“Everyone knows what happened here”

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado has accused the Chavista regime of a pushback after presidential elections this Sunday. Accompanied by the Unitarian Party candidate, Edmundo González, Machado has said that the opposition’s victory has been “overwhelming”. Contrary to most surveys, the National Electoral Council (CNE) has declared Nicolás Maduro the winner with more than 51% of the vote; against 49% of the Venezuelan opposition.

Machado – the opposition leader who could not be a candidate because she was disqualified – told a news conference: “Venezuela has a new elected president and he is Edmundo Gonzalez, and everyone knows it.” “We will not rest until the will of the Venezuelan people is respected,” Gonzalez said.

The opposition leader, who speaks of “massive looting”, claims that he has the details of the recount and that the difference in his favor is remarkable. Machado assured that the opposition has “more than 40% of the minutes and all the information agrees that Edmundo González Urrutia got 70% of the vote.”

“This is not just another fraud, it is a disregard and gross violation of popular sovereignty,” said Machado, who also reiterated the request she made throughout Sunday: that the witnesses would not leave the polling stations and that citizens would support them. “In the coming days we will continue to announce actions to defend the truth. Until the end, until the end,” she concluded.

The opposition points to the delays in the counting in some tables as a demonstration of the pucherazo, a delay that Chavismo attributes to external “attacks”. Elvis Amoroso, president of the CNE, assured that the delay in the delivery of the results was due to “aggressions against the data transmission system”.

Amoroso said he had requested the republic’s attorney general to open an investigation “into the terrorist actions committed against our electoral system, polling stations and electoral officials.”