August 20, 2024
As opposition forces gather across Venezuela to protest Nicolas Maduro’s presidential election win, opposition leader Marica Corina Machado is facing the possibility of being charged for murder.
Machado and other senior members of the opposition could soon face legal charges for the deaths that happened during the wave of violence over the past few weeks, the attorney general for the Nicolás Maduro regime, Tarek William Saab, said.
Saab said investigations carried out by the Venezuelan prosecutor’s office into the events that followed the July 28 elections are advanced and noted that the protests against the Maduro regime were planned by the “extreme right” group headed by Machado. “At any moment, any of them could be charged and held responsible as the intellectual authors of all these events,” Saab answered. when asked if Machado is in the process of being charged with homicide.
Machado, nonetheless, defiant in her opposition to Maduro, joined thousands of protesters in the capital, Caracas, and urged them not to be afraid.
Ms Machado, who had been in hiding after being accused of insurrection, said there was nothing above the voice of the people, and that the people had spoken.
Police and the army were deployed in force as supporters of Mr Maduro also held a demonstration.
“We won’t leave the streets,” Ms Machado told protesters, with many of them waving copies of election records from their voting stations as proof of victory.
Ms Machado, who was banned from running in the election, had called for nationwide protests to intensify pressure on Mr Maduro to concede.
Some demonstrators seemed determined to carry on.
Twenty-five people have died and dozens of others have been injured in the aftermath of the regime’s violent crackdown on protests that were triggered when the government-controlled National Electorate Council announced that Maduro had won reelection with almost 52% of the vote.
The regime has announced that it has arrested 2,000 people and Maduro has said that they would soon be taken to Tocuyito and Tocorón, two of Venezuela’s worst prisons. Calling the electoral council’s announcement another attempt by the regime to remain in power through fraud, the opposition has declared that González was the real winner of the election. It has published the official vote tallies, known as actas, gathered in more than 80% of the country’s voting stations, showing the opposition candidate defeated Maduro by a margin of more than 2-1.