Caracas.- A month after Venezuela’s controversial presidential election, which was questioned by local critics and the international community, the opposition on Wednesday called on its supporters to take to the streets of Caracas to defend its alleged victory in the elections.
The protesters will gather on Francisco Miranda Avenue, one of the busiest and widest avenues in the Venezuelan capital, under the slogan “Venezuela and the world reject the fraud of Maduro and his regime.”
“He who gets tired, loses. It is important to keep alive the spirit of July 28 when we went out joyfully to seek change,” Guillermo Ramirez, a 21-year-old student who was walking to the rally, told The Associated Press. “They have done everything to bring us to our knees, but they will not be able to.”
Since morning, hundreds of police officers patrolled the streets of Caracas and were stationed in areas surrounding the gathering.
Demonstrations by Venezuelans in Chile and Ecuador are also planned.
In Bogota’s iconic Plaza de Bolivar, a group of about 30 Venezuelans held white balloons as a symbol of the more than 1,600 people Venezuelan security forces have detained since the election, according to Venezuelan human rights group Foro Penal.
“These balloons represent the repression that Nicolás Maduro has unleashed,” Gaby Arellano, a former Venezuelan lawmaker who has been in Colombia as a refugee since 2018, told AP. “We want to show that what Nicolás Maduro is trying to achieve with fear and terror is not the truth of what the Venezuelan people are clamoring for, which is the victory of (opposition candidate) Edmundo González,” she added.
The ruling party, for its part, called on its supporters to march to celebrate Maduro’s re-election.
Maduro, who is seeking a third six-year term, claims he won the election by more than a million votes and his government has defied calls from the United States, the European Union and even leftist allies such as Brazil, Colombia and Mexico to release voting records backing that claim.
Meanwhile, the so-called Unitary Platform, which represents the main opposition parties, has published on its website the recount of 83.5% of the ballots cast by the voting machines, which show that González won by a margin of more than 2 to 1.
Maduro was declared the winner by the National Electoral Council, a collegiate body with a majority of pro-government voters, which said he obtained 6.4 million votes compared to 5.3 million for González. However, the opposition maintains that the records in its possession —copies collected by its witnesses at the voting tables— show that its candidate obtained 7.3 million votes and Maduro 3.3 million.
Last week, the Supreme Court of Justice — made up of judges who were part of the government — certified the results of the electoral body and stated that the vote counts published by the opposition were false.
Both González and opposition leader María Carina Machado, who pushed for office after being barred from running in the election, have remained in hiding, particularly after the government-controlled Attorney General’s Office opened a criminal investigation against them on August 5 following their request to the military and police to withdraw their support for President Maduro and not repress the protests that broke out after the election.
While Machado has appeared at mass opposition rallies, González has not been seen in public.
Attorney General Tarek Willliam Saab, a close associate of Maduro and former pro-government legislator, has called González to testify in connection with another criminal investigation into the publication of voting records on the website http://resultadosconvzla.com/. González has not attended the hearings because he believes that the attorney general “has repeatedly behaved like a political accuser” by condemning him in advance.
According to the Prosecutor’s Office, the president’s opponents were guilty of “the alleged commission of crimes of usurpation of functions, forgery of public documents, incitement to disobedience of laws, computer crimes, criminal association and conspiracy.”
“They are trying to subdue us, distract us and terrify us,” Machado said on Tuesday on her social media following the arrest of her legal coordinator Perkins Rocha. Her relatives reported that her whereabouts are unknown.
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