A union leader who led a crippling national strike against Chávez and later became what many consider Venezuela's most prominent political prisoner, Ortega slipped out of the Ramo Verde prison, where he was serving a 16-year sentence for civil rebellion. Three convicted military officers also escaped.
Prison director Gustavo Busnego said 14 guards were being interrogated and investigators believe that some may have helped the men leave the prison. He said guards reported the escape Sunday after checking one bunk and finding pillows under the sheet, arranged to look like an inmate.
Zambrano's party, Democratic Action, released a typed letter, purportedly written by Ortega from prison a week earlier. In it, was repeated a phrase he has often used: ``I know that we will soon see each other again -- and free."
However, he also said, ``for now I am a political prisoner of a dictator who knows I am dangerous in the streets and, therefore, I prefer to stay behind bars. That is the best way of showing he fears me." Ortega wrote that voters should boycott the presidential vote and called for street protests to ``defend democracy." He signed off saying, ``We will see each other soon, friends!"
Chávez has called Ortega a criminal who has conspired against democracy with Venezuela's wealthy elite.
Ortega was convicted last December of civil rebellion and instigation to commit illegal acts for his role in a 2002-2003 general strike that aimed to topple Chávez's government.
The two-month strike virtually shut down oil production in the world's No. 5 oil exporting country and cost Venezuela an estimated $7.5 billion, plunging the economy into recession. Chávez refused to step down and regained control of the oil industry by firing nearly half the work force at the state oil company.
The government has also linked Ortega, the leader of the million-member Venezuelan Workers Confederation, to an April 2002 coup that briefly ousted Chávez before street protests helped restore him to power.
Ortega has eluded authorities before. He fled arrest and sought asylum in Costa Rica, then chose to return to Venezuela in 2004, to ``continue fighting this regime by any means necessary."
He spent months in hiding before his arrest in March 2005 inside a Caracas bingo hall.
Some of Ortega's allies, including his lawyer, said his escape was justified because he was wrongly convicted by a biased judicial system.
Pro-Chávez union organizer Pedro Vargas called Ortega's escape ``part of the opposition's Plan B" to try to destabilize the government. Attorney General Isaias Rodriguez theorized that the opposition could have ``sponsored this escape."
