The National Social Pastoral Cáritas of the Paraguayan Episcopal Conference expressed this Saturday its solidarity for “the painful post-electoral situation” that Venezuela is experiencing and demanded a public and impartial review of the voting records of the July 28 elections, whose official result ratified the victory of President Nicolás Maduro, but which the largest opposition coalition considers fraudulent.
In an open letter, the organization stated, referring to the Venezuelan electoral process, that “democracy is in mourning” and asserted that the violence recorded in the Caribbean country, where there have been more than 2,400 arrests as a result of protests against Maduro’s reelection, is an effect of the “lack of transparency.”
“The state of violence affecting Venezuela is rooted in the lack of transparency regarding election results that demonstrate with evidence what the will of the people has been as expressed at the polls,” the religious group said.
Need
In this regard, the Pastoral considered “the public and impartial review and verification of the electoral records to be fair, necessary and required.”
Likewise, the Episcopal Conference joined the request for the electoral authorities to “review their intransigent position” and to act within the constitutional and legal framework to “restore peaceful coexistence and unrestricted respect for the dignity of the human person to the citizens.”
Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE), which says it suffered a cyber attack on voting day, declared President Nicolás Maduro the winner of the presidential election with more than 51% of the vote over Edmundo González Urrutia, the standard-bearer of the majority opposition Democratic Unitary Platform (PUD), a result that is also questioned by a sector of the international community.
No published minutes
Thirteen days after the elections were held, the electoral authority has not published the minutes certifying Maduro’s victory, as required by law, and has left the process of “certifying” the official result in the hands of the Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ), at the request of the president.
The Venezuelan opposition, for its part, published on a website “83.5%” of the electoral records that – it claims – prove González Urrutia’s victory, documents that Maduro considers “forged.”
Asuncion / EFE
#Paraguayan #Church #expresses #solidarity #Venezuela #demands #review #electoral #records
2024-08-12 13:14:11
