Venezuelan opposition leader Antonio Ledezma is calling on the international community to react to President Nicolas Maduro’s warning that if he loses Sunday’s election there will be “a bloodbath.”
Ledezma, exiled in Madrid, told EFE on Friday that Maduro “will only have repression left,” convinced that the opposition candidate, Edmundo González, will win the election.
He therefore urged more countries to join in the voices against this threat, as have done the leaders of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva; Chile, Gabriel Boric; Colombia, Gustavo Petro; and Honduras, Xiomara Castro.
Among them, Spain, recalling that former Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is in Venezuela as an electoral observer for the Puebla Group, a Latin American and European left-wing forum.
“Fraud will not be possible” on Maduro’s part, the opposition leader observed, since the polls give Gonzalez “a 40-point lead” and the opposition hopes to have representatives in the vote count in the nearly 90,000 polling stations in the country.
He is therefore calling on the rest of the world to do everything to “dissuade” Maduro. “I don’t see the military shooting at relatives” who protest against the president after the elections, said the former mayor of Caracas.
Confident of a massive turnout at the polls, he noted that many Venezuelans living outside the country have travelled to be able to vote in Venezuela, given the difficulties in doing so abroad.
Of the nearly 7.7 million Venezuelans who have left their country in recent years, just over 69,000 are eligible to vote abroad. Of the nearly 441,000 Venezuelans residing in Spain, just over 22,000 were able to register.
“From Spain, Peru, Chile, we have to do our best” to vote, he said, even though it means a financial effort, with plane tickets in some cases costing more than 2,000 euros for journeys such as from Madrid to Caracas.
“I hope it will be a flood of votes and joy for the victory,” said Ledezma, coordinator of the International Political Council of María Corina Machado, the opposition candidate who was disqualified and replaced by González at the head of the Democratic Unitary Platform.
Chavismo, in power since 1999 and with Maduro at the helm since 2013, “will have no alternative but to accept defeat and facilitate the transition,” said the opposition, in a process “with guarantees even for him.”
“There will be no lynching or witch hunt, but there will be no impunity either. There will be justice, but it cannot be revenge,” said Ledezma.
Ma / EFE
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2024-07-26 20:20:13
