In Plaza de Mayo, hundreds of Venezuelans, most of them refugees or asylum seekers in Argentina, carried Venezuelan flags
MAYARA PAIXÃO – BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA (FOLHAPRESS) – On a trip with few public details due to alleged security issues, Edmundo González, a diplomat that part of the Western world recognizes as the elected president of Venezuela, left exile in Madrid and met with Javier Milei in Buenos Aires.
In front, in Plaza de Mayo, hundreds of Venezuelans, most of them refugees or asylum seekers in Argentina, carried Venezuelan flags and posters in support of EGU, the acronym by which he is known, and María Corina Machado, the leader of the opposition which claims to be in Caracas but whose location is unknown.
The diplomat, for the first time since the July 28 elections, takes a tour of Latin America which, as the report said, does not include Brazil. Uruguay is on the list, where he will meet with Luis Lacalle Pou this Saturday; Panama, the Dominican Republic and the USA.
The objective is to garner support in the region on the eve of the inauguration of Nicolás Maduro, re-elected in an election questioned by the international community. The dictator takes power next Friday (10) and promises to begin a project to change the Constitution.
There are still doubts about which authorities will receive González in other countries, that is, whether he will be given the same prestige given by Milei and Lacalle Pou this weekend.
In Panama City, President José Raúl Mulino will possibly be traveling to the USA to participate in the funeral of former President Jimmy Carter for a symbolic agenda: it was Carter who was responsible for transferring the Panama Canal to the Central American country, and now Donald Trump threatens the sovereignty of the region.
Argentina is one of the most vocal countries in the region in defending the Venezuelan opposition. A week after the election, Milei’s diplomacy said it concluded, “unequivocally, that the unquestionable winner of the presidential election is Edmundo González Urrutia”.
Venezuela then broke relations with the country and expelled its diplomatic corps from Caracas.
Brazil, after actions that overcame the Milei-Lula feuds, took over the care of the Argentine embassy with an important factor: there live six opposition asylum seekers who were prevented by the dictatorship from leaving the country along with Argentine diplomats heading to Buenos Aires.
Since then, Lula’s diplomacy priority towards Venezuela has been to ask for safe conduct for them to leave the country.
On the other side of the River Plate, in Montevideo, EGU is raising what should be the last large-scale public support in the country. President Lacalle Pou has good contact with María Corina Machado and also recognizes González, but his successor, Yamandú Orsi, who takes over in March, promises a lower tone.
From the Frente Amplio, he agrees that the electoral process in Venezuela did not follow democratic rites, but his stance is different from that of Lacalle, especially because he has to balance all the opinions of his coalition, in which the more traditional unionism and still defender of the Venezuelan dictatorship it has some weight.
The Venezuelan opposition claims that EGU won the election with 67% of the votes, compared to 30% for Maduro. To do this, it collected what it says is 85% of the minutes from the electronic voting machines, the same ones that the local regime initially refused to hand over, but later placed in the hands of the Supreme Court of Justice, which did not make them public either.
Some verification projects around the world that also obtained these documents from so-called voting table witnesses (people who supervised the process) validate that González was elected. The regime says Maduro won with 51.2% of the vote.
