Daniel Raisbeck
Daniel Raisbeck
Venezuela’s 75-year-old president-elect, Edmundo González, fled to Spain on September 8, soon after the Chavista regime issued an arrest warrant against him. González’s exile is the product of the regime’s reign of terror, unleashed since autocrat Nicolás Maduro lost the July 28 election by a 67-to-30-percent margin. Six Latin American countries recognize González’s legitimacy, while the United States acknowledges his electoral victory.
After the election, González initially took refuge in the Dutch embassy in Caracas and then went to the Spanish embassy, where he was coerced into accepting his removal from Venezuela. Under threat, González signed a letter, drafted by the regime’s officials, in which he accepted the Venezuelan Supreme Court’s decision to proclaim Maduro as the election’s winner. González’s subsequent exile appeared to be a significant Chavista victory.
The regime had been under exceptional pressure since opposition leader María Corina Machado, who was banned from running against Maduro, acted to prevent the electoral authorities from getting away with fraud on a colossal scale. Machado’s team of electoral witnesses got a hold of the tallies at over 20,000 voting centers, more than 80 percent of the total, and quickly published them on a website. The data specifies the exact location of each voting center and includes QR codes that give access to all scanned tallies, each signed by a representative of the National Electoral Council. The regime, meanwhile, has yet to publish any evidence to back its preposterous claim of a Maduro victory.
The day after the election massive protests arose, mostly in poor, traditionally Chavista strongholds. Disgruntled Venezuelans even toppled statues of Hugo Chávez himself. For some, the regime’s fall seemed nigh. Things look different now. Maduro and his accomplices are clinging to power, and the opposition must work to prove it can maintain its momentum. The regime followed a series of steps that it has used often before. » Read More
https://www.cato.org/blog/how-maduro-clings-power