Venezuelan Political Leaders Call for Rallies Over Contested Election Results

[Pelican Press 0]

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

Venezuelan Political Leaders Call for Rallies Over Contested Election Results

At least 16 people — including one soldier — have ***** and about 750 more have been arrested as a result of protests in Venezuela, following the highly contentious presidential election over the weekend, according to rights groups, government officials and relatives of the victims.

Election officials declared the nation’s autocratic leader, President Nicolás Maduro, the winner of another six-year term early Monday, saying he handily beat a former diplomat, Edmundo González. But the government has not released the full results, and many countries, including the ******* States, have said that the vote was marred by widespread irregularities.

Both sides of the country’s political divide called on followers to take to the streets, which resulted in deadly clashes on Monday. The demonstrations continued on Tuesday, signaling that the crisis was far from over.

Hundreds of people gathered early Tuesday outside the ******* Nations office in Caracas, the capital, denouncing the official results.

“We are totally *******,” said Robert Castellanos, 46, a chef who was an election monitor in his district, where he said Mr. González had received three times as many votes as the president. “This has been the biggest ****** in the history of ****** America.”

The opposition leader, María Corina Machado, released data on Tuesday night that she said showed Mr. González, the candidate she backed, winning the presidency in a landslide.

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, using paper tallies observers collected from 81 percent of the nation’s voting machines, showed that Mr. Gonzalez had won 7.1 million votes, or 67 percent, versus 3.2 million, or 30 percent, for Mr. Maduro.

Jorge Rodríguez, the president of the National Assembly and the head of Mr. Maduro’s campaign, also called for marches on Tuesday from traditional government strongholds to Miraflores, the presidential palace.

“We are going to Miraflores to defend our right to life, our right to freedom, and, above all, our right to choose and to defend the result of the election,” he said.

In the end, however, it appeared that the turnout for the pro-government demonstration on a rainy afternoon was relatively modest.

The protests that broke out in Caracas and in other parts of Venezuela on Monday appeared to have turned deadly.

Foro Penal, a human rights organization, said in a preliminary count that at least 11 people had ***** amid the protests throughout the country. Families who were gathered at the medical examiner’s office in Caracas reported at least four more people who were shot at protests and who were not part of Foro Penal’s count.

Olinger Montaño López, 23, and Yeison Bracho, 22, were strangers who both lived in working-class Caracas neighborhoods. Both decided for the first time to attend rallies on Monday. They both hoped pressure from the street would force Mr. Maduro to admit that he had lost.

They were fatally shot by unknown assailants who fired upon protesters, and their bodies both wound up at the Bello Monte morgue, where people who have ***** violent deaths are taken. Before leaving for the demonstration in El Valle, in the southwest of Caracas, Mr. Montaño, a barber who liked to sing, told his aunt that he was willing to **** fighting for his country’s freedom.

“How is it possible that all of this situation is happening for nothing more than damned politics, for a government that doesn’t want to let us be free?” his aunt, Carol López, 46, said through sobs.

Her own three children have already left the country for the ******* States, she said, having trekked through the Darien Gap, the treacherous jungle path linking Central and South America, heading north to find a better life somewhere else. Her grandchildren left with their parents and she believes she will probably never see them again, because she is not fit enough to make such a voyage.

“And if you stay here in this country, then that ****** you,” she said. “Hunger ****** you. ********** ***** you. Or the government ****** you.”

Javier Bracho said his son, Yeison, joined about 40 other people protesting the official election results. They gathered on a nearby road to block traffic on the road that leads from Caracas to nearby La Guaira, when two motorcycles pulled up, and the armed riders started ******* into the crowd.

Yeison’s father was just 150 feet away.

“They started ********* at everybody,” Mr. Bracho said. “We were trying for a better Venezuela, a better future for our kids, and look at everything that happened.”

The younger Mr. Bracho had recently returned home to Venezuela, after spending several years in Colombia with his mother. He wanted to study ********* justice, but was not accepted. “I feel so guilty for all of this, for having brought him back from Colombia,” his father said.

