Before the undaunted eyes of the hemisphere, Nicolás Maduro consummated on Friday the gross theft of last July’s elections, by swearing in a new six-year term that everyone, starting with himself and his acolytes, knows he did not win fair and square.
---
Lee este artículo en español.
---
With this unfortunate course of action, Maduro and his entourage confirm the dictatorial nature of his regime and aggravate in unsuspected ways the deep crisis that the neighboring country has been experiencing for so long, with the potential, due to its resources and its people, to be one of the richest countries in the world, but plunged into a crisis of apocalyptic proportions due to the incompetence, rapacity, corruption and ideological fanaticism of its leaders.
Given the intransigence of Maduro and his entourage, there is no easy way out of this overwhelming drama that for so long has raged against our Venezuelan brothers and sisters. We urge the international community, however, to maintain pressure on the illegitimate regime, not to loosen the yoke at any time, until Venezuela recovers the democratic spirit of which it was an example in Latin America for generations.
Maduro is isolated and he knows it. The illegitimate inauguration, to say the least, was attended by only two heads of state whose democratic vocation is known to be null and void: Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua and Miguel Díaz Canel of Cuba. We applaud the rest of the heads of state of the continent and the rest of the planet who did not lend themselves to the unpresentable pantomime, including Maduro’s ideological allies such as the presidents of Chile, Colombia, Brasil and México.
At every opportunity, Maduro must be told that he and his gang have no place among legitimate governments that truly represent their people.
The elections in Venezuela were not optimal, as the government basically decided who could compete. Even so, Venezuelans turned out massively and peacefully to vote on July 28 last year. The opposition showed minutes evidencing that Edmundo González Urrutia, a diplomat, won the elections with almost 70% of the votes, even though he was unknown to the population just a few months before the elections.
Multiple international organizations, including the Carter Center, which has been supervising elections around the world for decades, consider the minutes evidencing González Urrutia’s victory, which, as of this week, are kept in the custody of the National Bank of Panama. Several governments of the region, including the United States, also consider González Urrutia the legitimate president of Venezuela.
With pretext upon pretext, including an unsubstantiated accusation that the electoral system had been intervened from North Macedonia, a small European country whose leaders never received a formal complaint on the matter, the government never showed its alleged evidence of Maduro’s triumph. It is forced to conclude that they did not present such evidence because it does not exist.
The will of the Venezuelan people was that someone else, not Maduro, should lead the destiny of their country. What choice is left for us, believers in democracy, human rights, peace and truth, other than to respect that will and demand, once again, that the clamor of a people who clearly indicated the path they want to follow be respected?
Venezuela, nor Latin America, deserve to be kicked back to the totalitarianism that, with rare and unfortunate exceptions, we thought had long since been overcome in our region of the world. It is up to the international community, and to all democrats around the world, to let the unpresentable Maduro regime know this at every moment. “Dictatorship,” the great Simón Bolívar once said, “is the stumbling block of the republic.” It is time for them to understand this.
---
This content was translated from Spanish to English using artificial intelligence and was reviewed by an editor before being published.
