The president of Venezuela's National Assembly -- widely considered embattled President Nicolás Maduro's most powerful internal adversary -- is asking courts to bar news executives from leaving the country while he is suing them for alleged defamation, the Associated Press reported.

Diosdado Cabello on Wednesday said that he is taking legal action against news outlets that reproduced a January report from Spanish newspaper ABC that linked the powerful Chavista to the drug trade. ABC had claimed that Cabello's bodyhard had fled to the United States, where he planned to testify that Cabello heads a drug ring made up of top-level Venezuelan politicians military officers.

The head of the country's unilateral parliament said he was pursuing both civil and criminal complaints and was asking judges to seize the news executives' passports and freeze their assets, according to the AP. On his national television show, Cabello mocked the defendants on Wednesday for expressing outrage at the charges.

"None of them have even said 'sorry,'" he complained. "And now I'm the bad guy, who they accused of being a drug trafficker without any proof? Who is going to defend my human rights?" the 52-year-old wondered.

But Alberto Federico Ravell, who leads the LaPatilla.com news website, insisted that Cabello's legal action was little more than "vengeance," El Siglo noted.

"This trial starts out with a verdict of prohibiting you from leaving the country (and) making yourself available to the court once a week," Ravell told CNN en Español. "And now -- last night -- Mr. Cabello threatened that he would also try to freeze the accounts of (the news outlets in question), that they would try to strangulate the few independent media that remain in Venezuela," the journalist added.

Whatever the legal outcome, Cabello's suit will have a "very high political cost" for Maduro's government, Ravell insisted, according to the AP.

"What is at stake here are freedom of expression, democracy and the upcoming electoral process," he noted.