>The five Venezuelan dissidents — Pedro Urruchurtu, Magallí Meda, Claudia Macero, Humberto Villalobos, and Ómar González — are close associates of opposition leader María Corina Machado, who has remained in hiding for months after facing threats from the ruling socialist regime. >The five dissidents sought refuge in the Argentine embassy in Caracas in March 2024 and remained there for 14 months after being targeted by the regime’s “Bolivarian Fury” dissident persecution campaign and accused of joining unproven assassination plots against socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro and members of his top brass. A sixth dissident, 70-year-old Fernando Martínez Mottola, also sought refuge with the group, but he voluntarily turned himself in to Venezuelan authorities in December and died from a stroke in February. >The embassy has remained in Brazilian custody since August after Maduro abruptly cut ties with Argentina and several other Latin American countries that refused to acknowledge his “victory” in the fraudulent July 2024 presidential election. Maduro kept the embassy in a constant state of siege, cutting its access to running water and power, stealing the building’s fuse box, and constantly harassing the dissidents, who were repeatedly denied safe passage out of the country. >The stranded dissidents were rescued this month as part of a “precise operation” by the United States and taken into American territory. The operation, whose details have not been publicly disclosed at press time, has been dubbed by Venezuelan and international media as Operation Guacamaya (“Macaw”) in reference to the bird species that inhabits Caracas. . . [Archive](https://archive.today/sYtpn)