Lorent Enrique Gómez Saleh (born 22 July 1988) is a Venezuelan activist. Since 2011, Saleh has participated in several activities in defense of human rights and has been repeatedly detained by the Venezuelan authorities. In 2014, he was deported from Colombia and handed over to officials of the Bolivarian Intelligence Service (SEBIN). Until 2018, he was being held in La Tumba, in Plaza Venezuela, Caracas during which time his audience had been postponed 52 times. On 12 October 2018, he was released by the Venezuelan authorities and exiled to Spain, where he arrived the next day after landing at the Madrid–Barajas Airport.
In 2017, Saleh was one of eight Venezuelans awarded with the Sakharov Prize by the European Parliament, as one of the representatives of all the political prisoners enumerated by the Foro Penal.
Activism
In 2009, Saleh, together with other young people, formed a platform to make national tours of opposition to the government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. In February 2011, he began a hunger strike in front of the headquarters of the Organization of American States (OAS) in Caracas with 13 other young people as the national coordinator of the Active Youth Organization Venezuela Unida (JAVU). demanding the release of , José Sánchez Mazuco and Judge María Lourdes Afiuni, among other people considered as political prisoners, and asking Secretary General José Miguel Insulza to be "more forceful in the face of the government's crimes." Saleh was accused the same year of the crime of "disseminating false information that causes distress" along with Gabriel Vallés, another student activist, when they were arrested with slingshots and other materials to use during the protests and with posters pointing at then-President Chávez to lying about his electoral promises.
On 2 May 2011, members of the Bolivarian National Guard fired shots at some demonstrators and evicted several youths, including Saleh, who had chained themselves to the gates of the Judicial Circuit of Barinas to demand the release of Delfín Parra Gómez, a military man who was processed. for alleged corruption in the Central Agroindustrial Azucarero Ezequiel Zamora (Caeez) and whom the youth considered a political prisoner. Saleh was severely beaten and detained, and as a result of the event, judicial proceedings were opened for the alleged crimes of resistance to authority, basic type injuries and violent outrage against a public official. His mother, Yamileth Saleh, was also imputed during the presentation hearing. At the beginning of July, Saleh was arrested by the Bolivarian Intelligence Service (SEBIN) while he was arriving at a peaceful protest on Urdaneta Avenue, in Caracas. He was released hours later. In December he is arrested again by unidentified individuals after landing at the Santo Domingo airport in Táchira.
In 2012, Saleh's NGO Operación Libertad launched an international campaign in rejection of the departure of Venezuela from the Inter-American Human Rights System. Saleh was beaten by military personnel while participating in a protest at the University of the Andes. Days later, in January 2013, when trying to travel to Costa Rica, airport authorities of Valencia, Carabobo prevented him from boarding the plane and canceled his passport. After accusations that at the end of July 2013 Saleh participated in Colombia in the launching of the Nationalist Alliance for Freedom, a political movement that defines itself as "Identitarian nationalist" in addition to "anti-Zionist", Saleh said months later in an interview with El Espectador: "I am Latin American, of Palestinian family, I can not believe in Nazi, neo-Nazi or radical positions of any kind, I am not Neo-Nazi nor do I believe in militarist governments."
In February 2014, Saleh began an international campaign to denounce human rights violations during the 2014 Venezuelan protests. In Costa Rica he got the attention of the Congress, members of the Church and important figures of the country. On February 19, seven days after the start of the protests, the death of three people in Caracas and the handing over of Leopoldo López to the Venezuelan authorities, Saleh traveled again to Colombia. On 2 May, Venezuelan Interior Minister Miguel Rodríguez Torres claimed that Henrique Salas Römer financed the JAVU group and read a supposed document with confidential information dated 2011, about supposed "training camps" held in Carabobo by the group on a farm property of Venezuelan opposition deputy Freddy Curupe, in which Saleh is mentioned.