U.S. and Other Countries Denounce Venezuela Election Results
The United States and countries around the world denounced the results of Venezuela’s presidential election, in which the incumbent, Nicolás Maduro, declared victory in the face of accusations of widespread fraud.
Notably, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the president of Brazil and a longtime leader within the region’s leftist movement, released a cautious statement that did not congratulate the president on his win.
“The Brazilian government welcomes the peaceful nature of yesterday’s elections in Venezuela and is following the counting process closely,” Mr. Lula’s government said in the statement. “In this context, it awaits the publication by the National Electoral Council of data broken down by polling station, an indispensable step for the transparency, credibility and legitimacy of the election result.”
And Colombia, led by Gustavo Petro, a former leftist militant, also did not salute Mr. Maduro, but rather called for the tallies to be released and for international observers who monitored the vote to report their findings.
“It’s important to clear up any doubts about the results,” Colombia’s foreign minister, Luis Gilberto Murillo, wrote on X.
The Venezuelan electoral authority, which the government controls, announced that partial results of Sunday’s election showed that Mr. Maduro. had received 51.2 percent of the vote and was the clear winner.
Mr. Maduro, a former bus driver and union leader who has been in power for more than 10 years, had faced off against Edmundo González, a former diplomat, who the electoral authority claimed received 44.2 percent of the vote.
Mr. González was essentially a stand-in for a wildly popular opposition leader, MarĂa Corina Machado, who had been disqualified from running. She called the official results “im-poss-ible.”
“Everybody knows what happened,” she said.
Much of the dispute around Sunday’s election focuses on the vote count.
There are two in Venezuela, a digital tally sent by voting sites to the country’s election body — which is led by an ally of Mr. Maduro — and a paper tally of ballots cast that is printed by each voting machine at polling sites.
The paper tallies are usually how people can verify that the digital count is correct.
But this year, election officials have refused to hand over the entirety of the paper tallies to election monitors.
Ms. Machado said that the opposition had only received fewer than half of the paper tallies and those results, which were also given to independent election monitors, showed Mr. González winning in a landslide.
Two senior U.S. officials who spoke to journalists on the condition that their names not be published, in accordance with Biden administration policy, called for the Venezuelan government to immediately publish detailed precinct-by-precinct results. The international community would not accept the results without it, a senior U.S. official said.
The Biden administration would assess its Venezuela sanctions policy, which restricts Venezuela’s ability to sell oil in international markets, given the new developments, but was not considering revoking any previously issued oil licenses, another senior U.S. official told reporters in a call Monday.
By using oil sanctions as leverage, the United States helped pressure Venezuela into holding the elections.
According to quick counts and other data the Biden administration had received, the results announced by Venezuela may not “track” with how people voted, the official said.
On Monday, Venezuela’s justice minister, Tarek William Saab, said the government was looking into acts of vandalism against government installations, and said three opposition leaders, including Ms. Machado, were under investigation for a hack of Venezuela’s electoral system Sunday.
Mr. Maduro said the opposition was prepared to use a tired tactic: crying fraud even before the election had taken place.
“I’ve seen this movie a few times,” Mr. Maduro said.
Mr. Maduro did receive support from leftist leaders in Cuba, Nicaragua, Russia, Bolivia and Honduras, who applauded his victory.
But, across Latin America, leaders of Uruguay, Peru, Panama, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Argentina and Guatemala all denounced the results.
Chile’s leftist leader, Gabriel Boric, said people were right to be skeptical.
“The Maduro regime must understand that the results they publish are difficult to believe,” he said on X.
But Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, who has overseen the erosion of democracy in his own country, congratulated Mr. Maduro on his victory, and Cuba’s Miguel DĂaz-Canel BermĂşdez said he had “defeated the pro-imperialist opposition.”
Russia’s Vladimir Putin said he was eager to strengthen ties between the two countries. Iran and China also congratulated Mr. Maduro on his victory.
“Russian-Venezuelan relations have the character of a strategic partnership,” Mr. Putin said in a message to Maduro, the Kremlin said in a statement. “I am confident that your activities as the head of state will continue to contribute to their progressive development in all directions.”
Charles Shapiro, a retired diplomat who was the U.S. ambassador to Venezuela during a 2002 coup that briefly ousted Mr. Maduro’s mentor, former president Hugo Chávez, said he hoped that Brazilian diplomats were using their influence to work behind the scenes to negotiate a solution.
“There is no international body that will turn this around, but you can be assured that countries in Latin America, in North America and in Europe are going to push as hard as they can,” Mr. Shapiro said.
Unlike in some past elections, Venezuela’s electoral body did not publish detailed election results online and, in fact, its website was down, fueling suspicions about the results.
“This is like the cowboy movies I used to watch when I was a child: the lights would go off in the saloon, and when they came back on, one guy had stolen the other guy’s cards,” Mr. Shapiro said. “It’s a baldfaced election steal.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken called for the release of a detailed tabulation and said the United States and the international community would respond “accordingly.”
“We have serious concerns that the result announced does not reflect the will or the votes of the Venezuelan people,” Mr. Blinken said from Tokyo. “The international community is watching this very closely.”
Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, said the Maduro regime had “carried out the most predictable and ridiculous sham election in modern history.”
Genevieve Glatsky contributed reporting from Bogotá, Colombia.
#U.S #Countries #Denounce #Venezuela #Election #Results