Venezuelans call to defend González Urrutia’s victory

More than 200 Venezuelans – representatives of different sectors and organizations – called this Monday through a document to the higher unit to defend the victory that he obtained the candidate of the majority opposition, Edmundo González Urrutiain the elections of July 28, despite the fact that Nicolás Maduro was declared the winner by the National Electoral Council (CNE).

“We, citizens and representatives of various political and ideological currents, as well as different sectors of civil society, who fight for democracy in our country, invoke the supreme unity of the nation,” says the document, read at a virtual meeting attended by opposition leader María Corina Machado, González Urrutia’s main ally.

The signatories urged Venezuelans to “to safeguard, with the greatest care, the civic spirit expressed on July 28” and “firmly maintain peaceful and constitutional protest.”

Venezuelans trust that freedom will be restored

“The path to democracy requires the broadest unity of all political, social and cultural sectors of the country. The recognition of the will expressed on July 28 may open the doors to a negotiation that will allow progress to be made in the re-institutionalization of the country and towards the peace that we so long for,” they said.

They demanded that the CNE, the Supreme Court of Justice – which validated the official result – and the Bolivarian National Armed Forces “recognize what was expressed at the polls,” while condemning that the repression after the elections has deepened in a “scandalous” manner.

The signatories trust that, with “victory in hand,” “freedom will be recovered, in order to promote an orderly and consensual transition aimed at reversing poverty (…), overcoming the collapse of all public services, democratically rebuilding society and institutions, and reuniting the Venezuelan family torn apart by the diaspora.”

The document was signed and presented a day after González Urrutia, standard-bearer of the main opposition coalition –the Democratic Unitary Platform (PUD)-, arrived in Spain because he considered that he was suffering political and judicial persecution in his country following the elections of July 28, in which the anti-Chavez bloc claimed victory.