Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado said on Monday that the exile of former presidential candidate Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia “changes absolutely nothing,” and said that now comes a stage of great “intensity and danger.”
“The urgency remains, the legitimacy remains. The agenda and the strategy remain,” he said in an online press conference.
González Urrutia, who arrived in Spain this Sunday with his wife after requesting political asylum, said that his departure from Caracas was surrounded by “episodes of pressure, coercion and threats”. A day after landing in that country, he issued a statement, but did not reveal what his next steps would be.
Machado said on Monday that the details of the process that led González Urrutia to exile will be made known “in due time” and also affirmed that it is up to the 75-year-old retired ambassador to refer to several “specific aspects.”
“It is not up to me, but it is up to me to speak to the country. We Venezuelans who are in Venezuela are in a new phase of struggle,” he said.
Machado said that no one has the precise details of the complexity of the operation that took place behind González Urrutia’s departure from the country.
“At this moment there is a reality: Edmundo González Urrutia, in the circumstances in which he was in Venezuela, could not perform all the functions associated with the leadership that this moment requires; from outside he can do so with much greater protection and security,” Machado said.
“I want to ask those who are outside the country to consider the diagnosis that we are facing a criminal regime, described as having practices of state terrorism, and the ways in which we fight. It is not coherent to say that it is a criminal regime that has no scruples or limits clinging to power and to expect Venezuelan society to act as if it were not,” he said.
In this regard, he said that we must act with “intelligence, resilience, boldness and prudence” to “take care of our own, starting with the “president-elect.”
March in Madrid
Machado called on Venezuelans in Spain to gather in Madrid on Tuesday to demand the July 28 mandate. “We will continue to move forward until the entire world recognizes Edmundo González as president-elect.”
Machado, who won the opposition presidential primary but is barred from holding public office, said a proposal calling on the Spanish government and the European Union to recognise him as president-elect would also be debated in Congress on Tuesday.
González Urrutia left Venezuela days after his country’s justice system issued an arrest warrant against him, after failing to appear at three summons from the Public Prosecutor’s Office that is investigating him, among other crimes, for alleged “usurpation of functions” for publishing on a website the minutes kept by his polling station witnesses that would have declared him the winner of the presidential elections on July 28.
More than a month after the election, the electoral authority has not released the detailed results, which has been questioned by dozens of countries that have not recognized the victory of Nicolás Maduro, who was declared the winner of the elections.
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