Venezuela’s opposition, claiming victory in presidential elections they say were stolen by strongman Nicolas Maduro, gathered in the thousands in Caracas and elsewhere on Saturday, vowing to fight “to the end.”
People rallied in several cities in Venezuela and as far afield as Spain, Belgium, and Australia in response to a call by opposition leader Maria Corina Machado to join a “Protest for the Truth.”
Machado herself came out of hiding to lead a rally in the capital, seeking to intensify pressure on Maduro to concede what she and others say was an overwhelming win for opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia in the July 28 polls.
“We won’t leave the streets,” Machado told thousands of demonstrators, many of whom waved the national flag and copies of election records from their voting stations as proof of an opposition victory.
“Peaceful protest is our right,” she said as demonstrators chanted “Liberty! Liberty!” and clamored to get as close as possible to the wildly popular politician.
Authorities later confiscated the open-top truck that Machado uses as a stage at rallies, including on Saturday, according to an X post from her Comando Con Venezuela alliance.
Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) proclaimed Maduro the winner of a third six-year term until 2031, giving him 52 percent of the votes cast but without providing a detailed breakdown of the results.
The opposition says polling station-level results show Gonzalez Urrutia took more than two-thirds of the vote.
He had replaced Machado on the ballot after she was barred from running by institutions loyal to the regime.
‘Coup d’etat’
Maduro on Saturday accused Gonzalez Urrutia, who last appeared in public at a protest on July 30, of trying to flee the country.
He has called for Machado and Gonzalez Urrutia to be arrested, accusing them of seeking to foment a “coup d’etat.”
Gonzalez Urrutia was defiant in a post on X earlier in the day: “We have the votes, the records, the support of the international community, and Venezuelans are determined to fight. It is time for an orderly transition.”
Anti-Maduro protests have claimed 25 lives so far, with nearly 200 injured and more than 2,400 arrested since election day.
At one of the first overseas demonstrations to get underway on Saturday, more than 100 Venezuelans in Australia rallied in Sydney.
Thousands more protested across Spain, host to about 280,000 of the nearly eight million Venezuelans who fled their country as the economy collapsed under the watch of Maduro, in office since 2013.
There were also rallies in Colombia, Mexico, and Argentina, where 34-year-old Andreina Escalante told AFP, “We have faith that we will get out of the dictatorship.”
Barbara Agelvis, with AFP
