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A group of former heads of government on Friday welcomed as “unacceptable” the announcement by the administration of US President Joe Biden that Venezuela’s electoral authorities had declared the country’s President Nicolas Maduro the winner of the Venezuelan elections last December 28. July, without verification of the minutes.
In a letter to Biden himself, more than 30 former presidents of Spain and the Democratic Initiative for the Americas (IDEA) also praised the US government for rejecting the proposal to hold new elections in the Latin American country.
They noted that given that “Venezuelan people expressed their will clearly at the polls on July 28”, it would be appropriate to respect the results and “recognize the electoral victory achieved by democratic forces, with a margin of more than thirty percentage points”, by the opposition standard-bearer Edmundo González Urrutia.
Maduro’s victory for a third consecutive term was declared by the National Electoral Council (CNE), but was rejected by the majority opposition as “fraudulent” and questioned by several foreign governments and international monitoring groups.
One of them is a United Nations panel of experts, which said in a preliminary report released this week that the CNE’s announcement declaring Maduro’s victory “failed to publish its details or disclose tabulated results to candidates, which is unprecedented in contemporary democratic elections.
The two former presidents noted that what is happening in Venezuela is not just “pure electoral fraud” but that “Maduro Moros’s clear aim is to continue to hold de facto power, using his control over all public powers and the support of the military-ceremonial leadership associated with his dictatorship, and is looking for time.”
They added that it was “an act of clear contempt and ignorance of popular will by Maduro,” which was accompanied by restrictions on election observation, the jailing of voting witnesses, and the repression of democratic forces and the Venezuelan people.
In this sense, they remember that international organizations, such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, have confirmed the murders, torture, disappearances and imprisonment of thousands of people since the day of the election.
Meanwhile, the CNE has so far not conducted a review, nor printed the minutes of its meetings, and has hidden the electoral materials for weeks, thereby “persisting in grave violations of the rule of law in constitutional institutions”, lamented the former leader of the government.
They stressed that all of the above “is a real robbery of inter-American democratic law and a clear challenge to the principles of international criminal law that the United States defends.”
The letter was signed by former presidents Óscar Arias, Carlos Alvarado Quesada, Laura Chinchilla, José María Figueres, Miguel Angel Rodríguez and Luis Guillermo Solís from Costa Rica; José María Aznar and Mariano Rajoy from Spain; Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón from Mexico; Iván Duque, Andrés Pastrana and Álvaro Uribe from Colombia, and Mauricio Macri from Argentina.
The agreement was also signed by former presidents Mario Abdo Benítez, Federico Franco and Juan Carlos Vamosi (Paraguay); Nicolás Ardito, Mireya Moscoso and Ernesto Pérez Valladares (Panama); Alfredo Cristiani (El Salvador); Eduardo Frei (Chile); Osvaldo Hurtado, Guillermo Lasso, Jamil Mahuad and Lenin Moreno (Ecuador); Hipólito Mejía (Dominican Republic); Julio María Sanguinetti and Luis Alberto Lacalle (Uruguay), Carlos Mesa and Jorge Tuto Quiroga (Bolivia).
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