Colombian President Gustavo Petro said Thursday that Venezuelans must reach an agreement to stop the violence and get out of the crisis the country is in after last Sunday’s presidential elections, whose official result has been questioned by the opposition and part of the international community.
“It is not a foreign government that should decide who is the president of Venezuela. It is up to the Venezuelan people to reach a political agreement to end the violence in their country and to establish a transparent way in which a vote count can be carried out with guarantees for all,” Petro said on the social network X.
The Colombian president responded in this way to a message from opposition leader María Corina Machado, who on Wednesday also referred in X to the extraordinary session of the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States (OAS) in which a resolution demanding that Venezuela reveal the minutes of the elections failed.
Colombia abstained from voting in favor of the resolution, which has led to criticism of the Petro government, but Machado highlighted the proposals of the Colombian ambassador to the OAS in her message.
“The Colombian ambassador to the OAS, Luis Ernesto Vargas, closed his statement in this extraordinary session by proposing three things: 1. All the minutes must be known. 2. All the minutes must be audited by the entire world. 3. Electoral guarantees must prevail for all sectors and any doubts about the counting must be cleared up,” wrote the opposition leader.
Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) released its only bulletin on Sunday night, awarding victory in the election to President Nicolás Maduro with 51.2% of the votes, compared to 44.2% for opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia, supported by Machado and disqualified from running in the elections.
The rejection of the electoral results announced by the CNE has led to numerous protests in different Venezuelan cities with an unspecified number of deaths and arrests.
In her message on Wednesday night, Machado also thanked the foreign ministers of Ecuador, Uruguay, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Paraguay, Panama and Guatemala for their support at the OAS session.
Petro, for his part, said on Wednesday in X that there are “serious doubts” about the presidential elections in Venezuela and asked the government of that country for a “transparent” scrutiny and to accept the result, “whatever it may be,” but then, in the OAS vote, Colombia distanced itself from the resolution that demanded Venezuela to show the electoral records.
According to the Foreign Ministry’s statement last night, “in recent hours, the Colombian government has maintained ongoing dialogue with the governments of Brazil and Mexico to create the necessary conditions and seek an agreement for coexistence and political peace in the sister country.”
Bogota / EFE
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2024-08-03 18:57:26
