One of the main organizations involved in observing the presidential elections held in Venezuela on Sunday has discredited the entire process. The Atlanta-based Carter Center says it has not been able to verify or corroborate the results that declared President Nicolás Maduro the winner. “Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election did not conform to international parameters and standards of electoral integrity and cannot be considered democratic,” reads the statement released by the center on Tuesday night, hours after its members left the country.
The fact that the electoral authority (CNE) has not announced results broken down by polling station, the statement continues, constitutes a “serious violation” of electoral principles. “The process has not met international standards of electoral integrity at any of its relevant stages and has violated numerous precepts of national legislation. It took place in an environment of restricted freedoms to the detriment of political actors, civil society organizations and the media. Throughout the electoral process, the CNE authorities showed bias in favor of the ruling party and against the opposition candidates,” it adds.
The Carter Center deployed a mission of 17 people, 11 in Caracas and six more distributed in the cities of Barinas, Maracaibo and Valencia. The UN also had people on the ground, although its report is not public and is confidentially delivered to its secretary general. “The updating of the voter registry was carried out with numerous inconveniences: very short deadlines, relatively few registration places and a minimal public information and dissemination campaign. The problem was aggravated abroad, where citizens faced excessive, even arbitrary, legal barriers to registering on the roll abroad. The result of the restrictive special voting period was translated into very low numbers of new voters abroad,” the organization complains.
According to these observers, this irregular process declared Maduro the winner over Edmundo González Urrutia, the opposition candidate. González was scoring far above Maduro in the most reliable polls. With Venezuela, his campaign command, he has been publishing, audited and digitalized, the minutes of the elections that the Carter Center and countries such as the United States, Brazil, Spain, Colombia and Chile, among others, are demanding. This data has been uploaded to a website and, already 84% processed, gives the victory to González Urrutia, the candidate of the Democratic Platform, with 7,119,000 votes, 68% of the total. Maduro got 30%, which adds up to 3,200,000 votes, a result very similar to what all the polls had been announcing.
The CNE and the Attorney General’s Office have denounced a hacking of the institution’s automated structures, the ultimate cause of the delay in the detailed data of the electoral results and for which no evidence has been presented. The Attorney General, Tarek William Saab, has accused María Corina Machado, the leader of the opposition, of organizing the sabotage from North Macedonia, in the Balkans, something that the Government of this country has denied.
“We have not only won, we have swept the board,” Machado said on Tuesday in front of a massive rally at the United Nations headquarters in the country, on Francisco de Miranda Avenue, in the east of Caracas. “We won in all the states of the country. Each one of these voting records is irrefutable proof of our victory. Here we can prove it to anyone. The president-elect of Venezuela is Edmundo González Urrutia.”
Machado challenged Elvis Amoroso, the president of the CNE, to respond to this question and to publish the minutes, along with the data, table by table, of the election. “What is the fear? We all know what has happened in Venezuela,” he said.
Amoroso, who was present at Maduro’s last events, has declared himself re-elected and has remained silent in the face of opposition demands, which are the same as those made by several Latin American countries, the United States and others in Europe. The CNE did not carry out a final audit of the process, considered essential, during the day after the consultation, and has not published the detailed results of the election.
The investigation to collect all the voting records has been the result of strategic, medium-term work, coordinated personally by Machado and Magalli Meda, the head of his command, who is sheltered in the Argentine embassy in Caracas. It is a labyrinthine technical team, organized in networks with their hierarchies and responsibilities, which works with extreme discretion, and which has managed to filter information, even from tables from which the opposition was expelled.
While all this is happening, the Chavista government of Maduro, which has co-opted the Venezuelan state, refuses to take note, does not respond to these claims and has renounced the arguments of the opposition. According to its data, Maduro has won and should remain president.
On Tuesday, rumors grew about the imminent arrest of Machado and González Urrutia, whose request was made by the official hierarchy at least three times. The Costa Rican foreign minister has offered asylum to Machado, who has politely declined the offer. The government has begun to identify the perpetrators of the toppling of eight statues of Hugo Chávez during protests on Monday and Tuesday. Meanwhile, opposition member Freddy Superlano, national coordinator of the Voluntad Popular party, was arrested after entering his home. Ricardo Estévez, one of the leaders of Súmate —a civil organization that functions as a technical brain of the Comando con Venezuela— was also arrested.
The protests have left at least 11 dead and hundreds arrested. Maduro held a national meeting with members of the Council of State and the General Defense Council — the revolutionary leadership, members of the public powers and senior members of the Armed Forces — to announce the capture of several of the protesting citizens and to promise to punish “the fascist right” for allegedly fomenting the riots. The Bolivarian leader seems to have the pleased support of the military.
“Enough is enough. We will not allow them to continue sowing death in the streets. The people have spoken here,” said Maduro, who promised “justice” and “jail” for his opponents, and who also spoke to his supporters from a small rally near Miraflores Palace. Maduro announced that he would reinforce the police and military presence in the streets “to guarantee peace,” and promised to confront “the misinformation on social media.” At the National Assembly session, the president of Parliament, Jorge Rodríguez, as well as the deputy Diosdado Cabello, called for jail for Machado and González Urrutia, and held them responsible for the violence after the elections.
“If you want to provoke us, we will accept the provocation,” Cabello told opposition politicians. “Be assured of one thing: we will screw you. We will not allow the peace that we have worked so hard to build to be altered.”
Follow all the information from El PAÍS América onFacebook andXor in ourweekly newsletter.
