CARACAS, Venezuela — Leaders of both sides of Venezuela’s political divide are calling on their followers to take to the streets Tuesday, in a sign that the crisis set off by this weekend’s disputed presidential election is intensifying.
Opposition leader María Corina Machado released data that she said showed Edmundo González, the opposition candidate, winning in a landslide, and summoned her followers to a rally in front of the United Nations offices in Caracas, Venezuela.
Jorge Rodríguez, the president of the National Assembly and the head of President Nicolás Maduro’s campaign, also called for massive marches Tuesday from traditional government strongholds to Miraflores, the presidential palace, after the government declared Maduro the winner.
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“Thousands of us will be out on the streets from all four corners of the globe, who came out on the day of the closing campaign to line all the avenues of this capital,” he said Monday night. “We are going to Miraflores to defend our right to life, our right to freedom, and, above all, our right to choose and to defend the result of the election.”
On Tuesday, an opposition politician was arrested in Sebucán, east of Caracas, his supporters announced. Videos shared on social media showed Freddy Superlando, a former presidential candidate, being taken away by masked armed men.
The scheduled marches follow a day of tense and spontaneous protests that took place in the capital Monday. Large groups of young men fanned out from neighborhoods where the government had long enjoyed strong support to demand Maduro’s ouster after 11 years in power. As they marched through the streets, they tore down his campaign signs and set them on fire.
Several statues of Maduro’s mentor, former President Hugo Chávez, who died in 2013, were toppled. Maduro quickly ordered new ones built.
Election authorities announced that Maduro had won Sunday’s presidential election by a margin of 7 percentage points. But the government has yet to publish precinct-by-precinct vote counts results and is facing increasing international pressure to do so.
Venezuela suspended flights to Panama and the Dominican Republic after those countries questioned the official election results. Venezuela’s foreign minister announced that the country was expelling diplomatic missions from seven Latin American countries that had condemned the official election results.
Maduro said he was relaxed about the fallout from the election and the claims of fraud, and had “slept like a baby” on Sunday night.
“The regime slept anxiously while we did not sleep, because we were very busy,” Machado said, explaining that the opposition was occupied scanning hundreds of pages of election results and building a website to show who had really won the election.
Using paper tallies that political party monitors receive after the count from each voting station, Machado released her own results. The opposition has about 73% of the tallies from Sunday’s vote, she said, which showed that González received more than 3.5 million more votes than Maduro.
Though some people reported having used the website the opposition had created to check election results, the site kept crashing under the weight of voters trying to check their precinct results.
On the government side, Ivanova Rodríguez, a spokesperson for Venezuela’s elections council, when asked when results would be made publicly available, said: “In progress.”
The mass demonstrations raise the possibility of clashes like those Venezuela has seen several times before under Maduro, when anti-government protests were forcibly suppressed by the security forces.
This article originally appeared in . c.2024 The New York Times Company
