Machado to Petro and Lula: It is absurd to continue asking for the minutes

Opposition leader María Corina Machado This Tuesday he told the presidents of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, and of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, that it is “absurd” to ask that the electoral records of the elections of July 28 be published.

«There is nothing more to wait, three months have passed. It is absurd to continue asking the regime to deliver minutes that it is not going to deliver.«Machado expressed in an interview with the Colombian radio station Blu Radio.

The opposition leader stressed that the opposition has the minutes, that “they are original copies and that the world already knows them.”

«We must understand that this period (of requesting the publication of the minutes) has closed and I can understand the position of Presidents Petro and Lula in the sense of trying to maintain a certain neutrality for the purposes of maintaining a dialogue with the regime, but they haven’t even answered the phone«he added.

The governments of Colombia, Brazil and Mexico have tried to mediate in the crisis that Venezuela is experiencing since the National Electoral Council (CNE) announced Maduro’s disputed victory.

None of these countries has yet recognized the supposed re-election of Nicolás Maduro, but neither have they opted for the victory of the former opposition candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, and are committed to requesting the publication of the electoral records and opening paths of dialogue between the parts.

Machado: It is time to act

Machado noted that “Maduro is not going to sit down and negotiate anything until the cost of remaining in power is higher than the cost of giving up power.”

«This is the moment in which the world has to act and in particular Colombia, because there will be no peace in Colombia as long as a system that is not only dictatorial, tyrannical, but criminal exists in Venezuela, which has turned our territory into the sanctuary of all these groups that destabilize Venezuela, Colombia and the region,” he expressed.

Machado also recalled that on October 22, 2023, in the primaries, she was chosen as a candidate for the 2024 presidential election, a fact that she described as “the civic event that gave her cause, that opened the doors to all citizen forces” and led to the opposition “until July 28, to the largest victory in the history of Venezuela in an electoral process.”

“What happened was a milestone that has changed the history of Venezuela and that demonstrated the collapse of Chavismo as a political movement and social platform,” he said, adding that “the regime is at its weakest point in these 25 years.”