Venezuelan prosecutors have made good on their threat to issue an arrest warrant for opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia, after he failed to appear three times to testify. He is accused of usurpation of functions, forgery of public documents, incitement to disobedience of laws, conspiracy and “sabotage to damage systems” amid an investigation focused on the publication of 83.5% of the voting records collected by witnesses on July 28. With this data, the opposition has denounced that Nicolás Maduro committed fraud by declaring himself the winner of the elections without having the votes. The arrest warrant, signed on Monday, was sent to a court specializing in terrorism.
Chavismo is trying to force the opposition into a dead end with this new move. In a brief message, María Corina Machado responded to the measure, stating “they have lost all sense of reality.” “By threatening the President-elect, they only succeed in uniting us more and increasing the support of Venezuelans and the world for Edmundo González. Serenity, courage and firmness. We are moving forward,” the leader wrote on the social network X.
The Chavistas’ targeting of the opposition, which began a year ago when they were organizing for the primaries, has intensified after the elections. González Urrutia, a 75-year-old diplomat, has been in hiding for more than a month and for the last three days had not even used his social networks until this Monday, before the arrest warrant was known, he wrote a message in which he asks for the release of the 28 teenagers detained in the protests who remain to be released and informs the Government that he is ready to begin talks for the presidential handover. “It is time to end the persecution and move towards an orderly transition for a change in peace and with guarantees,” he wrote.
The candidate has ignored the calls of the judiciary, arguing the lack of independence of the public powers, including the Attorney General’s Office, which is ultimately controlled by Maduro. “The prosecutor has repeatedly behaved like a political accuser,” said González Urrutia, since “he condemns in advance and now he is promoting a summons without guarantees of independence and due process.” “The Public Prosecutor’s Office intends to submit me to an interview without specifying the condition in which I am expected to appear and pre-qualifying the crimes not committed,” he said last week. González Urrutia did not appear at any of the three summonses made by the Attorney General’s Office. He also missed the appearances at the Supreme Court in early August when an alleged expert appraisal of the election documents was carried out to validate the result announced by the CNE that gave Maduro the victory, without yet presenting, more than a month before the elections, the figures of votes broken down table by table, which has cast suspicion on its veracity.
Machado, the leader of the opposition coalition, is also in hiding in a secret location and has only made about four public appearances at events in Caracas. Along the way, dozens of leaders close to the politicians have been imprisoned. Chavismo seeks to present Machado and González as criminals and the main enemies of the revolution to public opinion. It has accused them without presenting evidence of attempting a coup d’état, of destabilizing the country, of falsifying the minutes printed by the machines, of having a “satanic pact” with the magnate Elon Musk and even of the 10-hour national blackout suffered by Venezuelans last week that the government believes was the result of a “criminal attack,” despite the fact that for several years regions of the country have constantly suffered power cuts due to failures in generation and maintenance.
Machado had warned last week that González Urrutia’s residence could be raided within hours. Maduro, in his recurring appearances on television, has insisted on forcing his rival from July 28 into exile, as he ended up doing with opposition deputy Juan Guaidó. He was involved in a standoff with him during the previous crisis of legitimacy that his government faced in 2019, after elections in which the participation of the main opposition leaders and the ballot was prevented, so the international community decided not to recognize them as valid.
The investigation that the Public Prosecutor’s Office started is related to the website Resultados Con Vzla, where the opposition posted the minutes obtained from its witnesses on July 28 and which can be consulted publicly. The minutes are a document that the voting machines print in several copies that are kept by the electoral authorities, the military that guard the electoral material and the witnesses of each party. The opposition prepared to quickly collect and scan these documents with which it can ensure that González Urrutia won with 67% of the votes, as reflected in 83.5% of the minutes obtained by its witnesses, some of whom were pursued by the security forces. But the Prosecutor’s Office has classified them as false in advance, despite the observations made by the UN Panel of Experts that in its report stated that after analyzing a small sample they found that they maintain the security parameters that make them trustworthy. In other elections, such as the one in which Maduro faced Henrique Capriles in 2013 and won by a narrow margin, the Chavistas published the data they had in their possession on the website of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV).
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