Venezuelan prosecutors close in on Edmundo González Urrutia and issue warrant for his arrest

The Venezuelan Prosecutor’s Office has carried out its threat to issue an arrest warrant against Edmundo González Urrutia, after three summons to testify that the opposition presidential candidate did not attend. Urrutia is accused of the crimes of usurpation of functions, forgery of public documents, instigation to disobey laws, conspiracy, and “sabotage to damage systems” amid of an investigation centered on the publication of 83.5% of the voting records collected by witnesses on July 28. With these data, the opposition has denounced that Nicolás Maduro committed fraud by proclaiming himself the winner of the elections, a victory that was later ratified by the Chavismo-subordinated National Electoral Council. The arrest warrant for Urrutia, signed Monday, was sent to a court that specializes in terrorism charges.

Chavismo is trying to force the opposition into a dead end with this latest move. In a brief message, opposition figurehead María Corina Machado responded to the measure, stating “they have lost all sense of reality.” “By threatening the president-elect, they only succeed in uniting us more and increasing the support of Venezuelans and the world for Edmundo González. Serenity, courage and firmness. We are moving forward,” Machado wrote on X.

The Chavistas’ targeting of the opposition, which began a year ago when they were organizing themselves for the primaries, has intensified after the disputed election. González Urrutia, a 75-year-old diplomat, has been in hiding for more than a month. He had not used his social media for several days until Monday - before the arrest warrant had been issued – when he called for the release of the 28 teenagers detained in the protests and to informs the government that he is ready to begin talks over the presidential handover. “It is time to end the persecution and move towards an orderly transition for a change, in peace and with guarantees,” he wrote.

The opposition coalition candidate has cited the lack of independence of the judiciary and in particular that of the Attorney General, Tarek William Saab, as reasons for not submitting to the process. “The prosecutor has behaved, repeatedly, as a political accuser,” as he “condemns in advance and now pushes for a summons without guarantees of independence and due process,” Urrutia said last week in a video posted on his social networks. “The Public Prosecutor’s Office intends to subject me to an interview without specifying in what condition I am expected to appear and pre-qualifying the crimes not committed.” González Urrutia did not appear at any of the three summonses issued by the Attorney General’s Office.

The opposition candidate also failed to appear before the Supreme Court a few weeks ago, when a supposed expert appraisal of the election documents was carried out to validate the result announced by the CNE, handing Maduro victory. The authorities have yet to present, a month after the election, the voting figures broken down table by table, which has cast doubt on their veracity.

Machado is also being kept in a secret location and has only made four public appearances at events in Caracas. Dozens of aides close to the opposition leaders have been imprisoned. Chavismo seeks to present Machado and González Urrutia as criminals and the main enemies of the revolution before public opinion. It has accused them, without presenting evidence, of attempting a coup d’état, of destabilizing the country, of falsifying the minutes printed by the voting machines, of forming a “satanic pact” with Elon Musk and even of being behind the 10-hour national blackout suffered by Venezuelans last week, which in the view of the government was the result of a “criminal attack,” despite the fact that for several years regions of the country have been constantly experiencing power cuts due to failures in generation and maintenance.

Machado had warned last week that González Urrutia’s residence could be raided within hours. Maduro, in his recurrent appearances on television, has insisted on forcing his July 28 rival into exile, as he eventually managed with opposition deputy Juan Guaidó. Maduro was involved in a standoff with Guaidó during the previous crisis of legitimacy that his government faced in 2019, after elections in which the participation of the main opposition leaders was prevented, leading the international community not to recognize them as valid.

The investigation initiated by the Public Prosecutor’s Office is related to the website Resultados Con Vzla, where the opposition posted the minutes obtained from its witnesses on July 28 and which can be consulted publicly. The records are a public document, several copies of which are printed by the voting machines and then retained by the electoral authorities, the military that guard the electoral material, and the witnesses of each party. The opposition prepared to quickly collect and scan these documents, with which it can confirm that González Urrutia won with 67% of the vote, according to 83.5% of the records obtained by its witnesses, some of whom were pursued by the security forces. The Prosecutor’s Office has classified these records as false in advance, despite the observations made by a UN panel of experts who stated that after analyzing a small sample, they found that they maintained the security parameters to make them reliable. In other elections, such as the one in which Maduro faced Henrique Capriles in 2013 and won by a narrow margin, Chavismo published the records they had in their possession on the website of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV).

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