Thursday, October 3, 2024, 17:21
The advisor of the Carter Center for Latin America and the Caribbean, Jennie Lincoln, showed on Wednesday before the Organization of American States (OAS) some alleged minutes of the presidential elections held on July 28 in Venezuela that would demonstrate the comfortable victory of the opposition candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez. The entity, founded in 1982 by former US president Jimmy Carter, specializes in electoral observation and was the only independent organization that was present in the South American country’s elections, along with a UN delegation. The Government of Nicolás Maduro has welcomed this new evidence with disdain: “We do not care what the OAS says, we do not care what this lady from the Carter Center says,” concluded the Minister of the Interior, Diosdado Cabello, on his television program. ‘With the hammer giving’.
“I just received the originals and I would like to share them with you after the session so that you can see that they are original minutes from Venezuela,” commented Lincoln, who emphasized the presence of the QR code that allowed the information to be collected for scrutiny. The electronic voting system “worked,” said the representative of the Carter Center, and both the Government, the National Electoral Center (CNE), and “the military” are aware of the “true results,” which according to these minutes show 31% of the votes for Nicolás Maduro and 67% for the opponent Edmundo González. These percentages coincide with the partial minutes published by the opposition and which gave rise to demonstrations harshly repressed by the Government.
After the CNE declared Maduro the winner, the Carter Center already concluded that these electoral results lacked the necessary integrity and failed to comply with international standards, so “they could not be considered democratic.” Numerous international actors have demanded that Chavismo publish the minutes, to no avail, and the Secretary General of the OAS himself, Luis Almagro, has insisted before his permanent council that the process “was neither fair, nor free, nor transparent.”
“The world knows what happened”
The opposition member María Corina Machado has celebrated the presentation to the OAS of these records that “represent physical proof of Edmundo González’s victory.” “The world knows what happened on July 28,” she published in a message on the X network. Furthermore, in a public letter signed by her and her entire party, the Democratic Unitary Platform, they have rejected the Government’s invitation to negotiate a political solution to the deep crisis that the country is going through, considering that it is only “a propaganda exercise without agenda, without rules, without location”, and they have called on Chavismo to agree on the “terms of a serious negotiation.” The High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs, Josep Borrell, has also valued positively that the minutes have reached the hands of a “prestigious institution” such as the Carter Center: “They reflect the results that we have always pointed out, which are that Maduro does not won the elections and that the opposition leader, now a refugee in Spain, Edmundo González Urrutia did,” he stated.
But, as expected, none of this has made an impact on the Venezuelan Executive. “The OAS is going to wash that vest,” the Minister of the Interior despised in his television space, in addition to insisting that on January 10 the country will go out “to be sworn in alongside its president, Nicolás Maduro.”
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