The rebellion of Venezuela’s top prosecutor

TRAITOR. Madwoman. Striptease artist. Fascist. Leaders of Venezuela’s populist regime have recently hurled these insults and more at Luisa Ortega Díaz, the country’s attorney-general. It matters not that she extols the regime’s founding father, Hugo Chávez, as “the most humanist man to have existed on the planet”. Her former comrades now see her as a dangerous turncoat. “This woman could cause a civil war,” says Pedro Carreño, the vice-president of the PSUV, the socialist ruling party.

Ms Ortega, a former professor of criminal law, is becoming more dangerous to Venezuela’s repressive government. On June 8th, she filed a motion at the supreme court denouncing as illegal a scheme by Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, to convene an all-powerful constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution. The puppet court rejected the suit on June 12th, calling her application “inept”. On the same day she filed another motion arguing that 13 of the 32 supreme-court judges, who were hastily selected by the outgoing pro-regime parliament in 2015, were chosen through a flawed process and should therefore stand down. The court disagreed.