The Venezuelan flag flies over the Federal Legislative Building in Caracas, Venezuela on August 15, 2024. | Photo Credit: Reuters
Venezuela’s CNE electoral council, which has been facing criticism after declaring President Nicolas Maduro’s widely rejected election victory, on Wednesday (August 14, 2024) described a UN report disputing the result as “full of lies”.
The CNE declared Mr Maduro the winner with 52% of the vote in a poll conducted on July 28, but did not give details.
Mr Maduro’s victory has been rejected by the opposition, the United States, the European Union and several Latin American countries.
Anti-Maduro protests in Venezuela have so far left 25 people dead, dozens injured and more than 2,400 arrested.
A preliminary report published Tuesday by a panel of U.N. election experts found that the CNE “failed to meet basic transparency and integrity standards.”
The CNE hit back on Wednesday, saying the UN report was “full of lies and contradictions” and stressing that a “cyber terrorist attack” had deprived it of a full account of polling station-level results, while describing it as an “impeccable and transparent electoral process.”
The CNE website has been down since election day.
Venezuela’s Foreign Ministry has also rejected the UN report.
Former opposition leader Enrique Márquez, who once ran against Mr. Maduro and himself worked at the CNE, said on Wednesday that he would ask the prosecutor’s office to open a criminal investigation against his former colleagues on the electoral council.
Mexico insisted that Venezuela’s post-election crisis could be resolved by it alone.
“This is a matter of the Venezuelan people and we want a peaceful resolution of disputes, which has always been our foreign policy,” President Andrés Manuel López Obrador told reporters.
He said he had no immediate plans to renew contacts with his leftist leaders in Brazil and Colombia to discuss the crisis. He said he would await the decision of Venezuela’s Supreme Judiciary, which Mr Maduro has asked to certify the election result.
‘Coup’
The opposition says its own polling station-level results showed Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, a 74-year-old retired diplomat, won by a large margin.
González Urrutia and opposition leader María Corina Machado, who were barred from contesting the election by state institutions friendly to Mr. Maduro, have been in hiding since the president accused them of carrying out a “coup” and attempting to incite a “civil war.”
On Wednesday, Gonzalez Urrutia said the U.N. panel’s report and an earlier report by the U.S.-based Carter Center “confirm the lack of transparency in the declared results and the veracity of the opposition’s published ballots, which demonstrate our indisputable victory.”
A day earlier, the South American country’s National Assembly began considering a package of laws to tighten regulation on non-governmental organisations – which the regime has described as a “mask for financing terrorist actions”.
Other measures include increasing government monitoring of social media, which is accused of promoting “hate,” and attempting to punish “fascism” — a term Mr. Maduro often uses in relation to the opposition and other critics.
The debate in the unicameral Assembly will resume on Thursday.
Since coming to power in 2013, Mr Maduro has overseen an economic collapse that has forced more than seven million Venezuelans to leave the country, and an 80% drop in gross domestic product over a decade.
Mr Maduro’s last election in 2018 was also rejected by dozens of countries as a sham.