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Venezuela president reneges on pledge to free opponent Lopez

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Venezuela\'s President Nicolas Maduro, speaks during a press conference with at Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas, Venezuela, Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2017. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)

CARACAS, Venezuela – Venezuela’s president is backing out of a pledge to free opponent Leopoldo Lopez now that President Barack Obama has commuted the sentence of a Puerto Rican independence activist whose release the embattled socialist has long promoted.

In 2015, Maduro said he would release Lopez the day that Obama freed Oscar Lopez Rivera. When asked Wednesday at a press conference about that pledge, Maduro said he’d been joking.

He also went one step further and accused Lopez of being a CIA spy not worthy of being compared to Lopez Rivera, who was serving out a long sentence for his role in a violent struggle for the U.S. island territory’s independence.

Lopez is serving a 14-year sentence for allegedly inciting violence against the government during a wave of anti-government unrest.

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