CARACAS – The Venezuelan government announced Friday that it would call former opposition candidate Edmundo González to give sworn testimony as part of an ongoing investigation into attempts to spread panic in the South American country by challenging the results of last month’s presidential election.
It is the latest attempt by the government of Nicolás Maduro to crack down on opponents who claim they easily defeated the self-proclaimed socialist leader.
Maduro refuses to acknowledge his defeat, claiming he won the July 28 election by more than a million votes, although polling results compiled by González’s campaign and online publications show the president lost by more than two to one. The United States, the United Nations and others have said the election is not credible, and even some of Maduro’s left-wing allies in Latin America have called on him to release the election results.
Venezuela’s Attorney General Tarek William Saab accused the former candidate at a press conference on Friday of trying to “illegally accumulate powers that belong exclusively” to the National Electoral Council.
González went into hiding after the July 28 election, when security forces arrested more than 2,000 protesters and political activists who had contested the official result. He was joined in hiding by opposition leader María Corina Machado, who chose González as a last-minute replacement after her own candidacy was disqualified.
Leading representatives of the ruling party have called for the arrest of González and Machado, but the authorities have so far held back.
The Biden administration on Friday condemned a ruling by Venezuela’s Supreme Court that confirmed Maduro’s victory. The high court said on Thursday it had conducted an audit of the results and found that they were consistent with those announced by electoral authorities, and that ballots published online by the opposition were fraudulent.
“Given the overwhelming evidence that Gonzalez received the most votes on July 28, this verdict is not credible,” said U.S. State Department spokesman Vedant Patel. “Continued attempts to fraudulently declare Maduro the winner will only exacerbate the ongoing crisis.”
Thanks to an excellent campaign on election day, opposition volunteers managed to collect copies of ballot papers from 80 percent of the 30,000 polling stations across the country. The ballot papers printed by each voting machine are provided with a QR code that makes it easy for anyone to check the results and is almost impossible to copy.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres called on Venezuela on Friday to act transparently and expressed his concern about human rights violations.
Meanwhile, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whose government is trying to resolve the conflict together with Brazil and Colombia, said on Friday that he would not recognize Maduro as the winner until the results were published.
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AP writer Edith Lederer at the United Nations, Courtney Bonnell in Washington and Mark Stevenson in Mexico City contributed to this report. Goodman reported from Miami
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