Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has asked his country’s highest judicial authority to strip opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez of his citizenship, accusing him of encouraging a US military invasion.

Caracas says Lopez supports the deployment of warships, fighter jets and US troops to the Caribbean as part of what the White House is portraying as an anti-drug operation. Maduro insists the goal is to topple him, and Secretary of State Ivan Hill announced today that the president has appealed to the Supreme Court to strip Lopez of his citizenship.

The request was made “because of his ridiculous, criminal and illegal call for a military invasion of Venezuela”, because he “continues to promote the economic blockade” of his country and because he calls for “the slaughter of Venezuelans, with the cooperation of foreign governments”, he added.

The rector of the School of Law and Political Sciences at the Central University of Venezuela, Juan Carlos Apitz, explained, however, that the law does not provide for the revocation of the citizenship of Venezuelans by birth. Only naturalized Venezuelans can be stripped of their citizenship following a final court decision.

Representatives of the most radical wing of Maduro’s party have hinted in the past that many opposition leaders, whom they call “traitors,” may lose their citizenship.

Lopez, a former mayor of Chacao, a Caracas suburb, was sentenced in 2015 to 14 years in prison for inciting violence during protests that killed 43 people in 2014. He was placed under house arrest in 2017 and, two years later, took part in the failed military uprising against Maduro. After this plan failed, he took refuge in the residence of the Spanish ambassador in Caracas and in 2020 left for Madrid.