From the Editorial Staff

The newspaper La Jornada
Friday, August 2, 2024, p. 24

The governments of Colombia, Brazil and Mexico spoke out yesterday in favor of the controversies over the electoral process in Venezuela being settled through institutional channels and warned that “the fundamental principle of popular sovereignty must be respected through impartial verification of the results.

Venezuela’s National Electoral Council announced early Monday that the winner of the presidential race is President Nicolás Maduro, who received 51.2 percent of the votes, with 80 percent of the votes counted, which was rejected by the opposition, whose candidate Edmundo González obtained 44.2 percent of the votes, according to the official count.

Opposition candidate María Corina Machada claimed, without providing evidence, that González obtained 70 percent of the votes.

In a joint statement released in Bogotá, Brasilia and Mexico City, the three countries congratulated and expressed their solidarity with the Venezuelan people who turned out in large numbers to vote on July 28 to decide their future.

Below is the document:

“Presidential Elections of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. The governments of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico congratulate and express our solidarity with the Venezuelan people who went en masse to the polls on July 28 to define their own future.

“We are closely following the vote counting process and we call on the electoral authorities in Venezuela to move forward expeditiously and to release the data broken down by voting table.

“Disputes regarding the electoral process must be settled through institutional channels. The fundamental principle of popular sovereignty must be respected through impartial verification of the results.

“In this context, we call on political and social actors to exercise maximum caution and restraint in their demonstrations and public events in order to avoid an escalation of violent episodes.

Maintaining social peace and protecting human lives must be the priority concerns at this time. Let this be the opportunity to express, once again, our absolute respect for the sovereignty of the will of the people of Venezuela. We reiterate our willingness to support efforts for dialogue and the search for agreements that benefit the Venezuelan people.

In this context, Mexican and Brazilian officials told the AP news agency that several countries in the region are making diplomatic efforts to persuade Maduro to release the voting records of the elections in which he was declared the winner.

Maduro offered the day before yesterday to hand over In the next few days, 100 percent of the minutes of the disputed elections that resulted in his re-election.