By EFE
30 Jul 2024, 07:36 AM EDT
San Juan – Political leaders of different ideologies in Puerto Rico expressed their opposition on Monday to the results of the elections in Venezuela, where President Nicolás Maduro has been re-elected for a third consecutive term with 51.2% of the votes.
“The result announced by the Venezuelan government clearly seems like fraud,” said Jesús Manuel Ortiz, leader of the autonomist Popular Democratic Party (PPD) and candidate for governor of the island in the upcoming general elections in November, on his X account.
“The world saw the mobilization of voters and the voting records of the event. Maduro and his regime lied to come to power and they have lied to stay there,” added Ortiz.
For his part, the senator and candidate for governor of the island for the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP), Juan Dalmau, acknowledged that the electoral process in Venezuela should have been “transparent,” which for him was not fulfilled and “failed gravely.”
According to Dalmau in a television interview with Teleonce Puerto Rico, the failure was due to “the absence of international observers, the removal of the opposition from the ballots and having control of the court that awards the votes.”
“In other words, in Venezuela, the failures are the same as those made by the PNP in Puerto Rico and they are the first to criticize the processes in Venezuela,” said Dalmau in reference to the ruling New Progressive Party (PNP).
Meanwhile, the spokesman for the PNP in the House of Representatives, Carlos Méndez, described the action of the National Electoral Council of Venezuela to certify Maduro as the winner as a “fraud against democracy.”
“It is a shame to say that he prevailed in yesterday’s (Sunday) elections when we saw unprecedented support for the Venezuelan people’s candidate Edmundo González. We all saw the images on the streets, not only in Caracas but in the rest of the country, and it was obvious that Maduro had lost resoundingly,” he said.
Méndez also criticized anyone in Puerto Rico who supports Maduro, alluding to the left: “Those who do so or remain silent are those who seek to implement the same oppressive system in Puerto Rico and we will not allow that,” he said.
Virtually the only group that showed support for Maduro was the minority Movimiento Independentista Nacional Hostosiano (MINH), which in a statement said that “what has been at stake in this electoral process is the continuity of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and, by extension, of the democratic and progressive processes that occur in America.”
“That has been the main objective of the United States government and its allies around the world: to prevent a successful transformation of any Latin American or Third World society through electoral means,” he said.
According to the first report from the National Electoral Council, Maduro, who has been in power since 2013, was re-elected with 51.2% of the votes (5,150,092 votes), while the candidate of the main opposition coalition, Edmundo González Urrutia, obtained 4,445,978, which represents 44.2% of the votes.
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