Venezuela | Arrest warrant issued for opposition candidate

(Caracas) Edmundo González Urrutia, the opposition candidate who claims victory in the July 28 presidential election against Nicolás Maduro, has been the target of an arrest warrant from the Venezuelan justice system since Monday, while Caracas accuses Washington of “piracy” after the seizure of Mr. Maduro’s plane by the United States.

The prosecution claims to have obtained “an arrest order for serious” crimes from a court with jurisdiction over terrorism, according to a statement posted on social media.

Mr González Urrutia, 75, has failed to appear for three summonses from the courts – the last on Friday – who wanted to question him about the opposition website that claims he will win the presidential election.

The prosecutor’s office opened an investigation in early August against Mr González Urrutia and opposition leader María Corina Machado for “usurpation of functions, dissemination of false information, incitement to disobedience of the law, incitement to insurrection, criminal association”.

“They have lost all sense of reality. By threatening the president-elect [González Urrutia]”They only succeed in bringing us closer together and strengthening the support of Venezuelans and the whole world for Edmundo González,” reacted on social networks the leader of the opposition María Corina Machado, who like the former ambassador, lives in semi-clandestinity.

To justify his absences, Mr. González, who has not been seen in public since July 30, said he feared a justice system “without guarantees of independence” and the attorney general Tarek William Saab, whom he accuses of behaving “like a political accuser.”

Socialist President Nicolás Maduro, whose victory was validated by the Supreme Court, was declared the winner with 52% of the vote by the National Electoral Council (CNE), which did not make public the minutes of the polling stations, saying it was the victim of computer hacking.

Such an attack is considered implausible by the opposition and many observers, who see it as a maneuver by the government to avoid disclosing the exact count.

According to the opposition, which published the minutes provided by its scrutineers, Mr González Urrutia obtained more than 60% of the votes.

After the announcement of Nicolás Maduro’s re-election, spontaneous demonstrations left 27 dead and 192 injured, while some 2,400 people were arrested, according to official sources.

“Piracy”

Much of the international community, led by the United States, does not recognize Mr. Maduro’s re-election. The opposition has said it does not want to abandon the streets.

As part of the crisis, the United States announced Monday that it had “seized an aircraft that we believe was illegally acquired for $13 million through a front company and smuggled out of the United States for use by Nicolás Maduro and his clique,” according to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in a statement.

The aircraft, a Dassault Falcon 900EX, was seized in the Dominican Republic and transferred to Florida (Southeast), according to the press release.

Venezuela immediately “denounced it to the international community […] a repeated criminal practice that can only be described as an act of piracy,” according to a statement from the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry.

“This action reveals that no state or constitutional government is immune from illegal actions that flout international law,” the ministry added.

The Dominican Republic, for its part, stressed that it had not participated in the investigation led by Washington. Dominican authorities had “only” responded to “an international request for mutual legal assistance,” Dominican Foreign Minister Roberto Alvarez told reporters, specifying that the plane was in his country before the seizure “for maintenance purposes.”

In August 2019, under the presidency of Republican Donald Trump, the American executive branch issued a decree prohibiting any person in the United States from carrying out transactions with anyone who “directly or indirectly acted for or on behalf of the government of Venezuela,” the ministry recalled.

In March 2020, the US Department of Justice announced the indictment of Nicolás Maduro and other senior Venezuelan officials and offered a bounty of up to $15 million for information leading to the arrest of the president, who has been in power since 2013.

“Mr. Maduro and his representatives falsified the results of the presidential election” […] and “carried out a large-scale crackdown,” a White House National Security Council spokesman said Monday, calling the seizure “an important step in ensuring that Mr. Maduro continues to suffer the consequences of his misrule.”