The Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN), António Guterres, says he believes that the new sanctions by the United States government against 16 high-ranking officials of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, accused of obstructing the last elections, “will not help find a way out of the political crisis in the South American country”.
“I don’t think they will help,” Guterres’ spokesman Stéphane Dujarric said when asked about it at his news conference at United Nations headquarters in New York.
The Portuguese diplomat added that the UN Secretary-General remains “concerned about respect for human rights” and “the lack of transparency” that still prevails after the July 28 presidential elections in Venezuela.
Washington announced the imposition of sanctions on 16 allies of Maduro – including the president of the Venezuelan Supreme Court and leaders of the country’s armed forces – for human rights violations and for obstructing the free conduct of the last elections.
In those elections, Venezuelan electoral authorities declared Maduro the winner shortly after polls closed, but never published a detailed breakdown of the results, claiming that the website of the Chavista National Electoral Council had been hacked.
Opposition leaders María Corina Machado and former candidate Edmundo González Urrutia, who recently went into exile in Spain, said the process was rigged and that they won the election by a wide margin. They released more than 80 percent of the records they collected proving that González beat Maduro.
Venezuela has already criticized the sanctions imposed by the US and called the country “the most bloodthirsty power that humanity has ever known”.
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