Venezuela’s top prosecutor on Monday announced a criminal investigation against the opposition’s presidential candidate Edmundo González and its leader Maria Corina Machado over their call on the armed forces to abandon their support for President Nicolás Maduro and to stop repressing demonstrators.

Attorney General Tarek William Saab’s statement tied the investigation directly to a written appeal the two members of the opposition sent hours earlier about Maduro and the demonstrators who have come out in force to defend their votes in the July 28 election.

The armed forces are traditionally the arbiter of political disputes in Venezuela. But they’ve shown no signs of ditching Maduro even in the face of credible evidence presented by the opposition that it trounced the self-proclaimed socialist at the polls by a more than 2-to-1 margin.