(CNN Español) – Among the priorities that the Venezuelan opposition has, the most important one, from the point of view of opposition leader Leopoldo López, exiled in Spain since October 2022, is to attend to the immediate future that January 10 represents, the date on which the president is sworn in. elected from Venezuela. That is why López called on democratic governments to recognize the electoral triumph of Edmundo González, who assures that he won the election by an overwhelming margin, although the Chavista electoral authority has declared him the loser against Nicolás Maduro without showing results broken down by table and center. voting.
López calls for recognition, but knows that it is not an easy path. “It must be said: so far no government in Europe and few governments in Latin America have recognized the triumph of Edmundo González as president-elect and this must be done before January 10.” Already, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro said he had received an invitation from the National Assembly, a body he controls, to take office that same day.
The politician, however, perceives reasons for hope. July 28, he says, marked a before and after. “Before we thought we were the majority and today we know we are the majority,” he says, while rejecting the belief that his is a divided country. “It’s not true. “In Venezuela there is the oppressor and the oppressed people.”
Edmundo González is “a leader who is reaching global dimensions,” says Antonio Ledezma
López believes that the fact that Edmundo González is also in exile is not an insurmountable obstacle, because he considers that Maduro is in power thanks to the support of the military and the institutions he controls. For the former mayor of Chacao – who was sentenced in 2015 to almost 14 years in prison for public instigation, damage to property and association to commit a crime, among others – González is doing a good job because “he has quickly known how to speak with all the factors . He has met with the heads of all political parties and with the President of the Government. “It has had the recognition of the Congress of Deputies, the Senate and the European Parliament.”
The opposition has less than three months to achieve what they maintain that Venezuelans chose at the polls. And to achieve this, the way to achieve it, according to López, is for the opposition leadership to clearly propose that Venezuelans mobilize around the swearing-in date of the new president,” and at the international level for democratic countries to express “without hesitation and without gray places” that González won the election. “Let this be a first diplomatic step that can be accompanied, in your opinion, by a policy of sanctions.”
The United States has applied sanctions to Venezuela’s financial sector (August 2017) and oil (January 2019), which deepened an economic crisis that ended in 2021 with the loss of 75% of GDP, according to analyst calculations. On the occasion of the Barbados Agreement of October 2023, which laid the foundations for the presidential controversies of July 2024, Washington issued special licenses so that Venezuela could sell its oil for six months, but reimposed them with the argument that the government of Maduro had broken his promise to facilitate the participation of opposition candidates.
