Chavismo continues to tighten its grip on the opposition. The Attorney General’s Office issued this Thursday the third and final summons to candidate Edmundo González to testify as a suspect for crimes of conspiracy, usurpation of functions, instigation to disobedience, among others, and warns that if he does not attend the appointment set for this Friday morning, as he has done at the two previous summons this week, an arrest warrant will be issued, under the presumption of risk of flight and obstruction of justice.
González Urrutia has been holed up in a safe place for a month. His last public appearance was on July 30 at an opposition demonstration in front of the United Nations headquarters in Caracas. The constant threats of imprisonment made by the government have kept him in hiding, from which he is speaking today at the informal council of European foreign ministers. The hours are of maximum tension. Opposition leader María Corina Machado warned that “in the next few hours” her home could be raided.. “Stay tuned because I think the next step could be a raid on your house, the house of the president-elect, in the next few hours,” he warned at a press conference.
The 75-year-old diplomat has argued that the judiciary is not independent in order to miss this meeting. Maduro himself has called for his electoral rival to be jailed and this week warned that González Urrutia was planning to flee the country. “He is not showing his face,” he said at an event with his supporters in Miraflores, suggesting that the authorities could “hook” him. The opposition leader also missed appearances at the Supreme Court for the supposed examination of the election documents to validate the result announced by the CNE that gave Maduro the victory, without yet presenting, one month before the elections, the figures of the votes broken down table by table, which has cast suspicion on their veracity. The sentence did not resolve the doubts about what happened after the counting of votes on the night of July 28, but among its decisions it declared González Urrutia in contempt of the judicial authority.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office has classified the publication of the voting records that the opposition posted on a website as a crime and has already described them as false. The records are a public document, which are printed by the voting machines in several copies that are kept by the electoral authorities, the military who guard the electoral material and the witnesses of each party. 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 ones they had in their possession on the website of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela.
Chavismo has launched a persecution against the leaders of the coalition that María Corina Machado has promoted since the beginning of the year, when Maduro’s security forces went after her closest team. The heads of her party, Henry Alviárez and Dignora Hernández, were arrested in March and another group had to take refuge in the Argentine Embassy, now under the protection of Brazil, after the recent break in relations. The stalking has intensified after the elections. On Wednesday, at the end of the rally called in Caracas, the police arrested Biagio Pilieri, of the Convergencia party, after a violent car chase through Caracas. Other political party figures who have been arrested in recent weeks are Freddy Superlano, William Dávila, Roland Carreño and Américo De Grazia. Regional leaders of Machado’s party, Vente Venezuela, and other organizations, human rights activists, journalists and more than a thousand people who demonstrated against the election results have also been arrested.
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