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Antonio Ledezma, Venezuelan Opposition Leader, Flees to Colombia

Antonio Ledezma holding a Venezuelan flag on Friday at the Camilo Daza airport in Cucuta, Colombia.Credit...Efrain Patino/Associated Press

Kirk Semple and

CARACAS, Venezuela — Antonio Ledezma, a prominent opposition leader in Venezuela who had been placed under house arrest on sedition charges, escaped on Friday morning and fled to neighboring Colombia, where the authorities allowed him to enter.

Calling the trip “an odyssey” and likening it to a movie plotline, Mr. Ledezma, in a brief televised interview after his border crossing, said that he had somehow managed to evade detection while passing through more than 29 posts manned by members of Venezuela’s security forces.

“I am going to defend the liberty of Venezuela,” he told reporters in Colombia. “I’m more useful to Venezuela in the street.”

Mr. Ledezma’s flight was hailed by Venezuela’s political opposition and its sympathizers around the world as a boost for their fight and a major embarrassment for the administration of President Nicolás Maduro, who, with the support of loyal jurists, has sought to silence opponents through imprisonments and other means, including the creation of a new legislative body that essentially neutered the old one dominated by opposition parties.

The politician’s warm reception by the Colombian authorities will likely worsen the tense relations between the two neighbors.

“Welcome to liberty!” Andrés Pastrana, a former president of Colombia, said on Twitter. “We need you free in the world, defending liberty, human rights and democracy and not a prisoner by the narco-dictatorship of @NicolasMaduro.”

Mr. Ledezma was arrested in February 2015 while he was mayor of Caracas, on accusations that he and the United States had plotted to topple Mr. Maduro’s government. He and the United States denied the charges. Mr. Ledezma’s allies saw the detention as an attempt by Mr. Maduro to weaken the opposition before legislative elections later that year.

Until his escape on Friday morning, Mr. Ledezma had been held under house arrest without trial since 2016, except for a brief interim imprisonment following a dramatic late-night raid on his house in August.

It remained unclear how he managed to escape on Friday, but the Colombian government said he crossed the border by way of the Simón Bolívar International Bridge, which connects the Venezuelan city of San Antonio del Táchira with the Colombian town of Villa Rosario.

Relations between the two countries have been very tense. Earlier this year, Colombia’s president, Juan Manuel Santos, recalled his ambassador to Caracas and labeled the Maduro administration a dictatorship.

Mr. Maduro’s jailing of his opponents has been widely criticized by foreign governments and democracy advocates worldwide, and the Trump administration used it as a justification for imposing sanctions this year against Mr. Maduro and dozens of officials in his government.

In preparing targeted sanctions of their own this week, the foreign ministers of the European Union demanded “the liberation of all political prisoners” in Venezuela.

Alfredo Romero, head of Foro Penal, a human rights group in Venezuela, said on Friday that when Mr. Maduro took office in 2013, there were only 11 jailed opposition activists — he called them “political prisoners.” That number rose to 676 in August, at the height of the anti-government protests earlier this year, he said.

Following the election of the new, all-powerful legislative body, the Constituent Assembly, Mr. Maduro started releasing opponents from prison. As of Friday, Mr. Romero said, the number of jailed activists stands at 342.

Early this month, the Maduro administration freed two other prominent activists held without trial for more than a year, Yon Goicoechea and Delson Guarate.

About the same time, though, Freddy Guevara, another prominent opposition figure, sought asylum in the Chilean Embassy in Caracas after the Supreme Court blocked him from leaving the country and the Constituent Assembly stripped him of his political immunity from prosecution on suspicions of instigating unrest during this year’s protests.

Follow Kirk Semple @KirkSemple and Ana Vanessa Herrero @AnaVHerrero on Twitter.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: Opposition Leader Flees Venezuela for Colombia. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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