CARACAS. – Dear Venezuelans, Venezuela won, every mother who wants her children back home won, every worker who wants to live with dignity and justice. You won, every kid who doesn’t want to leave or wants to return won, we all won, Venezuela won. With the pride of having achieved a historic victory on July 28 and the awareness that to get paid, you have to go all the way. That’s why we have to stay firm, organized and mobilized. This Saturday, August 3, we will all meet with our families, with children, grandchildren and grandparents, in all the cities of Venezuela, in Caracas, on Las Mercedes Avenue. We are going to pay tribute to all those heroes who asserted and defended the will of the Venezuelan people and who are now persecuted by the regime. Because we are going to assert the truth so that the world sees the determination of a society determined to live in freedom. And from this Saturday, August 3, raise our flag, a symbol of freedom, in your home.
This is the message that Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado made public this afternoon, addressed to all her compatriots after announcing earlier through close sources that she would address the country.
Machado, through an article published this Thursday at noon in The Wall Street Journal She declared herself in “clandestinity” for fear of her “life” and her “freedom”, after Nicolás Maduro asked for imprisonment for her and Edmundo González Urrutia, who was declared president-elect of Venezuela according to the counting of the voting records, held by the opposition.
“I am writing this from hiding, fearing for my life, for my freedom,” Machado said in the note published in the American media, in which he called for the “immediate cessation of the repression” of the protests by the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro, which with elections in which the National Electoral Council, at the service of the regime, declared him the winner, without showing evidence, in violation of the law that required that within a maximum of 48 hours after the elections the minutes be made public.
THE AMERICAS DAILYfor her part, had confirmed with sources close to the opposition leader that her exhortation was to remain calm. That she would remain under cover and that in the next few hours she would address the country, as she already did.
The opposition, warned, created a page in which it has reported more than 80% of the minutes and the total of this data gives Edmundo González Urrutia as president-elect with 7,173,152 votes, while Maduro accumulates 3,250,424 in this afternoon’s report.
The international community, including the regime’s regional allies such as Brazil and Colombia, have called on the dictatorship to carry out a vote count to clarify the situation.
The Carter Center, invited by the National Electoral Council, withdrew from Venezuela hours after the elections and stated that it “cannot verify or corroborate the authenticity of the results of the presidential election declared by the National Electoral Council (CNE).”
“The fact that the electoral authority has not announced results broken down by polling station constitutes a serious violation of electoral principles,” the international institution added in the statement.
Source: AFP
