On August 17, 2024, hundreds of Venezuelans responded to the global call for “Great World Protests” and gathered in Plaza Manco Capac in Lima, Peru, to protest against the recent re-election of Venezuelan Nicolás Maduro. The World Truth Rally is a global event organized by opposition leader María Collina Machado in the wake of the controversial re-election of Nicolás Maduro as president in Venezuela, both domestically and internationally. Held after the results.
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Venezuela’s attorney general’s office said on Monday a court had issued an arrest warrant for opposition leader Edmundo Gonzalez, accusing him of conspiracy in the dispute over whether he or President Nicolas Maduro won the July election. and other crimes.
Justice Minister Tarek Saab shared a photo of the arrest warrant with Reuters via a message on the Telegram app.
Issuing an arrest warrant for Gonzalez would represent a significant escalation in Maduro’s government’s crackdown on the opposition following a disputed election.
Venezuela’s national electoral authorities and its supreme court said Maduro won the July 28 election with just over half the vote, but vote tallies shared by the opposition showed Gonzalez’s landslide victory.
The arrest warrant follows weeks of comments by senior government officials saying Gonzalez and other opposition members should be jailed.
“This man has the audacity to say that he does not recognize the law, he does not recognize anything. What is going on? This is unacceptable,” Maduro said in a broadcast on state television. “Citizens agree that the law must play a role, Officials must perform their duties.”
The opposition, some Western countries and international bodies including a U.N. expert panel said the vote was opaque and called for the full count to be released, with some outspokenly denouncing the results as fraudulent.
A spokesman for Gonzalez said they were awaiting notification of any arrest warrants but had no further comment. The opposition has consistently denied any wrongdoing.
“They have lost all sense of reality,” opposition leader Maria Corina Machado said on Support from Mondo Gonzalez.
The opposition has posted copies of what it says are more than 80 percent of the ballot box tallies on a public website, while the electoral commission said a cyberattack on election night prevented it from releasing the full tally.
The arrest warrant request appears to be the latest government move to target what the opposition says is a crackdown on dissent.
Saab has also launched a criminal investigation into Machado and the opposition vote-counting website itself, and detentions of opposition figures and protesters have continued in the weeks since the vote.
The protests have resulted in at least 27 deaths and around 2,400 arrests.
Gonzalez ignored three subpoenas to testify about the site, so a warrant could be issued for his arrest in that case.
The warrant was issued after prosecutor Luis Ernesto Duenes requested the arrest of Gonzalez on charges of usurping office, falsification of public documents, inciting to violate the law, conspiracy and association, all of which are alleged to have targeted Venezuela country.
Lawyers consulted by Reuters said Venezuelan law does not allow people over 70 to serve time in prison and instead requires house arrest. Gonzalez, who turned 75 last week, is married with two daughters. One lives in Caracas and the other in Madrid.
The United States has drafted a list of about 60 Venezuelan government officials and their family members who could be subject to sanctions in the first post-election punitive measures, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters.
Since the vote, the ruling party-controlled National Assembly has passed a law tightening rules for NGOs, and unions have condemned the forced resignations of state employees who espoused pro-opposition views.
The Biden administration said a plane used by Maduro was confiscated in the Dominican Republic after it was determined the purchase violated U.S. sanctions, a move the Venezuelan government denounced as “piracy.”
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