wrote an open letter from San José, Costa Rica, in which he claimed to have received orders and pressure from president Hugo Chávez to convict Iván Simonovis, security chief of the Metropolitan District of Caracas, as well as Caracas Metropolitan Police officers Henry Vivas and Lázaro Forero, applying the maximum sentence for their participation during the Llaguno Overpass events. The letter was published in September. Aponte fled Venezuela to Costa Rica in April 2012 after being accused of assisting Makled who said he had been paying Aponte US$70,000 per month related to joint business ventures. Aponte then contacted the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration which provided him with a flight to the United States. 2015 justices appointment Currently, for a part of Venezuelan society, the legitimacy of the Supreme Tribunal is in question, especially the legitimacy of its origin, due to the appointment on 23 December 2015 of 13 main justices and 21 supplementary justices by a lame duck National Assembly with a ruling party majority, as well as its actions since. Article 264 of the Venezuelan Constitution and Title V of the Supreme Tribunal of Justice Organic Law contemplate an extense procedure of more than thirty days for the appointment of the justices, both main and alternate, in which it is required to form a Judicial Nominations Committee integrated by members of the National Assembly and civil society, which will do a preselection of candidates that will be submitted to the Republican Moral Council: the Ombudsman, the Public Ministry and the Comptroller General, which will do a second preselection that in turn will be submitted to the National Assembly, which will have a lapse of three plenary sessions to appoint the justices with the vote of two thirds of the deputies or a fourth plenary session with the vote of a simple majority in case of not getting two thirds of the vote. The appointment of the justices was not done in accordance with the legal procedure, but with a hurried process carried out on 23 December 2015 by the lame duck National Assembly with a ruling party majority, when the legislature ended on 15 December, after being defeated on the 2015 parliamentary election, where the opposition, represented by the Democratic Unity Roundtable opposition coalition, gained 112 of the 167 seats. During the process, the "Citizen branch" issued a list of preselected candidates of previous processes, endorsed by the Ombudsman