By
The Associated Press
The governor of the Venezuelan state of Zulia, Manuel Rosales, presented his candidacy for the presidential elections after withdrawing his support for the unitary opposition candidate Corina Yoris, whose candidacy could not be registered.
In his first public appearance after his registration, Rosales indicated this Tuesday that it was not an easy decision.
“Yesterday [Monday] night until the last minutes we were insisting on the possibility of registering the candidacy that had previously been chosen [of Yoris] and it was not possible to do so and there were only a few minutes left when I decided between going to Zulia to live in comfort. as governor of the state or go out to face Venezuela,” Rosales said in a press conference.
Presidential candidate Manuel Rosales gives a news conference in Caracas, Venezuela, Tuesday, March 26, 2024. Associated Press
“I am not coming to replace anyone, I am not coming to take away anyone's leadership, I am not coming to remove anyone;
I come with open arms to rebuild Venezuela,” he added, without explaining how he managed to access the application system.
The announcement of Rosales' registration came after the Democratic Unitary Platform (PUD), the main opposition bloc, denounced this Tuesday morning that the electoral authorities did not allow Yoris' candidacy to be registered.
Omar Barboza, executive secretary of the PUD — which since 2021, with the support of Washington, has been holding talks with representatives of the Government of Nicolás Maduro — indicated that since Thursday, when the registration process for candidates opened, “
no “
They have allowed us to access the application system
.”
The registration period ended on March 25 at midnight.
“Let there be a record of this violation of the right of the majority of Venezuelans who want to vote for change and are prevented from voting for a candidate,” Barboza said in a video released on the PUD accounts on social networks.
“We demand that the deadline to apply, which is our right, be restored,” added the opposition bloc on its account on the social network X.
In recent days, the PUD denounced that the website of the National Electoral Council (CNE)—in charge of organizing the July 28 elections—kept access to the electronic nomination system blocked for representatives of the political organizations Mesa de la Democratic Unity (MUD) and Un Nuevo Tiempo (UNT), the only ones authorized by the electoral authority to register candidates for that sector of the opposition.
On this Tuesday afternoon, however, the president of the CNE, Elvis Amoroso, indicated that the MUD registered Edmundo González as a candidate.
There were no immediate comments from the Unitary Platform, holder of that electoral card.
Barboza, a founding member along with Rosales of UNT, did not mention that the governor had the intention of registering his candidacy, departing from his commitment to support Yoris.
He also did not allude to the registration of another postulate.
The CNE reported that UNT registered Rosales through the automated system.
The main Venezuelan opposition parties, which have fragmented in recent years, put aside their divisions last year to bet on a unity candidate to compete with Maduro.
The one elected in the October primaries with more than 90% of the votes was former legislator María Corina Machado, who is disqualified from holding public office for 15 years by the Comptroller General's Office, controlled by the Government.
On Friday, beset by the disqualification and arrest of members of her campaign team,
Machado named Yoris
, an 80-year-old academic and retired university professor, as her replacement.
“Right now the country is processing enormous disappointment, people feel cheated,” Machado told reporters on Tuesday.
“It is too crude, it is too dark, it is too grotesque and the country deeply rejects it,” he added and ruled out supporting Rosales: “My candidate is Corina Yoris.”
Rosales returned to the political scene in December 2016 after being released from prison as part of the conditions of the opposition at the dialogue table that he then held with the Government, and which had the Vatican as the main facilitator.
These talks ended without agreements that would put a definitive end to the political, economic and social crisis that is plaguing the country.
Rosales, who lost to the late former President Hugo Chávez in the 2006 presidential election, fled into exile in 2009 after prosecutors accused him of appropriating public funds during his tenure as governor between 2000 and 2008. He was granted asylum in Peru. and later moved to Panama.
He always denied the charges and denounced that he was politically persecuted.
After returning to the country,
he was immediately detained in October 2015
.
Critics of Chávez and Maduro, his successor and political heir, have accused Venezuela's judicial system of acting in concert with the government to persecute their adversaries.
In recent years, Rosales and Maduro have maintained cordial relations, particularly since the 71-year-old politician won the governorship of Zulia for the second time in 2021.
During the five days to make their applications official before the CNE, 13 candidates registered: Maduro, Rosales, González, Luis Eduardo Martínez, Daniel Ceballos, Antonio Ecarri, Juan Carlos Alvarado, Javier Bertucci, José Brito, Claudio Fermín, Luis Ratti, Enrique Márquez and the comedian Benjamín Rausseo.
Most of them do not appear in the various voting intention surveys.
Candidates
must wait to see if their application is accepted by the CNE
.
The Government of Colombian President Gustavo Petro expressed this Tuesday in a statement its "concern" about the events related to the registration of "some presidential candidates, particularly in relation to the difficulties faced by majority sectors of the opposition [...] which could affect the confidence of some sectors of the international community in the transparency and competitiveness of the electoral process” in Venezuela.
Petro, the first left-leaning president in Colombia, reestablished diplomatic and commercial relations with Maduro, whom his predecessor Iván Duque (2018-2022) called a “dictator.”
Dozens of countries, including the United States and Colombia,
consider Maduro's re-election in 2018 fraudulent
.
Some of them, like the Government of Chile, highlighted that the elections in Venezuela did not meet “minimum standards of a true democracy.”