A State Department spokesman requested on Monday that the bloodthirsty socialist regime of Venezuela “respect … the will of the Venezuelan people” after dictator Nicolás Maduro announced thousands of arrests and the construction of “re-education” facilities for dissidents.
Venezuela is embroiled in an ongoing political crisis following Maduro’s claim to “winning” the sham presidential election he orchestrated on July 28. Maduro has been in power for over a decade and organized at least six other fraudulent elections since 2013, in all cases falsifying the results and using widespread violence to suppress political opponents.
WATCH — Watch: Billboard of Maduro Set Ablaze amid Venezuelan Election Protests:
The National Electoral Center (CNE), a Maduro-controlled body that administers elections in Venezuela, claimed on July 29 that Maduro obtained 51.2 percent of the vote and his closest opponent, opposition candidate Edmundo González, received 44.2 percent support. The CNE did not publish any voter data and has yet to release any hard evidence of the alleged victory at press time.
González and banned opposition candidate María Corina Machado claimed last week that they had obtained the raw electoral results from local ballot centers and published the data online, showing that González ha actually obtained 67 percent support compared to Maduro’s 30 percent. The revelation triggered nationwide peaceful protests in which dissidents toppled statues of late dictator Hugo Chávez and called for an end to socialism in their country.
Residents try to block a street to protest the official results the day after the presidential election as National Guards work to remove them in Caracas, Venezuela, on July 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Fernando Vergara)
The administration of President Joe Biden played a pivotal role in facilitating the sham presidential election, as Secretary of State Antony Blinken spent years pressuring Venezuelan regime officials and neighboring Latin American states to orchestrate a “free and fair election.” Biden backed Blinken’s campaign by greatly enriching the Maduro regime through sanctions relief, greatly expanding its resources to now kill, disappear, and imprison political opponents. Biden also freed key Venezuelan criminals associated with the Maduro regime: Alex Saab, a financier arrested for money laundering with close ties to the regime, and Maduro’s drug-trafficking “narco-nephews,” Efraín Antonio Campo Flores and Francisco Flores de Freitas.
In the aftermath of the election, however, the Biden administration has had little to no role to play in the chaos. Blinken announced shortly after the sham election that the evidence suggests González is the president-elect of the country and recommended Maduro enact a “transition,” but State Department spokesman Matthew Miller confirmed on Monday that Washington has not, in fact, formally recognized González as head of state. Miller also limited his comments to calls for the Maduro regime to “respect” the people it has wantonly repressed for decades.
A woman holds a banner reading “Fuera” in Spanish as Venezuelan expatriates protest the reelection of Nicolas Maduro in Santiago, Chile on August 03, 2024. (Lucas Aguayo Araos/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“We continue to urge the Venezuelan parties to begin discussions on a peaceful transition back to democratic norms,” Miller told reporters. “We continue to call for transparency and the release of detailed tally votes, while recognizing it’s been over a week since the election and any release of those votes would require close scrutiny given the potential for tampering or manipulation in that timeframe.”
“We continue to make clear that the will of the Venezuelan people needs to be respected, and that’s what we’re engaging with our partners in the region about,” Miller insisted.
“Ultimately, this is a question about respecting the will of the Venezuelan people. And as we concluded – and you saw in the statement that we released last week,” Miller continued, “when you look at the tallies that the opposition made public, it’s clear that even if every outstanding vote came back for Maduro it wouldn’t be enough to overcome the advantage that Edmundo González had.”
Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado holds a national flag while waving to supporters as she arrives for a rally in Caracas, Venezuela, on August 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Matias Delacroix)
“We’re going to continue to push for respect for the – of the will and the votes, actually, of the Venezuelan people,” the spokesman promised.
Miller did not discuss the possibility of further sanctioning the Maduro regime or taking any other material measures to address the situation. Despite the lack of action in his remarks, Maduro’s top diplomat, Foreign Minister Yván Gil, published an unhinged diatribe accusing the United States of orchestrating “an attempted coup d’etat” by refusing to accept the fraudulent election results.
#Comunicado 📢 Venezuela repudia las declaraciones del Departamento de Estado de los Estados Unidos de América donde deja en evidencia que está al frente del intento de golpe de Estado, y que desconoce la voluntad democrática del pueblo venezolano que reeligió al presidente… pic.twitter.com/Vb9jHx9gUn
— Yvan Gil (@yvangil) August 5, 2024
The Maduro regime, the statement read, “repudiates the declarations of the State Department of the United States of America where it leaves clear that it is before an attempted coup d’etat and does not recognize the democratic will of the Venezuelan people who reelected President Nicolas Maduro.”
“It is unheard of that a government that has repeatedly refused to recognize the Venezuelan electoral processes of the last 20 years,” the statement continued, “which has been involved in all the intents of destabilization, assassination, invasions, and derailings put in march against the Venezuelan people … attempt to impose a new puppet government in Venezuela in the image and semblance of its failed strategy in 2019.”
The statement also claimed that Washington was conspiring with the “extinct” Tren de Aragua, a transnational criminal organization that has dramatically grown its presence in the United States since Maduro “raided” Aragua state’s Tocorón prison and allowed its top leaders to “escape” in September. Maduro has repeatedly claimed, falsely, that the Tren de Aragua does not exist and announced this week that he plans to turn the ruins of the Tocorón prison into a “re-education” center for anti-socialists.
Human rights groups have documented at least 23 people killed in protests against Maduro’s sham election since July 28 as of Monday, most of them under the age of 30 and at least one child, a 14-year-old. Maduro’s authorities claim they have arrested over 2,000 people and counting, most of them facing charges of “terrorism” and “instigation to hate.” The regime has presented no documented evidence of violence, much less terrorist acts, by anti-socialists at protests.
“We have 2,000 prisoners captured and from there they will go to Tocorón and Tocuyito [Venezuelan prisons], maximum punishment, justice,” Maduro announced on television on Sunday. “This time there will be no pardon, this time there will be no pardon, this time there will be Tocorón.”
