By Luis De Jesus
Aug 12, 2024, 4:37 PM EDT
Journalist and writer Andrés Oppenheimer said that the results of the presidential elections in Venezuela were “a scandalous fraud” and that the supposed winner Nicolás Maduro invented more than 40% of the votes.
“It was a scandalous fraud. The opposition showed the evidence, showed the minutes; the Maduro dictatorship claimed a cyber blackout, an alleged hacking of the National Electoral Council computers to never release the figures. So, they claimed they won with 51% but they did not show a single proof as required by Venezuelan law,” he said in an interview with The Republic from Peru.
He said that autocrats steal one or two percentage points and mentioned the case of Evo Morales in 2019, in Bolivia. “But he invented almost 40% of the votes, it is an astronomical figure, and now he is looking for excuses to divert the issue and not show the minutes,” he said.
Andrés Oppenheimer pointed out that people forget that María Corina Machado, the leader of the Venezuelan opposition who transferred her popularity to candidate Edmundo González Urrutia, is a clever engineer who was also in the NGO Súmate, which specializes in electoral data.
“They obviously prepared for this: they created a structure of polling station monitors who took photos of the minutes and transmitted them. So there is no doubt that this was a monstrous fraud. Latin America took a while, but the Peruvians were the first to recognize González Urrutia as the winner of this election, and then the United States followed suit,” he said.
The journalist indicated that, in the case of Brazil and Colombia, which are trying to mediate, there is much greater concern because those governments know that if the crisis in Venezuela is not resolved, there will be “an invasion of Venezuelans,” exiles and migrants, equal to or greater than what has been seen so far.
What would Nicolás Maduro’s plan be for Venezuela?
He said that international support will surely have an indirect influence on the opposition in Venezuela. “If they feel supported, if they take to the streets, that will have an impact because the Venezuelan military is unlikely to go out to repress the people because they know that Maduro lost.”
He stated that