Venezuela’s authoritarian government is known for using bands of armed men on motorbikes as enforcers. Known as collectives, or colectivos in Spanish, they started as pro-government community organizations, but are now essentially a paramilitary group.

Mr. González, the opposition candidate, called for the police and armed forces to respect the Constitution.

“Unfortunately, in the past hours, we’ve received reports of people *******, dozens of injured and detained,” Mr. González said in a

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

posted on

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

. “To the security forces and armed forces, we insist that you respect the will Venezuelans expressed on the 28th of July and stop the repression of peaceful protests.”

An opposition politician was arrested on Tuesday in Sebucán, east of Caracas, his supporters announced. Videos shared on social media showed Freddy Superlano, who ran in the presidential primaries but dropped out, being taken away by masked armed men.

The Ministry of Defense said that a soldier also ***** after being shot in the neck, and 48 police officers and soldiers were injured. The ministry said hundreds of electoral centers, election council offices and machines had been vandalized in acts of sabotage by the “extreme right.”

Attorney General Tarek William Saab announced on Tuesday that 749 people had been arrested on charges that included terrorism and incitement to hatred.

He described the unrest as the seeds of a “civil war.”

“We have had a kind of unrest, a country in flames,” Mr. Saab said.

The marches on Tuesday followed a day of tense and spontaneous protests in the capital. Large groups of young men fanned out from neighborhoods where the government had long enjoyed strong support to demand Mr. Maduro’s ouster after 11 years in power. As they marched through the streets, they tore down his campaign signs and set them on *****.

Several statues of Mr. Maduro’s mentor, former President Hugo Chávez, who ***** in 2013, were toppled. Mr. Maduro quickly ordered new ones built.

The election authorities announced that Mr. Maduro had won Sunday’s presidential election by a margin of seven percentage points, with Mr. Maduro obtaining 51 percent of the vote and Mr. González 44 percent, figures that did not match quick counts and other data. But the government has yet to publish precinct-by-precinct vote counts results and is facing increasing international pressure to do so.

Venezuela suspended flights to Panama and the Dominican Republic after those countries questioned the official election results. Venezuela’s foreign minister announced that the country was expelling diplomatic missions from seven ****** ********* countries that had condemned the official election results.

Mr. Maduro said he was relaxed about the fallout from the election and the claims of ****** and had “slept like a baby” on Sunday night.

Speaking to a crowd of hundreds of people outside the presidential palace on Tuesday evening, Mr. Maduro called for his followers to hit the streets every day to defend the official election results.

He said most of the people arrested in the protests had admitted to being part of an “ultraright” plot supporting Ms. Machado, whom he referred to as a “**********.”

“Honestly,” Mr. Maduro said, “they are fascists.”

Ms. Machado said her supporters were busy scanning hundreds of pages of election results and building

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

to show who had really won the election.

Using paper tallies that political party monitors receive from each voting station, Ms. Machado released her own results. The opposition has a majority of the tallies from Sunday’s vote, she said, and they showed that Mr. González received more than 3.5 million more votes than Mr. Maduro.

The government’s election website was still down on Tuesday. When asked when results would be made publicly available, Ivanova Rodríguez, a spokeswoman for Venezuela’s elections council, texted: “In progress.”

The postelection protests on Monday and Tuesday took a surprising turn as low-income people who live in the hills surrounding the capital, which were traditionally government strongholds in past demonstrations, joined opposition rallies.

“We have never seen anything like this before, where people of all social statuses are on the same side,” said Miguel Reyes, 70, who joined Ms. Machado’s rally Tuesday. “We’re all in this together.”

Genevieve Glatsky contributed reporting from Bogotá, Colombia, and Adriana Loureiro Fernandez contributed reporting from Caracas, Venezuela.

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

#Venezuelan #Political #Leaders #Call #Rallies #Contested #Election #Results

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

For verified travel tips and real support, visit: https://hopzone.eu/