Oscar Perez, the Venezuelan police officer allegedly behind a helicopter attack on a government building last week, appeared in a new internet video Wednesday, vowing to continue the fight for the “liberation” of his country.
Perez spoke in a video seen on YouTube, wearing a military uniform and wool cap, with a Venezuelan flag and a rifle behind him.
In the video, Perez said he was in Caracas following an emergency landing on Venezuela’s coast. He said he was ready for the “second phase” of his campaign to free his homeland from what he called the corrupt rule of President Nicolas Maduro and his “assassin” allies.
“Stop talking. Get on the streets. Take action. Fight,” he said in the video. He also denounced Maduro’s plan to rewrite the constitution.
“If this constitutional assembly goes through, Venezuela will cease to exist because we’ll have given away the country to the Cubans,” he said.
WATCH: Perez depicts himself as a James Bond-meets-Rambo figure on social media
On June 25, Maduro said Perez was responsible for firing shots and lobbing grenades at the interior ministry and the supreme court after hijacking the helicopter in downtown Caracas.
“There was a social activity going on in the Supreme Court. They could have caused dozens of deaths,” Maduro said of the helicopter attack.
Perez, 36, directed and starred in a 2015 Venezuelan action movie called Suspended Death about the rescue of a kidnapped businessman, which includes scenes of him firing a rifle from a helicopter and emerging from water in scuba gear.
He has an unusually public profile for the usually tight-lipped and secretive investigative police.
Perez’s alleged action came during a major national crisis as hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets in recent months calling for an end to Maduro’s presidency amid food shortages, a collapsing currency and soaring inflation.
Critics accuse Maduro of creating a dictatorship by stifling dissent, using security forces to limit the right to protest and arbitrarily jailing demonstrators. Maduro dismisses the protests as a U.S.-backed attempt to overthrow him.
— With files from Reuters and the Associated Press
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