Opposition leader joins rally calling for invalidation of Venezuelan presidential election results

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Thousands of people took to the streets of Venezuela’s capital on Saturday, waving the national flag and singing the national anthem in a show of support for the opposition candidate who they say won the presidential election by a landslide.

The authorities announced President Nicolas Maduro the winner of last Sunday’s elections, but has not yet presented his candidacy voting results to prove he had won. Maduro also called on his supporters to take part in his own “mother of all marches” in Caracas on Saturday.

The government has arrested hundreds of opposition supporters. who took to the streets in the days after the disputed elections, the president and his staff also threatened to arrest the opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado, and her personally chosen presidential candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez.

On Saturday, supporters chanted and sang as Machado arrived at a rally in Caracas. They swarmed around her, delighted, as she climbed onto a platform on a truck to address the crowd.

“After six days of brutal repression, they thought they could silence us, intimidate us or paralyze us,” she told them. “The presence of each of you here today represents the best of Venezuela.”

Machado, who has been barred from running for office for 15 years by Maduro’s government, has been in hiding since Tuesday. She says her life and freedom are in danger. Masked attackers On Friday, they ransacked the opposition’s headquarters, took documents and vandalized the room.

On Saturday, she raised the Venezuelan flag and promised that the government whose policies she had forced millions of Venezuelans are leaving was finally coming to an end.

“We have overcome all the barriers! We have broken them all down,” Machado said. “The regime has never been so weak.”

González, who is still in hiding, was not spotted at the event and after the rally ended, Machado was given a T-shirt without any markings and rode away on the back of a motorcycle.

Carmen Elena García, a 57-year-old street vendor, attended the rally despite fearing government reprisals.

“They have to respect me and they have to respect all Venezuelans who voted against this government,” García said. “We will not allow them to steal our votes. They have to respect our votes.”

A column of pro-government motorcyclists who have served as Maduro’s militia in the past rode near the opposition rally, but there were no confrontations. There was only a light police presence.

The Organization of American States called on Saturday for “reconciliation and justice” in Venezuela, saying “may all Venezuelans who express their voices in the streets find in them only an echo of peace, a peace that reflects the spirit of democracy.”

Later Saturday, thousands of government supporters gathered outside Maduro’s office in the Miraflores National Palace. Wearing red caps and shirts — Maduro’s party color — they danced and listened to folk songs. There were fewer national flags and more umbrellas to shield them from the scorching Caracas sun.

In a long, rambling speech fueled by many cups of coffee, Maduro shouted, whistled, sang and cracked jokes, weaving in references from pop culture to religion. He repeated his threat to arrest and jail more opponents, including González, but also called for reconciliation and peace.

“There is a place for everyone in Venezuela,” he said, calling it a “blessed land of opportunity.”

Machado and González, a 74-year-old former diplomat, said spreadsheets they obtained Data from voting machines set up in polling stations across the country show that Maduro has clearly lost the fight for a third, six-year term.

Associated Press: analysis of Friday’s voting results sheets published by the opposition coalition indicate that Gonzalez won significantly more votes in the election than the government claims, which casts serious doubt on official declaration that Maduro won.

On Friday evening, the Venezuelan Supreme Court, Supreme Court of Justice ordered the Maduro-controlled National Electoral Council to release district-level vote-result sheets within three days. Many governments, including Maduro’s close regional allies, have called on Venezuelan electoral authorities to release district-level vote results, as they did after previous elections.

AP processed nearly 24,000 images of result sheets representing results from 79% of voting machines. Each sheet encoded vote counts in QR codes, which AP programmatically decoded and analyzed, resulting in tabulations of 10.26 million votes.

Gonzalez received 6.89 million votes, nearly half a million more than the government claims Maduro won, according to the tallies. The tabulations also show that Maduro received 3.13 million votes from the published ballots.

By comparison, the National Electoral Council said Friday that, based on 96.87% of the ballots that were returned, Maduro had won 6.4 million votes and Gonzalez 5.3 million. National Electoral Council President Elvis Amoroso attributed the delay in reporting complete results to attacks on the “technological infrastructure.”

The results sheets, known in Spanish as “actas,” are long, receipt-like printouts that have long been seen as definitive proof of Venezuelan election results.

AP could not independently verify the authenticity of 24,532 result sheets provided by the opposition. AP successfully extracted data from 96% of the submitted voter results, with the remaining 4% of images too faint to analyze.

The Biden administration has come out strongly in support of the opposition. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued a statement Thursday citing “overwhelming evidence that Gonzalez turned out to be the winner and discredited the official results of the National Electoral Council.

González posted a message on X in which he thanked the United States “for recognizing the will of the Venezuelan people.”

Maduro said Friday that the United States should stay out of Venezuelan politics.

Venezuela at the top the world’s largest proven oil reserves and once boasted Latin America’s most advanced economy, but after Maduro took power in 2013 it went into free fall, marked by 130,000-person hyperinflation and widespread shortages. More than 7.7 million Venezuelans fled the country since 2014, the greatest exodus in the recent history of Latin America.

US oil sanctions have only deepened misery, and the Biden administration, which has been easing those restrictions, is now likely to tighten them again unless Maduro agrees some kind of transition.

Brazil, Colombia and Mexico have launched a series of diplomatic efforts to persuade Maduro to allow an impartial audit of the vote. On Thursday, the three governments issued a joint statement calling on Venezuelan electoral authorities to “act swiftly and publicly disclose” detailed voting data.

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Co-authored by Associated Press photographer Matias Delacroix.