Colombian President Petro calls on Venezuela’s Maduro to release detailed vote counts from election

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CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Pressure kept building against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on Wednesday, when his close ally Colombian President Gustavo Petro, joined other foreign leaders in urging him to release detailed vote counts from the recent presidential election after electoral authorities declared him the winner.

Petro’s comments come as the National Electoral Council, which is loyal to the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela, has yet to release any printed results from polling centers as it did in past elections. A day earlier, another of Maduro’s allies, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, along with U.S. President Joe Biden called for the “immediate release of full, transparent, and detailed voting data at the polling station level.”

The rebukes follow the stunning announcement Monday of Maduro’s main challenger, Edmundo González, and opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, that they had secured more than two-thirds of the tally sheets that each electronic voting machine printed after polls closed on Sunday. They said the release of the data on those tallies would prove Maduro lost the election.

Machado said the tallies show González received roughly 6.2 million votes compared with 2.7 million for Maduro. That is widely different from the electoral council’s report that Maduro received 5.1 million votes, against more than 4.4 million for González.

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“The serious doubts that have arisen around the Venezuelan electoral process can lead its people to a deep violent polarization with serious consequences of permanent division,” Petro said Wednesday in a post on social media site X.

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“I invite the Venezuelan government to allow the elections to end in peace, allowing a transparent vote count, with the counting of votes, and with the supervision of all the political forces of its country and professional international supervision,” he added.

Petro also proposed that Maduro’s government and the opposition reach an agreement “that allows for the maximum respect of the (political) force that has lost the elections.” The agreement, he said, could be submitted to the United Nations Security Council.

Venezuela has the world’s largest proven crude reserves and once boasted Latin America’s most advanced economy, but it entered into free fall after Maduro took the helm in 2013. Plummeting oil prices, widespread shortages and hyperinflation that soared past 130,000% led to social unrest and mass emigration.

More than 7.7 million Venezuelans have left the country since 2014, the largest exodus in Latin America’s recent history. Many have settled in Colombia.

The Carter Center, an independent U.S.-based institution that evaluates elections, said late Tuesday it was unable to verify the results of Venezuela’s presidential election, blaming authorities for a “complete lack of transparency” in declaring Maduro the winner without providing any individual polling tallies.

The group was authorized earlier this year by Venezuela’s electoral authorities to send experts to observe the election. It had 17 experts spread out in four cities on Sunday.

“The electoral authority’s failure to announce disaggregated results by polling station constitutes a serious breach of electoral principles,” the Carter Center said, adding that the election did not meet international standards and “cannot be considered democratic.”

The results announced Monday by the electoral council within hours drew thousands of protesters to the streets of the capital, Caracas, and other cities. The protests, which continued into Tuesday, turned violent at times, and law enforcement responded with tear gas and gun pellets.

Attorney General Tarek William Saab on Tuesday told reporters that more than 700 protesters were arrested in nationwide demonstrations Monday and that one officer was killed.

The Venezuela-based human rights organization Foro Penal also on Tuesday reported that 11 people, including two minors, had been killed in unrest related to the election.

The Organization of American States was set to gather Wednesday to discuss Venezuela’s election.

Maduro’s closest ruling party allies quickly came to his defense. National Assembly President Jorge Rodriguez — his chief negotiator in dialogues with the U.S. and the opposition — insisted Maduro was the indisputable winner and called the opposition violent fascists.

Praising the arrests of the protesters, he said Machado should be jailed and so should González, “because he is the leader of the fascist conspiracy that is trying to impose itself in Venezuela.”

Later, speaking from the balcony of the presidential palace, Maduro called González a coward and challenged him to face him.

“Come after me!” he yelled. “Show me your face. … Where are you hiding, mister coward?”

Meanwhile, Machado and González urged their supporters to remain calm and avoid violence.

“I ask Venezuelans to continue in peace, demanding that the result be respected and the tally sheets be published,” González said on X. “This victory, which belongs to all of us, will unite us and reconcile us as a nation.”