(Bloomberg) — Venezuela has ordered the arrest of presidential candidate Edmundo González, an escalation in the government’s crackdown on dissenters after a disputed election.
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The move is likely to further outrage the US and other countries, which have concluded that González was the winner of the July 28 election. Venezuelan authorities have instead declared, without evidence, that President Nicolás Maduro has been re-elected for a third term.
Prosecutors accuse González of violating the law because the opposition uploaded voting data to show he had won by a landslide. González is accused of crimes including falsifying a public document, inciting disobedience to law, conspiracy and sabotage, according to an arrest warrant posted Monday on the Public Prosecutor’s Office’s Instagram account.
Thousands of citizens, including children, have already been arrested as the regime tries to silence post-election protests. At least 25 people have been killed, according to human rights groups. While exiled opposition leader María Corina Machado has attended three opposition protests, González has not appeared in public since two days after the votes were cast.
Attorney General Tarek William Saab said Friday that authorities plan to take González into custody after he failed to comply with three separate subpoenas over the uploading of voting data that appeared to show he won a landslide in the July 28 presidential election. Saab had already opened a criminal investigation into González and Machado for incitement to violate laws, insurrection and disinformation, among other offenses.
“They have lost all sense of reality,” Machado posted on X on Monday after the arrest warrant was issued. “By threatening the president-elect, they will only unite us more and increase the support for Edmundo González from Venezuelans and the world.”
Gonzalez’s spokespeople did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Seized aircraft
The arrest warrant was announced hours after the US seized Maduro’s plane, after concluding that it had been purchased and used in violation of US sanctions, and days after a nationwide power outage that the government blamed on an attempt to “sabotage” the electrical grid by “fascist and far-right forces”.
Venezuela’s electoral authority, controlled by Maduro’s allies, said the president was re-elected with 52% of the votes cast. That claim has been disputed by the opposition, which says it has evidence of more than 80% of polls showing a victory for González.
While the U.S. and other countries agree with those findings, many are holding back on declaring González president-elect, leaving room for negotiations before a January inauguration. Ideologically oriented regional counterparts Brazil and Colombia have called on Maduro to publish the full vote results showing he won, while the European Union’s top diplomat said on Aug. 29 that the bloc could not accept the authoritarian socialist’s self-declared victory.
(Updates with comments from Machado, background information begins in the sixth paragraph.)
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