As the deadline for Venezuela’s Maduro regime to provide detailed voting records for each polling station expired yesterday, opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia has been recognized as Venezuela’s next president by the governments of Argentina, the United States and Uruguay (Peru already recognized him on Tuesday).
But on the streets of Caracas and other Venezuelan cities, there were no signs this week that the Maduro regime was rethinking its strategy of claiming victory and trying to crush the opposition by force.
On Friday, the opposition was attacked at its headquarters, El Bejucar, in the Altamira district of Caracas. Destroyed overnight A group of six armed men wearing camouflage uniforms and hoods.
Arrests of volunteer poll workers continued across the country as the government tried to block the opposition from uploading digitized receipts from individual polling stations. Showing opposition The margin of victory was more than 2-1.
Venezuelan social media Video of the attack Opposition volunteers are shown being dragged from their homes by angry mobs. Tried to prevent Arrest.
Venezuelans have also posted videos of foreigners in uniform on the streets of Caracas. Cuban and A decorated soldier He is a member of the Wagner Group, a notorious mercenary group with ties to the Kremlin that has played a major role in wars in Ukraine and across Africa.
Others are following Flights arriving from Cubaphotographed a Russian plane landing in Caracas.
Suspicion of mass counterfeiting
One of the most serious accusations of foreign interference came from former Colombian vice-president Francisco Santos, who He said on Wednesday China has aided the Maduro regime with a massive effort to counterfeit more than 30,000 “actas,” digital receipts generated by voting machines that were tampered with to show Maduro had won.
“The National Electoral Commission’s warehouse in Firas de Mariche, Miranda state, has a team of 150 employees supervised by a group of four Chinese engineers,” he said.
“All this in order to print a brand new actor and present it to international observers.”
Santos said the 150 workers were wearing grey overalls with no pockets and were not allowed to carry mobile phones, and that the Chinese engineers had arrived from Cuba on a Conviasa flight.
CBC News was unable to independently verify this claim.
If Santos’ allegations are true, it would not be the first time China has stepped in to support the Maduro regime in its digital repression.
The Maduro regime is heavily in debt to China and has had to cede Venezuela’s resources to Beijing to repay the debt.
Chinese mining companies are the leading foreign exporters of gold, coltan, lithium and thorium from Venezuela.
Chinese company ZTE Helped Venezuela The government has issued a digital national ID card, the Carnet de la Patria (Homeland Card), which the Maduro regime uses to track people’s movements and, in a country where most people rely on government aid to get food, the card is also used to direct scarce resources to those loyal to the regime.
The re-election of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has sparked violent protests across the country, with the opposition and much of the world questioning the legitimacy of the results. Andrew Chan explains why the results are so contentious and what they mean for a country that has been mired in crisis for years.
On Friday, the legal deadline expired for the Maduro government to present a digital receipt for the election. The opposition argues that it would have been impossible for the government to forge such a huge amount of documents in time, because each digitized tile requires a correct QR code, an alphanumeric digital signature, and the ink signatures of three witnesses.
Opposition parties began uploading copies of digitized ballots within hours of the election. Opposition volunteer poll workers were entitled to copies by law. Although they were barred from leaving polling stations with ballots thousands of times, they still managed to obtain “ballots” covering 81.7% of the country’s polling stations.
“Double Standards” on Non-Interference
“We finally have proof of what we’ve been explaining to the international community for years: that we always win elections,” said Alessa Polga, the longtime Canadian coordinator for Vente, the main party in Venezuela’s opposition coalition.
Polga told CBC News that the opposition is frustrated with foreign countries saying they respect Venezuela’s sovereignty and will let Venezuelans resolve their differences. Venezuela already faces significant foreign interference and ordinary people have no tools to remove the dictatorship from power, she said.
“The double standard of not asking for any interference in my country is a travesty,” she said.
“For years, the Maduro regime has allowed foreign powers to control and govern our country’s security — first Cuba, then Russia, China and Iran.”
Polga said many Venezuelans had gone to renew their national ID cards only to have to answer questions from officials with Cuban accents, and that the government was now turning to Cuba to shore up its military, whose loyalty is more in doubt.
“Why? Because many soldiers at the core of the military are standing with the people,” she said. “They are taking off their uniforms. They are laying down their weapons. They are suffering because they and their families are suffering.”
“The average Venezuelan earns just $10 to $11 a month. No one can survive on that.”
Cuban government watches nervously
While China and Russia are interested in both Venezuela’s resources and its strategic location in the Western Hemisphere, the Cuban government depends on Maduro for its very survival, said Juan Antonio Blanco, a former Cuban diplomat, historian and president of a pro-democracy group. Cuba Siglo 21.
“Neither the Venezuelan government nor the Cuban government was willing to accept defeat in the Venezuelan elections,” he told CBC News.
The Maduro government agreed to hold the elections after being promised concessions from the United States, including a partial lifting of sanctions.
“They miscalculated, first of all, the possibility of a landslide victory for the opposition against the government,” Blanco said. “They expected a defeat, but they expected the margin to be smaller, and they thought that the margin could be easily manipulated and hidden from the public. But that was not the case.”
“Given the type of defeat they have suffered, it is pretty difficult to carry out that plan without using lethal force, and that is exactly what they are doing now. They are resorting to their last resort, which is the use of lethal force against the population.”
Venezuela’s incumbent leader, Nicolas Maduro, has been declared the winner of a disputed presidential election that the opposition claims was stolen.
Many aircraft Unscheduled flightsAircraft including an Ilyushin Il-76, an Ilyushin Il-96 and an Airbus 340 have flown between Cuba and Venezuela in recent days. Some aircraft have diverted west to avoid the identification zone over Curacao. Turned it off ADS-B transmitters used to track civil aviation.
Blanco said that while Cuba is clearly sending a large number of people, he does not expect the entire Cuban military contingent to descend on Caracas airport.
“They don’t need to send weapons because they have all the weapons. This is not like sending troops to Angola with all the equipment to fight a war there,” he said. “They only need to send personnel.”
Blanco said Cubans will play two main roles in Venezuela.
“First of all, it’s about managing the security of President Maduro,” he said. “They’re not entrusting President Maduro’s security to the Venezuelan people or to anybody who might one day turn against President Maduro, even if it’s a commander or a general. So the first thing for them is to make sure that the personal security of President Maduro, and maybe a few other leaders, is under their direct control.”
“But if Maduro thinks that these people are just there to protect him, he’s foolish. These people are also there to control him, so that at a delicate moment he doesn’t give in and say, ‘Okay, I’ll accept the golden bridge that the United States or whoever is offering me.'”
“So they’re there to protect his life because that’s in their interest right now. If they have to eliminate him in the future they will, but right now it’s important that they protect his life from any attempt.” [at] Mutiny from his own troops.”
