Maria Corina Machado rejects new elections and offers opposition records for review

The Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado rejects the holding of new elections and offers the electoral records held by the opposition for anyone who wants to review them, in an interview published this Sunday in the Spanish newspaper El País.

Machado stressed that the result of the presidential elections of July 28 “is not negotiable” as is “popular sovereignty” which, she claims, gave its majority support to the opposition candidate, Edmundo González.

“Who would think that another election would be held? There was already one here, under the regime’s terms, with an absolutely unequal campaign. We went under their terms, with their machines, with their records… The records we have are official documents from the CNE. Under their rules, we won, the world knows that we swept the board,” reiterates the Venezuelan opposition member.

Along these lines, he points out that “the challenge is to make Nicolás Maduro understand that his best option is to accept the terms of a negotiated transition,” an outcome with which, according to him, “many countries, many governments are aligned.”

“I believe that it is a position that unites all countries in the world when they say that there must be an impartial verification of the records,” he says, adding that those in the hands of the opposition “are available for anyone who wants to analyze them, verify them, to do so” since “for that” they have an “open database.”

For the opposition, “we can already talk about transition” although not yet so much about “negotiation”: “For there to be negotiation, both parties must want it. We are determined, with four conditions. First, a negotiation that starts from respect for the popular sovereignty of July 28.”

“It is a negotiation for the transition, not for sharing power or other ideas that have emerged” in which the opposition is “willing to give guarantees, safe-conducts and incentives” [a Maduro y al chavismo]which I am not going to elaborate on because it is obviously inconvenient to do so and would be the subject of the negotiation itself,” he said in the interview.

In parallel, the mission is to “stop the repression” that Maduro is exerting on civil society.

“If there is one thing I have to ask the international community to do, it is that this has not been denounced as it deserves. We are talking about Maduro bragging daily that he has more than 2,000 people detained, they are taking electoral witnesses from their homes, they are looking for those who volunteered on election day,” he says.

He also does not rule out the possible arrest of him or opposition candidate Edmundo González.

“In Venezuela, everything is possible. I feel that in his desperation, Maduro has opted for the most dangerous path: entrenching himself, surrounding himself with a high-ranking military command. I think it is a huge mistake on his part and a huge risk for Venezuelans,” he concludes.