CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Thousands of people rallied in the streets of Venezuela’s capital Saturday, waving the national flag and singing the national anthem in support of an opposition candidate they believe won the presidential election by a landslide.
Authorities have declared President Nicolás Maduro the winner of last Sunday’s election but have yet to produce voting tallies to prove he won. Instead, the government arrested hundreds of opposition supporters who took to the streets in the days after the disputed poll, and the president and his cadres have threatened to also lock up opposition leader, María Corina Machado, and her hand-picked presidential candidate, Edmundo González.
On Saturday, supporters chanted and sang as Machado arrived at the rally in Caracas. Machado, who has been barred by Maduro’s government from running for office for 15 years, had been in hiding since Tuesday, saying her life and freedom are at risk. Masked assailants ransacked the opposition’s headquarters on Friday, taking documents and vandalizing the space.
Machado held aloft a Venezuelan flag and promised that the regime that has forced millions of Venezuelans to leave their country was finally coming to an end.
“We have overcome all the barriers! We have knocked them all down,” Machado said. “Never has the regime been so weak.”
Carmen Elena García, a 57-year-old street vendor joined the rally, even though she said she feared the government might attack.
“They have to respect me and they have to respect all the Venezuelans who voted against this government, García said. “We will not accept them stealing our votes. They have to respect our votes.”
On Friday, Maduro alleged during a news conference that members of the opposition were planning an attack in a Caracas neighborhood near where the Machado rally was taking place Saturday. He said he had ordered the armed forces to guard the neighborhood, and also urged his supporters to attend “the mother of all marches” Saturday elsewhere in Caracas.
The Organization of American States on Saturday called for “reconciliation and justice” in Venezuela.
“Let all Venezuelans who express themselves in the streets find only an echo of peace, a peace that reflects the spirit of democracy,” the OAS said in a statement.
Machado and González, a 74-year-old former diplomat, said tally sheets they obtained from polling centers nationwide show Maduro lost his bid for a third six-year term by a landslide.
An Associated Press analysis Friday of vote tally sheets released by Venezuela’s main opposition indicates that Gonzalez won significantly more votes in the election than the government has claimed, casting serious doubt on the official declaration that Maduro won.
Late Friday, the country’s high court, the Supreme Justice Tribunal, ordered the Maduro-controlled National Electoral Council to hand over the precinct vote count sheets in three days. There have been calls from multiple governments, including Maduro’s close regional allies, for Venezuela’s electoral authorities to release the precinct-level tallies, as it has after previous elections.
The AP processed almost 24,000 images of tally sheets, representing the results from 79% of voting machines. Each sheet encoded vote counts in QR codes, which the AP programmatically decoded and analyzed, resulting in tabulations of 10.26 million votes.
According to the calculations, the González received 6.89 million votes, nearly half a million more than the government says Maduro won. The tabulations also show Maduro received 3.13 million votes from the tally sheets released.
By comparison, the National Electoral Council said Friday that based on 96.87% of tally sheets, Maduro had won 6.4 million votes and Gonzalez had 5.3 million. National Electoral Council President Elvis Amoroso attributed the delay in updating results to “massive attacks” on the “technological infrastructure.”
The tally sheets, known in Spanish as “actas,” are lengthy printouts that resemble shopping receipts. They have long been considered the ultimate proof of election results in Venezuela.
The AP could not independently verify the authenticity of the 24,532 tally sheets provided by the opposition. The AP successfully extracted data from 96% of the provided vote tallies, with the remaining 4% of images too poor to parse.
The Biden administration has thrown its support firmly behind the opposition, recognizing González as the victor and discrediting the National Electoral Council’s official results.
“Given the overwhelming evidence, it is clear to the United States and, most importantly, to the Venezuelan people that Edmundo González Urrutia won the most votes in Venezuela’s July 28 presidential election,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement.
González posted a message on X thanking the U.S. “for recognizing the will of the Venezuelan people reflected in our electoral victory and for supporting the process of restoring democratic norms in Venezuela.”
Maduro said Friday that the U.S. should stay out of Venezuela’s politics.
Venezuela sits atop the world’s largest proven crude reserves and once boasted Latin America’s most advanced economy, but it entered into a free fall marked by 130,000% hyperinflation and widespread shortages after Maduro took the helm in 2013. More than 7.7 million Venezuelans have fled the country since 2014, the largest exodu in Latin America’s recent history.
U.S. oil sanctions have only deepened the misery, and the Biden administration — which had been easing those restrictions — is now likely to ramp them up again unless Maduro agrees to some sort of transition.
There has been a flurry of diplomatic efforts by Brazil, Colombia and Mexico to convince Maduro to allow an impartial audit of the vote. On Thursday, the governments of the three countries issued a joint statement calling on Venezuela’s electoral authorities “to move forward expeditiously and publicly release” detailed voting data.
On Friday, Maduro and his campaign manager, National Assembly President Jorge Rodriguez, attempted to discredit the tally sheets posted online by the opposition, arguing that they were missing signatures from the electoral council representative as well as poll workers and party representatives.
They didn’t acknowledge that soldiers, civilian militia, police and loyalists of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela, on Sunday blocked some opposition representatives from entering the polls, witnessing the vote, and signing and obtaining copies of tally sheets.
Thousands of opposition supporters took to the streets Monday after the government declared Maduro the winner of the election. Those protest were met with a massive clampdown; 11 people were killed about 1,200 detained, according to civic groups.
