Calls for ‘transparent’ vote count grow amid Venezuela protests, tensions | Nicolas Maduro News

Colombia’s left-wing President Gustavo Petro has called for a “transparent vote count” in Venezuela, which has been rocked by days of mass protests after President Nicolas Maduro was declared the winner of a disputed election.

Petro, who has worked to improve Colombia-Venezuela ties since taking office in 2022, said on Wednesday that the Venezuelan government should “allow the elections to end in peace, allowing a transparent vote count … and professional international supervision”.

Such a process would appease protesters “and stop the violence that leads to death”, the Colombian president wrote in a social media post.

He also said Maduro, who came to power in 2013 after the death of his mentor Hugo Chavez, held a “great responsibility” amid the turmoil: “to honour Chavez’s spirit and to allow the Venezuelan people to return to tranquility while the elections conclude peacefully and the transparent result, whatever it may be, is accepted”.

Petro’s comments come as Maduro has rebuffed international criticism and pressure to release the full results of Sunday’s presidential election, which saw the Venezuelan president face opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez.

Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) on Monday formally declared Maduro the winner of the vote. The CNE said Maduro had secured 51 percent support to win another six-year term, compared with Gonzalez’s 44 percent.

But the Venezuelan opposition has decried the official results as fraudulent, saying it has evidence that Gonzalez trounced Maduro.

“We Venezuelans want peace and respect for the popular will,” Gonzalez said on Tuesday as thousands of Venezuelans took to the streets of the capital Caracas and other parts of the country to protest the results.

The protesters, many of whom chanted anti-Maduro slogans, were met with tear gas and rubber bullets fired by police.

At least 11 people have been killed in incidents related to the election count or the protests, the rights group Foro Penal said on Tuesday, and international observers have raised serious concerns about a worsening crackdown on the demonstrations.

Maduro has struck a defiant tone, saying this week without any evidence that Venezuela was the target of an attempted “coup d’etat” of a “fascist and counter-revolutionary” nature.

His government has called the protesters violent agitators and Maduro directly blamed Gonzalez “for everything that is happening in Venezuela”, including “criminal violence … the wounded, the dead, the destruction”.

Opposition leaders say they have access to around 90 percent of vote tallies – which by law are supposed to be given to witnesses at vote counts – and the printouts of those tallies show Gonzalez won more than twice as many votes as Maduro.

But Oswaldo Ramirez of the Caracas-based firm ORC Consultores said the opposition faces “significant” challenges. “The opposition must show it has the tallies and send them to other countries as proof,” he told the Reuters news agency.

Carmen Beatriz Fernandez, CEO of the Datastrategia firm, said “there is still a small chance” that Maduro’s government could consent to negotiations to hash out a transition of power.

However, given that the government has not shared the tallies, it “seems to be taking the worst path for themselves and for the country”, she said.

On Wednesday, the foreign ministers of G7 countries urged the Venezuelan authorities to publish “detailed electoral results in full transparency”.

“And we ask electoral representatives to immediately share all information with the opposition and independent observers,” they said in a statement.

The US-based Carter Center, which sent electoral observers to Venezuela for the vote, said late on Tuesday that the election “did not meet international standards of electoral integrity and cannot be considered democratic”.

“The Carter Center cannot verify or corroborate the results of the election declared by the National Electoral Council (CNE), and the electoral authority’s failure to announce disaggregated results by polling station constitutes a serious breach of electoral principles,” it said in a statement.

The group listed a range of problems with the electoral process, including short voter registration deadlines, unequal campaign conditions, restrictions on the opposition, and what it said was a “clear bias” on the part of the CNE in favour of Maduro.

“In the limited number of polling centers they visited, Carter Center observer teams noted the desire of the Venezuelan people to participate in a democratic election process, as demonstrated through their active participation as polling staff, party witnesses, and citizen observers,” it said.

“However, their efforts were undermined by the CNE’s complete lack of transparency in announcing the results.”