Former world champion boxer found fatally shot in native Venezuela
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Version 0 of 1. CARACAS, Venezuela — Former world champion boxer Antonio Cerme ño was kidnapped and killed in his native Venezuela, police said Tuesday. Cermeño, a WBA super bantamweight and featherweight champion in the 1990s, was found fatally shot Tuesday on a road in the central state of Miranda, the local police chief, Eliseo Guzmán, said. Guzmán said Cermeño and other relatives were kidnapped Monday night near the La Urbina neighborhood in east Caracas. The relatives escaped when the kidnappers stopped to refuel the car, but the former boxer remained captive, Guzmán said. Cermeño’s slaying comes on the heels of the killing of a popular soap opera actress and former Miss Venezuela, Monica Spear, in early January. Robbers killed the 29-year-old and her former husband on an isolated stretch of highway while the couple was returning to the capital with their 5-year-old daughter. The high-profile slayings highlight spiraling violent crime in Venezuela, one of the spurs for opposition protests that have rocked the South American country in recent weeks. The United Nations ranks Venezuela’s homicide rate as the world’s fifth-highest. News of Cermeño’s killing came on the same day that the United States ordered three Venezuelan diplomats to leave in reprisal for President Nicolás Maduro’s expulsion of three U.S. Embassy staff members accused of fomenting unrest that has killed at least 16 people, according to the Reuters news agency. Students and others opposed to Maduro want him to quit over the high rates of crime and inflation, lack of basic foodstuffs and what they call his heavy-handed suppression of their protests. Disputes between the ideologically opposed governments in Washington and Caracas were common during the 1999-2013 rule of socialist leader Hugo Chávez, who died last year, and have continued under his successor. Pragmatism trumps politics, though, and the United States remains the oil-rich nation’s main export market. The State Department said in a statement that two first secretaries and a second secretary at the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington had been declared personae non gratae in response to Caracas’s Feb. 17 move against the three Americans. Venezuela and the United States have not had ambassadors in each other’s capitals since 2008, and Maduro expelled the three U.S. diplomats on accusations that they were recruiting students to lead protests. |