Washington.-The United States government clarified that it has not proposed any form of amnesty to Nicolás Maduro to get him to leave power in Venezuela. However, it said it remains willing to explore various alternatives while trying to resolve the political crisis in the country, reported the Caracas newspaper El Nacional on Monday.
A senior Biden administration official, who asked to remain anonymous, said: “We have not made any amnesty offers to Maduro or his associates since the election. We are evaluating a range of options to incentivize and pressure Maduro to accept the election results and will continue to pursue them.”
Cited by the Nuevo Herald, the informant said that the United States believes that Maduro lost the presidential election to the opposition leader Edmundo González. And, despite this, they declared him the winner, proclaimed him and intensified the repression against the democratic opposition.
He said it was the responsibility of Maduro and Venezuela’s electoral authorities to clarify the results.
The official made the remarks in response to an article published by the Wall Street Journal, which claimed that the United States was trying to persuade Maduro to resign in exchange for amnesty.
According to the American newspaper, the pardons would also extend to Maduro’s main allies, some of whom face drug trafficking charges in the United States.
“So far, talks have been conducted virtually between Jorge Rodríguez, the president of Venezuela’s Congress and a Maduro confidant, and Daniel P. Erikson, who heads Venezuela policy at the White House National Security Council. U.S. officials have signaled they will not force Western oil companies to leave Venezuela,” the publication says.
He also noted that the proposal was rejected by the Venezuelan regime.
Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, in turn, rejected the holding of new elections and offered the electoral records in the opposition’s possession for anyone who wants to review them, in an interview published this Sunday in the Spanish newspaper El País.
Machado stressed that the result of the presidential elections of July 28 “is not negotiable” as is “popular sovereignty” which, she claims, gave its majority support to the opposition candidate, Edmundo González.
“Who in the world would think that another election would be held? There was already one here, under the regime’s terms, with an absolutely unequal campaign. We went under its terms, with its machines, with its records. The records we have are official documents from the CNE. Under its rules, we won, the world knows that we swept the board,” reiterates the Venezuelan opposition member.
Along these lines, he points out that “the challenge is to make Maduro understand that his best option is to accept the terms of a negotiated transition,” an outcome with which, according to him, “many countries, many governments are aligned.”
“I believe that it is a position that unites all countries in the world when they say that there must be an impartial verification of the records,” he says, adding that those in the hands of the opposition “are available for anyone who wants to analyze them, verify them, to do so” since “for that” they have an “open database.”
For the opposition, “we can already talk about transition” although not yet so much about “negotiation”: “For there to be negotiation, both parties must want it. We are determined, with four conditions. First, a negotiation that starts from respect for the popular sovereignty of July 28.”
“It is a negotiation for the transition, not for sharing power or other ideas that have emerged” in which the opposition is “willing to give guarantees, safe-conducts and incentives” [a Maduro y al chavismo]which I am not going to elaborate on because it is obviously inconvenient to do so and would be the subject of the negotiation itself,” he said in the interview.
At the same time, the mission is to “stop the repression” that Maduro is exerting on civil society.
“If I have to ask the international community for one thing, it is that this has not been denounced as it deserves. We are talking about Maduro bragging daily that he has more than 2,000 people detained, they are taking electoral witnesses from their homes, they are looking for those who volunteered on election day,” he says.
“In Venezuela, everything is possible. I feel that in his desperation, Maduro has opted for the most dangerous path: entrenching himself, surrounding himself with a high-ranking military command. I think it is a huge mistake on his part and a huge risk for Venezuelans,” Clarin added.
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2024-08-14 07:00:50
