MIAMI.- The people of Venezuela expressed their desire for change and supported opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia with 70% of the votes, according to María Corina Machado. However, the regime of Nicolás Maduro declared itself the winner in what could be considered one of the biggest frauds in modern Venezuelan history.
“We won and everyone knows it,” Machado said at a press conference. “We want to tell all of Venezuela and the world that Venezuela has a new president-elect and it is Edmundo González Urrutia.”
“González Urrutia got 70% of the votes and Nicolás Maduro 30%. That’s the truth. Congratulations, Edmundo,” said Machado, who had him at his side.
The opposition leader, like the international community, denounces the lack of transparency in the hours before the National Electoral Council (CNE) announced the results in which it accredited, as in past elections, dictator Nicolás Maduro as the winner.
The president of the CNE, Elvis Amoroso, indicated that the dictator Maduro would illegitimately continue to lead Venezuela after, supposedly, obtaining 5.15 million votes (51.2%) compared to González Urrutia, with 4.45 million (44.2%), according to a first official bulletin with 80% of the votes counted.
“(The authorities) know what happened and what they intend to do. The entire international community knows this. All of it. Even those who were once allies. What happened in Venezuela and the way in which people voted for change. The most important thing is that we Venezuelans know this. In all the communities, the towns, the villages, what people did to get to vote. The joy of meeting, the hope for change and a peaceful transition,” added Machado.
Amoroso said that the bulletin reflected a “strong and irreversible” trend and pointed to an “attack against the data transmission system that delayed” the counting, thus justifying the waiting time for the “results.” Minutes earlier, the opposition had denounced irregularities with the counted votes.
“We have obtained 30% of the minutes because we were not allowed access. They have removed the witnesses from the table and it has been physically impossible to have everything that we should have had if the process had facilitated everything provided for by law. What we have to defend is the popular will, the peace of Venezuela and its future,” said Omar Barboza, secretary of the Unitary Platform.
Hours before, a exit poll The poll conducted by the prestigious Edison Research company declared the opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia of the Unitary Platform the winner, with 65% of the total votes, against the 31% obtained by the dictator Nicolas Maduro.
After the fraud took place, Venezuelan journalist Eugenio Martínez, an expert on Venezuelan political issues, said that the CNE had “two basic problems” with the rector’s announcement.
“There are two basic problems with the CNE president’s announcement. 1) Although he called them irreversible, a simple arithmetic operation serves to prove that this is not the case. 2) The results so far – Monday 2:32am – are not auditable,” Martínez wrote in X.
The National Electoral Council, which is controlled by Maduro loyalists, has yet to provide a breakdown of registrations for the country’s 30,000 voting centers.
Maduro, in his desire to perpetuate himself in Miraflores, took full advantage of his powerful status: he disqualified figures such as María Corina Machado, prevented the registration of candidates, used the media to spread opinion matrices, denied entry to the country to international observers and committed all kinds of outrages.
He also threatened a bloodbath if he did not win.
“The fate of Venezuela in the 21st century depends on our victory on July 28. If you don’t want Venezuela to fall into a bloodbath, into a fratricidal civil war“The product of the fascists, we guarantee the greatest success,” Maduro said in a televised message on the state channel, trying to instill fear in the population to consolidate his control.
