By EFE
30 Jul 2024, 16:17 PM EDT
Venezuelan and Cuban exiles demanded Tuesday in Miami the recognition of the opposition’s victory in Sunday’s presidential elections in Venezuela, and called for a “national civic strike” in the face of the “massive fraud” imposed by force by the regime of Nicolás Maduro.
“Dictator Nicolás Maduro is falling. We have a new president and now is the time to hold a national strike”, “We are tired and exhausted from these 25 years” of authoritarian government,” said Ernesto Ackerman, president of the Independent Venezuelan American Citizens (IVAC) organization, at a press conference today.
For this reason, he insisted to EFE, “the time has come for a complete and peaceful paralysis of the country, for a general strike that also extends to Cuba, Nicaragua and Bolivia.”
As protests continue to spread across the streets of Caracas and several regions of Venezuela, leaving at least six dead and 749 detained, IVAC and the Cuban Resistance Assembly have joined forces to denounce the “total fraud” of the presidential elections.
Ackerman calls on the international community to recognize the victory of Edmundo González Urrutia, the candidate of the majority opposition, the Democratic Unitary Platform (PUD), who defeated Maduro with 73% of the votes counted, according to the opposition.
Opposition leader María Corina Machado said that the PUD has in its possession 73% of the ballots issued in the presidential elections, which she said gave González Urrutia the victory with an “overwhelming” difference (between 20 and 35 points of advantage) in the elections, even though the electoral body declared Maduro the winner.
“These figures invented by them were a total fraud. The PUD has the real minutes of 73.20% of the tables. Maduro’s farce is falling apart. It is clear that there was fraud and that Urrutia is the president of Venezuela,” Ackerman said.
Numerous countries and international leaders have put Maduro against the wall by demanding that he prove his victory by presenting all the electoral records.
Ackerman defended the “total peaceful civic strike” as a “more effective” option than protests in the streets, which expose Venezuelans once again, he lamented, to being “massacred” by the Maduro regime.
“This is the time for democratic countries that believe in freedom to speak out and support” the victory of the Venezuelan opposition in the presidential elections, to “isolate” Maduro, he added.
The Cuban Resistance Assembly (ARC), for its part, said at the conference that this is a “crucial moment” for Venezuela and the Venezuelan-American community in South Florida.
Orlando Gutiérrez Boronat, coordinator of the ARC, which brings together more than 30 opposition organizations inside and outside Cuba, told EFE that the declared election results are a “shameless manipulation and a continued disregard by the regime for democratic principles and the will of the Venezuelan people.”
Gutiérrez defended the call for a national strike as a “civic and patriotic way to prevent the theft of elections and the kidnapping of Venezuelan sovereignty.”
Numerous international voices have urged the National Electoral Council of Venezuela (CNE) to guarantee the transparency of last Sunday’s elections by publishing the minutes of the vote count.
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