Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado recalls in an opinion column in the newspaper ‘El País’ the “milestone” that represented the winning the primaries exactly one year ago in which she was chosen as a candidate for the 2024 presidential elections and thanked the Venezuelans who with their votes made “possible what was thought to be impossible.”
“Today marks one year since a civic event that marked a before and after in our fight for freedom and democracy in Venezuela: the primary election of October 22, 2023,” recalls Machado, who leads the opposition’s efforts to achieve the return of democracy to Venezuela while hiding.
Since she received nearly 2.3 million votes in those primaries that legitimized her as the presidential candidate of the Democratic Unitary Platform (PUD), the former deputy has meandered through the political scene and, despite the disqualification that prevented her from being the one to fight at the polls with Nicolás Maduro on July 28th, her popularity continues to rise.
Machado’s disqualification motivated Edmundo González Urrutia to present himself as an opposition candidate in a presidential election in which the National Electoral Council (CNE) awarded the victory to Nicolás Maduro over the majority opposition bloc.
The Democratic Unitary Platform (PUD) insists on the retained voting records as proof that the winner was González Urrutia, who is currently exiled in Spain.
Machado reaffirms her stance that her disqualification “only promoted the primaries.”
“A rebellious spirit took root more and more among citizens, determined to challenge the autocratic system that, in the meantime, was betting on the failure of the electoral process and trying to keep up appearances. To this end, five days before the vote, its representatives signed the Barbados Accords together with the delegates of the Unitary Platform. It would not take long for them to violate all the points agreed there,” she points out.
On October 22nd, 2023, “nobody knew what the result of that process would be, once the moment of truth arrived. I confess – she points out – that the best expectations were to surpass (the other candidate) by one million votes. But the Venezuelan people gave us a new lesson: almost three million people went out to vote!”
For the opposition candidate at that time, the Venezuelan people regained the confidence “to defeat” Maduro in the presidential elections on July 28th with Edmundo González Urrutia as candidate, who, she explains, obtained “a resounding victory” not recognized by the regime.
This last year “has been a journey full of obstacles, traps and attacks. Previous experiences made many claim that it was an impossible task to achieve,” continues the liberal opposition leader.
According to Machado, the regime fostered demoralization through a vast propaganda apparatus that kept hundreds of journalists, analysts, academics, lobbyists and submissive politicians, supposedly part of the opposition, aligned inside and outside Venezuela.
But: “none of the barriers imposed by the regime managed to prevent people from exercising their right to choose. At the end of the process, people stayed in the voting centers to do with immense emotion what they had not been able to do for 20 years (due to the electronic vote imposed by Chavismo): Count each vote in public, “ballot by ballot”!
And she concludes that: “with incredible effort, humility and transparency, the primary crowned its fundamental objective: defeating the totalitarian lie, recovering confidence in the vote and raising hope for change again. Since then, the civic movement that today encompasses and unites all of Venezuela has grown without stopping.”
Even in hiding, Machado has received signs of support from all over the world or recognitions such as the Václav Havel Prize for Human Rights from the Council of Europe “for being a defender of democracy,” distinctions that she acknowledges with messages in which she reiterates that her battle against Chavismo – in power since 1999 – will continue “until the end.”
The Venezuelan opposition, with Machado and González Urrutia as representatives, is one of the three finalists for the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize, whose winner will be announced on Thursday, October 24th.
EFE