VENEZUELAN authorities arrested wannabe president Juan Guaido’s number two in the defunct National Assembly yesterday.

Opposition MP Edgar Zambrano is charged with treason, conspiracy and insurrection for his role in botched April 30 attempt to overthrow the elected government by force.

Despite Mr Guaido declaring a military takeover surrounded by men in uniform, almost the whole of Venezuela’s armed forces remained loyal to President Nicolas Maduro and crowds rallied around the presidential palace in his defence, leaving the “coup” to fizzle out.

Mr Zambrano and seven other MPs have been stripped of their immunity from prosecution by the National Constituent Assembly for participating in the coup attempt.

The latter assembly was elected in 2017 to break the constitutional deadlock created by the National Assembly’s contempt of court and repeated attempts to remove the elected president in defiance of the constitution.

The National Assembly, of which Mr Guaido holds the rotating presidency, continues to sit but has been stripped of legislative authority since 2016.

The arrests come days after United Nations special rapporteur Idriss Jazairy condemned US sanctions on Venezuela, Cuba and Iran, pointing out that the use of economic penalties for political purposes violates human rights and international law.

In recent years, Washington has slapped increasingly harsh sanctions on Caracas, which allow transnational companies to seize Venezuelan assets abroad, freeze further assets and interfere with its ability to import food and medicine.

A recent report, Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela, written by Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs and Mark Weisbrot from the Centre for Economic and Policy Research, revealed that 40,000 people may have died in the Latin American nation in the last two years because of the Trump administration’s policies.

The US State Department even briefly published a gloating document listing economic measures it had taken to destabilise Venezuela and naming “key outcomes,” including the illegal seizure of oil refiner Citgo, freezing over $3.2 billion (£2.5bn) in assets and deterring other countries from taking Venezuelan gold and buying its oil, but it removed the document from its website after realising the incriminating nature of some of the revelations.