Venezuela election: US recognises opposition candidate Edmundo González as winner

The US government has recognised Edmundo González Urrutia as the winner of Venezuela’s presidential election, discrediting the results announced by government-controlled electoral authorities who declared Nicolás Maduro the victor.

“Given the overwhelming evidence, it is clear to the United States and, most importantly, to the Venezuelan people that Edmundo González Urrutia won the most votes in Venezuela’s 28 July presidential election,” US secretary of state Antony Blinken said in a statement on Thursday night.

The country’s electoral council declared Maduro the winner of Sunday’s highly anticipated election, but the president’s main challenger, González, and opposition leader María Corina Machado have said they obtained more than two-thirds of the tally sheets that each electronic voting machine printed after polls closed.

They said the release of the data on those tallies would prove that Maduro lost.

The announcement from the US government came amid diplomatic efforts to persuade Maduro to release vote tallies from the election and increasing calls for an independent review of the results, according to officials from Brazil and Mexico.

Government officials from Brazil, Colombia and Mexico have been in constant communication with Maduro’s administration to convince him that he must show the vote tally sheets from Sunday’s election and allow impartial verification, a Brazilian government official told the Associated Press on Thursday.

The officials have told Venezuela’s government that showing the data is the only way to dispel any doubt in the results, said the Brazilian official, who asked not be identified.

A Mexican official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed that the three governments have been discussing the issue with Venezuela but did not provide details. Earlier, Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, said he planned to speak to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil and President Gustavo Petro of Colombia, and that his government believed it was important that the electoral tallies be made public.

Later on Thursday, the governments of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico issued a joint statement calling on Venezuela’s electoral authorities “to move forward expeditiously and publicly release” detailed voting data, but they did not confirm any backroom diplomatic efforts to persuade Maduro’s government to publish the vote tallies.

“The fundamental principle of popular sovereignty must be respected through impartial verification of the results,” they said in the statement.

On Monday, after Maduro was declared the winner, thousands of opposition supporters took to the streets. The government said it arrested hundreds of protesters and Venezuela-based human rights Organization Foro Penal said 11 people were killed. Dozens more were arrested the following day, including former a opposition candidate, Freddy Superlano.

Opposition leader Machado – who was barred from running for president – and González addressed a huge rally of their supporters in the capital, Caracas, on Tuesday, but they have not been seen in public since.

Later that day, the president of the National Assembly, Jorge Rodriguez, called for their arrest, calling them criminals and fascists.

In an op-ed published on Thursday in the Wall Street Journal, Machado said she was “hiding, fearing for my life, my freedom, and that of my fellow countrymen”. She reasserted that the opposition has physical evidence that Maduro lost the election and urged the international community to intervene.

“We have voted Mr Maduro out,” she wrote. “Now it is up to the international community to decide whether to tolerate a demonstrably illegitimate government.” Machado later posted a video on social media calling on supporters to gather on Saturday morning across the country.

Government repression over the years has pushed opposition leaders into exile. The González campaign had no comment on the op-ed.

On Wednesday, Maduro asked Venezuela’s highest court to conduct an audit of the election, but that request drew almost immediate criticism from foreign observers who said the court is too close to the government to produce an independent review.

It wasn’t clear if Maduro’s first concession to demands for more transparency was the result of the discussions with Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. Venezuela’s president confirmed during a news conference on Wednesday that he had spoken to Petro about it.

On Thursday, the court accepted Maduro’s request for an audit and ordered him, González and the eight other candidates who participated in the presidential election to appear before the justices on Friday.

Venezuela has the world’s largest proven crude reserves and once boasted Latin America’s most advanced economy, but it went into freefall after Maduro took the helm in 2013. Plummeting oil prices, widespread shortages and hyperinflation that soared past 130,000% led to social unrest and mass emigration.

More than 7.7 million Venezuelans have left the country since 2014, the largest exodus in Latin America’s recent history.