Wednesday, August 14, 2024, 3:17 PM
The Chavista regime continues its headlong flight after the growing international discredit of the elections that have revalidated Nicolás Maduro as president of Venezuela. This time its target has been the UN. Its panel of experts has sent a report to the National Electoral Commission in which it concludes that it failed to meet the necessary requirements of “transparency and integrity” during the counting of votes in the July 28 elections. The indignation has been maximum among the Venezuelan authorities. The president of Parliament, Jorge Rodríguez, has not taken long to call the UN experts “garbage” and has complained about the dissemination of a report that, in his opinion, was of a “private” nature.
The Venezuelan government has fewer and fewer levers to hold on to in order to defend the vote count that gave Maduro almost 53% of the votes in the elections. The UN resolution was the only one that remained to be published, after observers from the Carter Center uncovered the irregularities of the process and the Organization of American States and the European Union also declared that they will not accept the results until Caracas carries out an exercise in transparency with the minutes. The majority of the international community is of the same opinion. Support for Maduro is limited to a few traditionally friendly countries such as Iran, Russia, China, Cuba or Nicaragua.
Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega said on Tuesday that a “coup d’état” against his leader had been launched in Venezuela, but he was certain that the late “Commander Chavez is supporting the people and Nicolas.”
Devastating report
“The National Electoral Commission’s process of managing results did not comply with the basic measures of transparency and integrity that are essential for the holding of credible elections. It also did not follow national legal and regulatory provisions, and all established deadlines were not met.” This is one of the first conclusions of the panel composed of four United Nations observers who were in Venezuela for a week, from the eve of the elections until August 2. The document is preliminary in nature, but it states that the procedure followed by the Venezuelan authorities “has no precedent in contemporary democratic elections.”
The UN is particularly concerned that the Commission proclaimed Nicolás Maduro president without even publishing the “tabulated results.” It also detected multiple restrictions for opposition voters and a suspicious interruption in the transmission of data from each table to the National Electoral Commission during the counting of ballots. The government has attributed this blackout to a cyber attack of which neither these experts nor those from the Carter Center have found any evidence.
The report finally stresses that the key lies in the original electoral records. That is, the paper printed by the voting and counting machines, equipped with a series of codes and prints that make it practically invulnerable to attempts at falsification.
The regime has refused to provide these forms so far, but not the opposition, which managed to collect 83% of the minutes by often clandestine means, given the decision of the official delegates to expel the opposition witnesses from the tables. In contrast to the Chavista version that the minutes in the hands of the Democratic Unitary Platform are false, the UN has confirmed that all those it has been able to analyse contain the original seals. And they are not good for the government. In short, they would give victory to the candidate of the opposition platform, Edmundo González, by more than three million votes.
“Categorical” rejection
The Venezuelan government has “categorically” rejected the UN’s conclusions. Its analysis, it said in a statement on Wednesday, “spreads a series of lies” and “represents an absolutely reckless act that undermines confidence in the mechanisms designed for cooperation and technical assistance.”
The most angry response came from Jorge Rodríguez, the president of Parliament, who approved a legislative package to regulate the use of social networks in the country and create a new registry for NGOs during his session on Tuesday. These types of organizations have been the vehicle for popular complaints over the apparent electoral fraud in the last two weeks and, above all, for denouncing the wave of repression that has cost more than twenty deaths and thousands of arrests.
At the end of the parliamentary session, Jorge Rodríguez let loose his anger. He said that the UN panel of experts “is a panel of rubbish without a word, because they signed (an agreement) saying that the report is private and that only the electoral power of Venezuela and the Secretary General of the United Nations would know it.” In the opinion of the legislator, its dissemination, which this Wednesday was partial but whose full content the UN will soon make known, constitutes a kind of betrayal of the Venezuelan authorities. “They will continue screwing us and we will continue defeating them,” Rodríguez stressed to the applause of the pro-government deputies, who have a large majority in the Chamber.
The president of the Assembly is the regime’s main spokesperson in electoral matters and the one who has directed the main recriminations to the opposition together with Diosdado Cabello, deputy, vice president of the United Socialist Party and considered Maduro’s lieutenant in the Caracas cabinet. At the beginning of the popular mobilizations against the electoral fraud, Rodríguez demanded that the Attorney General’s Office take action against María Corina Machado and the candidate Edmundo González, leaders of the opposition. This Wednesday he continued his more closed speech and proposed a reform of the Venezuelan law to prohibit the presence of international observers in future electoral processes in the country. “Let no foreigner ever come to take a position again,” he said. “Why do they have to come?” he added, possibly in the harshest autocratic drift in the history of the Maduro regime.
Marches in Madrid and Barcelona
The opposition’s response is, for the moment, to apply pressure, but with caution. Corina Machado says she trusts in international negotiations to promote a “negotiated solution” with the regime, since the alternative of calling new elections is losing its effect with each passing day.
Experts agree that nothing would prevent the government from applying all kinds of obstacles to critical voter turnout in new elections or from manipulating the results in the event of defeat. The rules that the re-elected government is implementing at full speed and which de facto increase the battery of possible crimes of “hate”, “terrorism” or due to “fascist acts” would not help, according to these same experts, the opposition to conduct a campaign “under normal conditions”.
The Democratic Unitary Platform hopes that the US’s efforts with the countries of the region and with the OAS will bear fruit. In addition to the talks with the Colombian government, there have been talks with the Mexican government, in both cases led by the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken. However, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced on Wednesday that Mexico is temporarily disengaging from this diplomatic initiative, leaving the leaders of Colombia and Brazil alone in their attempts to engage in dialogue with Maduro. Obrador has said that he will maintain this position until the Supreme Court of Venezuela issues a ruling on the validity of the electoral results in the country. The magistrates, to whom Maduro has turned to legitimize his victory, will possibly rule on Friday.
Apart from the fragile path of dialogue, the opposition also has its hopes pinned on popular mobilization. It has called on the 7.7 million Venezuelans living abroad to demonstrate on Saturday, August 17, in dozens of world capitals to demand respect for “the results of July 28” that gave victory to Edmundo González.
The bloc has called for people to take to the streets under the slogan “where there is a Venezuelan, there is a voice for freedom.” It has done so in a dozen Latin American countries, from Brazil to Ecuador, Mexico and Uruguay, apart from Venezuela itself. Among the remaining capitals are the Spanish ones Madrid and Barcelona, Washington, Miami, New York, Amsterdam, Brussels, Lisbon, Rome and London.
Some of the organizers believe that Corina Machado and Edmundo González could make a splash and appear at the mobilization planned in Caracas. The two are “under cover” to avoid possible arrest or a situation like that of the deputy and opposition collaborator Freddy Superlano, who has been imprisoned and held incommunicado for two weeks. His party, the progressive Voluntad Popular, claims that he has been “tortured.”
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