authorities, she told them that at least one of her husband’s captors had a Venezuelan accent.
Across town nine days later, the authorities, acting on a tip, discovered a carry-on suitcase buried under nearly five feet of concrete. Inside, packed amid quicklime to speed up the decomposition, was Mr. Ojeda’s folded body.
Now, after a year of investigation, Chilean authorities are confirming the fears of Venezuelan dissidents hiding out around the world: The evidence, the Chileans said, indicates that Mr. Maduro’s government ordered Mr. Ojeda’s assassination.
The Maduro government has vehemently denied that.
If true, the case represents a dark escalation in Mr. Maduro’s efforts to crush any threats to his authoritarian rule — and the accusations arrive just as President Trump opens a new dialogue with the autocrat in hopes of deporting undocumented Venezuelans.
For years, Mr. Maduro has maintained his grip on Venezuela by jailing political opponents at home. But the murder in Chile suggests the Venezuelan leader has also adopted the tactics of his close ally, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, to reach into foreign nations to assassinate political rivals.
“Everyone is terrified. No one says where they are, how they took refuge, what country they arrived in,” said Zair Mundaray, a former top Venezuelan prosecutor who recently fled exile in Colombia to a country he would not identify after facing threats from people he believes are Venezuelan agents. “Ojeda was a turning point for everyone.”
Chile has been holding hearings to charge 19 people whom the authorities said took part in some aspect of Mr. Ojeda’s murder, including planning the killing, carrying it out and hiding the body, according to court documents viewed by The New York Times. Chilean prosecutors said most of the 19 accused are members of the Chilean branch of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan crime group that Mr. Trump wants to designate a terrorist organization.
Carolina Tohá, Chile’s interior and public security minister, said in an interview that three people have testified that the Venezuelan government hired Tren de Aragua to assassinate Mr. Ojeda. One of those people said Mr. Maduro’s top deputy and interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, personally ordered the killing, she said.
She said investigators had eliminated two other hypotheses: extortion and gang infighting. As for the third hypothesis — a political assassination — she said: “It’s still not proven. But we can say that the probabilities are very worrying.”
The Maduro government, including Mr. Cabello, has repeatedly denied involvement in the killing. Mr. Cabello has joked that the Venezuelan government would not be capable of pulling off such a crime. Tarek William Saab, Venezuela’s attorney general, said the murder was actually “a false flag operation that the Chilean State itself covered up.”
Mr. Maduro’s spokesman declined to comment for this article, while Mr. Cabello’s spokesman also did not respond to a request for comment.
Chilean investigators believe Venezuelan counterintelligence agents have worked out of Venezuela’s embassy in Santiago, according to a senior official close to the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss findings that had not yet been made public.
The accusations from Chile come as Mr. Trump has made overtures to Mr. Maduro. He dispatched Richard Grenell, a U.S. special envoy, to meet Mr. Maduro in Caracas, the capital, and he returned with six Americans who had been held in Venezuela.
The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said the meeting did not mean the United States recognized Mr. Maduro as the legitimate Venezuelan president. Instead, Mr. Grenell wants Mr. Maduro to agree to take back several hundred Tren de Aragua members detained in the United States and release U.S. citizens detained in Venezuela.
The United States pulled diplomats from Venezuela in 2019. Mr. Maduro’s government called the meeting “a new beginning in bilateral relations.”
Last week, the new U.S. border czar, Tom Holman, told The Times that deportation flights to Venezuela would begin within a month.
Many international observers — including Secretary of State Marco Rubio when he was a senator — have said sending Venezuelans back to Venezuela under Mr. Maduro would be a death sentence.
Mr. Maduro’s government has a long history of human rights abuses inside Venezuela. But the government has also been tracking down dissidents abroad for years, according to former Venezuelan officials, security experts and dissidents themselves.
To do so, Mr. Maduro has relied on a network of Venezuelan agents, criminal gangs and allied rebel groups to surveil, intimidate and, in some cases, kidnap dissidents outside Venezuela, according to the former officials and experts.
In 2021, members of a Colombian guerrilla group, the National Liberation Army, or ELN, kidnapped a former Venezuelan Army lieutenant, Franklin Caldera, who was hiding in Colombia after helping attack a Venezuelan military base, according to his father and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
The ELN brought Mr. Caldera to Venezuela, where he was imprisoned and tortured. In November, the commission moved to protect more of his family outside Venezuela because of increasing threats.
In December 2023, Mr. Ojeda traveled to the Colombian border to plot a potential uprising against Mr. Maduro with other dissidents, according to a lawyer for Mr. Ojeda’s family. There, the ELN captured the dissidents’ effective leader — a former military officer named Anyelo Heredia — and brought him back to Venezuela, according to Mr. Mundaray and Pablo Parada, a dissident close to Mr. Heredia. Mr. Ojeda escaped.
A month later, the Venezuelan government published a list of 33 military members it said had turned on the nation. “Zero tolerance for traitors!” the document said. The names were taken from Mr. Heredia’s phone, Mr. Mundaray said, and many of those in Venezuela were imprisoned.
Mr. Ojeda was also on the list. Less than a month later, he was murdered.
Court documents show the planning of the murder among members of Tren de Aragua, one of Latin America’s most violent and notorious criminal organizations. Messages from confiscated phones showed that a Tren de Aragua boss told the gang’s leader in Chile that they would be paid a large sum to kidnap and kill Mr. Ojeda. That set off a flurry of activity — all laid out in a WhatsApp group — in which gang members obtained Chilean police uniforms, weapons and vehicles, according to the documents.
At 3:05 a.m. on Feb. 21, 2024, five men disguised as police officers arrived at Mr. Ojeda’s building in a Nissan Versa with police lights on top. One stayed in the car, one gave the doorman a false warrant and the other three kidnapped Mr. Ojeda.
Days later, in a poor neighborhood controlled by the gang, the police were tipped off when neighbors reported suspicious activity in a shack where men were seen wheeling cement in and dirt out. An autopsy concluded that Mr. Ojeda was killed by asphyxiation, according to the documents.
As evidence began to point to the Maduro government, the Chilean prosecutor leading the case said so on television. Venezuela responded angrily, denying involvement. Last month, Venezuela ordered Chile to close its consulates in Venezuela and said diplomatic ties had been suspended.
President Gabriel Boric of Chile said that if Venezuela is shown to have ordered Mr. Ojeda’s killing, “it is not only a violation of our sovereignty, it is a violation of human rights and it has the worst precedents, which we know in our history,” referring to Chile’s own murderous dictatorship.
Building surveillance footage showing the kidnapping spread across Chile and beyond. Ms. Tohá said the criminals could have destroyed the cameras but chose not to. “Mr. Ojeda could have been killed in a much simpler, much less conspicuous way,” she said. “There is a reason they chose this strategy of making it visible.”
Mr. Parada, the Venezuelan dissident in Colombia, said that days after authorities found Mr. Ojeda’s body, mysterious men showed up to a meeting of dissidents in Colombia and chased him through the streets. He spent a night in a sewage pipe to evade them. Now he is in hiding again.
“It’s not easy to know that they’re looking for you to kill you. It’s not easy to know that you can’t even return to your country,” Mr. Parada said. “It’s not easy to know that, at any moment, I could suffer the fate that Ronald suffered.”
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