Washington.- The head of U.S. diplomacy for the Western Hemisphere, Brian Nichols, stated this Wednesday before the Organization of American States (OAS) that the opposition candidate in Venezuela, Edmundo González Urrutia, defeated President Nicolás Maduro, proclaimed winner on Sunday after a questioned electoral recount, according to information published by the Agence France-Presse news agency.
Nichols validated the electoral records shared on the Internet by civil society organisations and the opposition, which claims to have suffered fraud.
“It is clear that Edmundo González Urrutia defeated Nicolás Maduro by millions of votes,” he said.
“The tabulation of those detailed results clearly shows one irrefutable truth: Edmundo González Urrutia won with 67 percent of those votes to Maduro’s 30 percent. And there are simply not enough votes in the remaining tally sheets to overcome that deficit.”
On Sunday, Venezuela’s pro-government National Electoral Council (CNE) declared Maduro’s victory, but the body has not yet provided the voting records to support those results.
Nichols accused the Venezuelan government of refusing to share these documents, as required by the international community and Venezuelan law, in order to hide its defeat.
“Either they know that the real results show that Edmundo González clearly won the election and they don’t want to share the results. Or they know that the real results show that Edmundo González clearly won the election and Maduro’s CNE needs time to prepare falsified results to support their false claim,” he said.
Venezuela’s electoral authority declared the socialist leader the winner with 51 percent of the votes, thus re-electing him for a third six-year term, ahead of González Urrutia, who obtained 44 percent.
With information from AFP.
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