WASHINGTON.- The Permanent Council of the Organization of American States (OAS) called for this Wednesday an extraordinary meeting to “address the results of the electoral process” on Sunday in Venezuela, after the opposition and the international community denounced the fraud of the dictatorship to keep Nicolás Maduro in power.
The meeting will take place at 3:00 p.m. on July 31 at the OAS headquarters in Washington, the hemispheric organization announced in a statement on Monday.
The governments of Argentina, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay had announced earlier in a statement that they would request the summit of the OAS Permanent Council.
After hours of uncertainty on Sunday, Venezuela’s National Electoral Council, designed and managed by the regime, ended up giving Maduro the victory with 51.2% of the votes compared to 44.2% for the main opposition candidate, Edmundo González.
But the opposition, led by Maria Corina Machado, and much of the international community, including the United States, the European Union, Brazil and Colombia, cast doubt on the results that grant Maduro his third consecutive six-year term.
At the end of the afternoon on Monday, opposition leader María Corina Machado said that they already have evidence to prove the fraud carried out by the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro.
“I want to tell all the democrats in the world that we now have proof of what happened yesterday in Venezuela,” said Machado, who also gave figures. “We have 73.20% of the votes and with this result our president-elect is Edmundo González Urrutia.”
The opposition leader said that, according to information from the Command with Venezuela, with 73% of the votes, Nicolás Maduro obtained 2,759,256 votes and Edmundo González Urrutia was victorious with 6,274,182 votes.
In response to these allegations, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, for example, expressed his “serious concern” about the result and called for a “fair and transparent” recount of the votes.
Despite the calls, Venezuelan authorities have already celebrated Maduro’s proclamation, which denounced an attempted coup d’état “of a fascist and counterrevolutionary nature.”
Several sectors of Caracas were the scene of protests on Monday against the re-election of the Chavista leader, in power since 2013.
Police used tear gas to suppress one of these protests in the east of the Venezuelan capital.
Source: EDITORIAL with information from AFP
