Bárbara César Siero, a former justice of Venezuela's Supreme Court, said in a video that two of her brothers and a sister-in-law were arbitrarily detained in late 2023 to pressure her into upholding a political ban on opposition leader María Corina Machado. The claim, which El País reported and which could not be independently verified here, alleges direct coercion of the judiciary by the government of Nicolás Maduro. It matters because the court's ruling barred Machado from running in the 2024 presidential election, a decision critics have long called politically driven.