‘They have lost all sense of reality’: Leader Maria Corina Machado says arrest warrant against Edmundo Gonzalez unites Venezuela’s opposition

The leader of the Venezuelan opposition Maria Corina Machado reacted on Monday after a Venezuelan court issued an arrest warrant against Edmundo González Urrutia, who claims to have won the presidential elections of July 28 in which the current president Nicolás Maduro was proclaimed the winner amid allegations of fraud.

“They have lost all sense of reality,” Machado wrote in X. “By threatening the President-elect, they only succeed in uniting us further and increasing the support of Venezuelans and the world for Edmundo González,” he said, and then added: “Serenity, courage and firmness. We are moving forward.”

The Venezuelan Prosecutor’s Office announced earlier on its social networks a copy of the request to a court with jurisdiction over terrorism for an “arrest warrant against citizen Edmundo González Urrutia” for alleged crimes related to the elections, including “disobedience of laws”, “conspiracy”, “usurpation of functions” and “sabotage.”

González Urrutia, 75, was summoned to testify before the prosecutor’s office on three occasions. He did not attend, although the third summons coincided with a power outage across the country on Friday, August 30.

It should be noted that the summons were only addressed to González Urrutia. None of them included Machado.

What is he accused of and why did Gonzales not appear at the court hearings?

The investigation into González Urrutia is related to the publication of a website on which the main opposition coalition – the Democratic Unitary Platform (PUD) – claims to have uploaded “83.5% of the electoral records” collected by witnesses and polling station members on election night, to support its claim of fraud in the presidential elections.

The PUD released these records, which the Executive calls “false,” after the National Electoral Council (CNE) declared Maduro the winner of the elections, which has been questioned by numerous countries, some of which support that González Urrutia won by a wide margin.

On August 25 – the date on which the first summons was issued – through a video posted on their social networks, González Urrutia said that the Prosecutor’s Office “intends to subject him to an interview without specifying the condition in which he is expected to appear and pre-qualifying crimes that he did not commit.”

In his opinion, he said at the time, the Attorney General, Tarek William Saab, “has repeatedly behaved like a political accuser,” since – he asserted – “he condemns in advance and now promotes a summons without guarantees of independence and due process.”

On Thursday, when the third and final summons was made public, The Prosecutor’s Office had warned that if González Urrutia did not appear again, “a corresponding arrest warrant would be issued” for him, considering that he “is at risk of flight.”

Maduro has called for jail time for González Urrutia and opposition leader María Corina Machado, who is also in hiding and has repeatedly said she fears for her life and freedom. The regime holds them responsible for acts of violence in the post-election protests, which left 27 dead – two of them soldiers – almost 200 wounded and more than 2,400 arrested.