The Organization of American States (OAS) accused Venezuelan authorities on Tuesday of trying to “distort the election results” through “the most aberrant manipulation” in a process “without guarantees.” The Permanent Council of the OAS, the highest executive body, will hold an extraordinary meeting next Wednesday to address the results and the regime’s claim of victory, which it describes as fraudulent, while the announced informational meeting of electoral observers from the Carter Center to present preliminary results of their work, scheduled for this Tuesday, has been suspended and its experts have left the country. Like the Pan-American organization, the Carter Center had requested on Monday the full publication of the minutes.
The statement issued in Washington strongly denounces what it considers to be unmitigated fraud: “The worst form of repression, the most vile, is to prevent the people from finding solutions through elections. The obligation of each institution in Venezuela should be to ensure freedom, justice, and transparency in the electoral process. The people should have the maximum guarantees of political freedom to be able to express themselves at the polls and protect the rights of citizens to be elected.”
Unlike the Carter Center, which deployed a total of 17 electoral experts in three Venezuelan states, in addition to Caracas, the OAS, like the European Union, was not authorized to supervise the development of the vote. It regrets that during this electoral process the Chavista regime has applied “a repressive scheme complemented by actions aimed at completely distorting the electoral result,” as the opposition claims. In this sense, it maintains that “the Maduro regime mocked important actors of the international community during these years and once again went to an electoral process without guarantees, nor mechanisms and procedures to enforce those guarantees.” “The complete manual for fraudulent handling of the electoral result was applied in Venezuela on Sunday night, in many cases in a very rudimentary manner,” it emphasizes.
The OAS statement says that the audit or recount of the minutes “has not had the slightest conditions of security and control.” The Pan-American organization recalls that, with regard to scrutiny audits, “the system [chavista] “It is at least 11 years behind when it promised UNASUR (in a meeting on April 18, 2013 in Lima) to audit 100 percent of the minutes of the electoral process of April 14, 2013. It is obvious to say that this was never carried out. It is obvious that a new mockery would be unacceptable,” he warns.
One step further than the main foreign ministries, starting with the US State Department, which are requesting the immediate publication of the minutes, the organization headed by Luis Almagro gives full credit to the evidence provided by the opposition: “It has already presented the minutes by which it would have won the election,” while “Maduro’s government, including the CNE [Consejo Nacional Electoral]has not yet been able to present them.” Therefore, it urges Maduro to accept “the minutes held by the opposition and consequently his electoral defeat and open the way to the return to democracy in Venezuela.” If the Chavista regime does not do so, the statement proposes, “it would be necessary to hold new elections, but in this case with the electoral observation missions of the European Union and the OAS present and a new CNE to reduce the margin of institutional irregularity that plagued this process,” it stressed.
The statement goes into detail about the consequences that the sum of “injustices” has for the population of Venezuela. “These people are once again victims of repression, without a doubt the most relevant governmental characteristic, the result of inefficient management that has sown the most serious humanitarian and migratory crises that the region has ever known,” the statement continues. It is estimated that around eight million Venezuelans have left the country in recent years. More than 800,000 Venezuelans have arrived in the United States, where the OAS is based, since 2021, including 114,695 in the first half of this year.
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