Former Venezuelan opposition presidential candidate Edmundo González has fled the country to seek asylum in Spain, according to the Venezuelan government.
Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez announced that the government had decided to grant Mr. González Urrutia safe conduct to leave the country, just days after ordering his arrest, in order to help restore “political peace and tranquility of the country“.
Mr. González Urrutia, who several foreign governments consider the legitimate winner of the July presidential race, has been granted asylum in Spain.
Mr González Urrutia and opposition leader Maria Corina Machado have yet to comment.
Spain’s centre-left government said the decision to abandon Venezuela was Mr González Urrutia’s, and that he left on a plane sent by the country’s air force.
“Spain is committed to the political rights and physical integrity of all Venezuelans“, said the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jose Manuel Albareson the social media platform X.
Mr González Urrutia, a former diplomat, was replaced at the last minute when Ms Machado was unable to attend.
Until then unknown to most Venezuelans, his campaign nevertheless quickly ignited the hopes of millions of Venezuelans desperate for change after a decade of economic freefall.
Most Western governments have disputed the results of the July election, which declared President Nicolás Maduro the winner. Opposition volunteers who collected tally sheets from electronic voting machines say Mr. González Urrutia won the election.
The National Electoral Council, controlled by Maduro, failed to release results from more than 30,000 voting machines after this year’s election, blaming an alleged cyberattack from North Macedonia.
Attorney General Tarek William Saab, a staunch Maduro ally, has called for González Urrutia’s arrest after he failed to appear three times as part of a criminal investigation into what he considers electoral sabotage.
Mr Saab told reporters that the voting records shared online by the opposition were fake and an attempt to weaken the National Electoral Council.
Experts from the United Nations and the Carter Center, who observed the elections at the invitation of Mr. Maduro’s government, said the results announced by electoral authorities lacked credibility.
In a statement criticizing the election, U.N. experts stopped short of validating the opposition’s claimed victory, but said voting records published online appeared to have all the original security features.
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