There are characters who end up entering the story without wanting it. This seems to be the case of Edmundo González Urrutia, the former Venezuelan presidential candidate whose arrest was ordered on Monday (2) by the country’s justice system, dominated by Chavismo.
The former diplomat, who turned 75 last week, has always kept a low profile and had never been a prominent name in the Venezuelan opposition, where he moved after having been the country’s ambassador to Argentina between 1998 and 2002, during the first years of Hugo Chávez’s dictatorship.
At the time, he published an article in the newspaper La Nacion praising the Argentine government for having opposed an attempt to overthrow the Chavista in April 2002.
González then went into opposition and was president, between 2013 and 2015, of the Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD), which would give rise to the Democratic Unity Platform (PUD) coalition, through which he ran for president on July 28 of this year.
The former diplomat was only the candidate because the PUD was unable to register its first choices. María Corina Machado, leader of the coalition, was unable to run due to the political disqualification imposed by the Chavista regime, and the bloc was unable to register Corina Yoris, the candidate chosen to replace her, because the system of the Venezuelan National Electoral Council (CNE) did not allow it.
González was only provisionally registered, with the aim of securing a place for the PUD on the ballot, and ended up staying.
Friendly and soft-spoken, he won over the Venezuelan electorate. According to copies of more than 80% of the voting records, he was the winner on July 28, but the CNE, without presenting documentation to prove it, declared the victory of dictator Nicolás Maduro.
The day after the election, the PUD made these minutes available on a website, which it had managed to collect through electoral inspectors and supporters, and the Chavista dictatorship found the excuse it wanted to persecute González.
Venezuela’s Attorney General’s Office, loyal to Maduro, opened a criminal investigation against him through the website and summoned him three times to testify. González did not appear and, after the third and final summons was not answered, on Friday (30), the Public Prosecutor’s Office requested an arrest warrant against him on Monday. A few hours later, the Chavista court granted the request and ordered his detention.
González has already become a symbol of Venezuelan resistance. If he is arrested, his name will gain even more international traction – the United States, the UN Secretary General, the Organization of American States (OAS), the European Union and Latin American countries (including Brazil and Colombia) have all criticized the arrest order.
“They [chavistas] They have lost all sense of reality. By threatening the president-elect, they are only succeeding in uniting us more and increasing the support of Venezuelans and the world for Edmundo González,” Machado wrote in X, according to information from the Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional.
On Tuesday, González’s lawyer, José Vicente Haro, told the Venezuelan press that the former opposition candidate has not yet requested asylum at any embassy in Caracas and that he is going “from house to house to protect his life.”
“In this reign of fear that it wants to impose, the government may not see an additional cost now [perante a comunidade internacional] “The question is how far this will go, whether they will actually arrest him or allow him to seek refuge in an embassy. If they arrest him, the next step will be to arrest María Corina Machado, who is the jewel in the crown,” political analyst Luis Remiro told the website Efecto Cocuyo.
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