By Luis De Jesus
29 Jul 2024, 23:32 PM EDT
Former Foreign Minister Celso Amorim, international advisor to Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, met on Monday with Nicolás Maduro, who assured him that “he will deliver the electoral records in the next few days,” according to diplomatic sources cited by the newspaper The Globe.
The meeting, which was also attended by the president of the National Assembly, Jorge Rodríguez, took place on Monday afternoon at the presidential palace in Miraflores and took place in a “cordial atmosphere,” according to the Rio de Janeiro newspaper.
According to the newspaper report, Maduro also told Lula’s adviser that his regime was at risk of a “coup by the extreme right,” as he had denounced hours earlier at the National Electoral Council.
Brazil on Monday stressed the importance of electoral transparency through an official statement from its foreign ministry in which it said that “the principle of popular sovereignty must be observed through impartial verification of the results.”
This last requirement, the note points out, is “an indispensable step for the transparency, credibility and legitimacy of the outcome of the electoral dispute.”
In the statement, Lula’s government stressed that only when all the results are known will it comment on the victory attributed by the electoral authorities to Maduro.
Amorim, who has been in Caracas since Friday as an observer from Brazil, said before the meeting with Maduro that he was concerned about the possible lack of transparency in the process.
“I don’t necessarily question what is being said, but the government said it would provide all the documents” that resulted in Maduro’s victory,” said Amorim, who will be in the Venezuelan capital at least until Tuesday.
The advisor was also scheduled to meet with opposition leader María Corina Machado on Monday.
The National Electoral Council officially proclaimed Maduro president after announcing on Sunday night that the Chavista, in power since 2013, won the election with 51.2% of the votes, the same result he received when 80% of the ballots had been counted and there were still more than two million votes left to count.
Meanwhile, Edmundo González Urrutia supposedly obtained 44.2% of the votes, according to the first and only public report of the CNE, which did not specify which candidates received the 2,394,268 votes that were not reported.
Thousands of Venezuelans took to the streets of Caracas and several regions of the country on Monday to protest against the results announced by the CNE, actions that, in several of them, were repressed by the military.
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