María Corina Machado denied plans to leave Venezuela

• The opposition member assured that she will continue in the country, despite the threats against her

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado denied that she had left Venezuela and stated that she has no plans to leave the country, according to a press release released by her political party, Vente Venezuela, on October 1.

“Here the one who is leaving is Nicolás Maduro, I am still with the Venezuelans. What the regime wants is to put me on the defensive, here we continue facing forward, despite the circumstances (…) We are going to achieve this and Edmundo González Urrutia is going to be sworn in on January 10 (2025),” said Machado in the missive.

The opposition’s statement was spread after Nicolás Maduro assured that Machado was preparing “to leave the country.” “She knows what I am saying, she is preparing to leave, compadre, I am also saying it, they are cowards,” Maduro said at a rally in La Guaira.

However, these rumors were denied by Machado, who has not accepted the offers of asylum made by leaders of the region.

María Corina Machado received the Václav Havel award for her role in the defense of human rights

Photo: EFE

On September 30, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe granted the Václav Havel Prize for Human Rights to María Corina Machado, who was not able to receive the award in person.

His daughter, Ana Corina Sosa, accepted the distinction on behalf of Machado, who is the first Latin American figure to obtain it.

The Václav Havel Prize.
It is an international recognition that honors people or groups that defend human rights in a creative and peaceful way.

“I deeply regret that I cannot travel,” said the president of the Assembly, Theodoros Rousopoulos, to the opposition leader, who connected to the event by videoconference.

The other two nominees of this edition were: Akif Gurbanov, political activist from Azerbaijan, arrested in March of this year during a demonstration; and Babutsa Pataraia, lawyer and director of the non-governmental organization Sapari.

Machado’s position and the political situation in Venezuela

Photo: José Daniel Ramos

María Corina Machado, after Edmundo González left Venezuela, assured that she decided to stay in the country to “fight with the Venezuelans.”

Machado said that González’s decision responded to the Venezuelan government’s threats against the opponent, which he condemned and described as measures to “silence” him.

“Let this be very clear to everyone: Edmundo will fight from the outside alongside our diaspora and I will continue doing so here, alongside you,” the opposition wrote on September 8.

González, who is 75 years old, was in hiding in Venezuela after the Court of First Instance in Control Functions issued on September 2 an arrest warrant against him.

The Public Ministry accused him of “usurpation of functions”, “forging of a public document”, “incitement to disobedience of laws”, “conspiracy”, “sabotage to damage systems and association (to commit a crime)”, according to the published citations by the judicial entity on social networks.

The investigation against González is related to the publication of a Web pagein which the Democratic Unitary Platform (PUD) claims to have uploaded “83.5% of the electoral records” collected by witnesses and polling station members on the night of the election to support its complaint of fraud in the presidential elections on July 28 .

As of October 1, the National Electoral Council (CNE) has not published the electoral records that certify the victory of Nicolás Maduro in the July 28 elections, as indicated by legal regulations. For its part, the PUD released the electoral records that show that González won by a wide margin, which sparked protests in the country that left, at least, 1,867 political prisoners and 11 deadaccording to the non-governmental organization (NGO) Foro Penal.

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