(Caracas) Venezuelan prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into an online fundraising campaign accused of seeking to provoke the “downfall” of President Nicolás Maduro, Attorney General Tarek William Saab announced Tuesday regarding a mysterious website linked to the American founder of Blackwater.
The collection is being made on the website “Ya Casi Venezuela” (“We’re almost there Venezuela”), launched a few weeks ago, after the presidential election of July 28, which saw President Maduro proclaimed the winner while the opposition cried fraud and claimed victory.
The site, which claims to seek funds to “carry out the will of the people,” promises that Venezuelans will be “witnesses and protagonists of the fall” of Mr. Maduro, without specifying the initiatives it plans.
Its launch was accompanied by an aggressive social media campaign led by Erik Prince, a former US Navy SEAL and founder of the private military company Blackwater, renamed Academi after being implicated in the deaths of 17 civilians in Baghdad in 2007.
Erik Prince has appeared in videos calling for donations.
“They commit crimes even in the United States and in the continental and global sphere, and those who collaborate are accomplices,” including those who made donations, Mr. Saab warned in a statement to the press.
The opposition has so far kept its distance from the site.
The National Electoral Council (CNE), considered to be under the orders of the government, proclaimed Mr Maduro the winner of the election, with 52% of the vote, without publishing the exact vote count.
But the opposition assures, on the basis of the minutes provided by its scrutineers, that its candidate Edmundo González Urrutia, now a refugee in Spain, obtained more than 60% of the votes.