GUSTAVO ZEITEL
Edmundo González, rival of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, reported this Thursday (7) that the Venezuelan Public Ministry requested a red alert from Interpol as part of a “new and systematic attack”. González was Maduro’s opponent in the July 28 elections. At the time Maduro, who was seeking his third consecutive term, repressed demonstrations by opponents of the regime.
The request to Interpol circulates on social media without official confirmation. The AFP news agency even consulted the Venezuelan prosecutor’s office, which did not respond to the report’s question. “It is clear that this new and systematic attack is due to our work abroad,” said González, who is in exile in Spain, in a post on X.
In the document that spread across the internet, the Public Prosecutor’s Office claims to have requested an international detention order for the crimes of usurpation of functions, forgery of documents and disobedience of laws.
In July, the Maduro dictatorship requested González’s arrest on the same charges. In this context, the former Unitary Platform (PUD) candidate went into exile in Madrid on September 8th. Venezuela’s attorney general, Tarek William Saab, had promised to drop all charges against González if he went into exile. A retired diplomat, he emerged from anonymity in Venezuela when he was anointed as an opposition candidate after Chavismo disqualified María Corina Machado, the main figure of the opposition group.
González claims victory in the July presidential elections, in which the electoral authority proclaimed Maduro for a third six-year term (2025-2031) without showing the results of the count. The prosecutor’s office also opened an investigation against María Corina Machado, who went underground shortly after reporting fraud in the elections.
She is accused of “falsifying” the voting records that her team published on a website that she uses as proof of her victory. “All the people involved in the elections, at this moment, are either exiled, or in asylum, or in hiding or in prison. I don’t know if the world understands the magnitude of the political persecution that has taken place in Venezuela,” she said in an interview with Folha de S.Paulo.
An observer of the elections, the Carter Center presented the minutes of the election to the Organization of American States (OAS), indicating that the opponent of the regime won with 67% of the valid votes.
As the politician went into exile in Madrid, a diplomatic crisis developed between Venezuela and Spain. In September, the regime called the ambassador in Madrid, Gladys Gutiérrez, for consultations and summoned the European country’s representative in Caracas, Ramón Santos, to appear at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In a message on the Telegram messaging app, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yvan Gil justified the action by mentioning what he called “insolent, interventionist and rude” comments from Spanish Defense Minister Margarita Robles.
