Caracas, Venezuela — Thousands of people gathered in the streets of Venezuela’s capital on Saturday, waving the national flag and singing the national anthem in support of the opposition candidate they say won the presidential election by a landslide.
Authorities declared President Nicolás Maduro the winner of last Sunday’s election, but have yet to produce a vote tally proving his victory. Maduro also urged his supporters to participate in his own “mother of all marches” later Saturday in Caracas.
The government arrested hundreds of opposition supporters who took to the streets in the days following the disputed vote, and the president and his cadres threatened to also imprison opposition leader María Corina Machado and her personally chosen presidential candidate, Edmundo González.
On Saturday, Machado’s supporters chanted and sang as she arrived at the rally in Caracas. Ecstatic, they gathered around her as she climbed onto a raised platform on a truck to address the crowd.
“After six days of brutal repression, they thought they were going to silence us, intimidate us or paralyze us,” she told them. “The presence of each of you here today represents the best of Venezuela.”
Machado, who has been barred from running for office by Maduro’s government for 15 years, had been in hiding since Tuesday, saying his life and freedom were in danger. Masked assailants ransacked the opposition headquarters on Friday, taking documents and vandalizing the premises.
On Saturday, she waved a Venezuelan flag and promised that the government whose policies forced millions of Venezuelans to leave was finally coming to an end.
“We have overcome all the barriers! We have broken them all down,” Machado said. “The regime has never been so weak.”
González, who remains in hiding, was not seen at the event, and when the rally ended, Machado was given a nondescript shirt and taken away on the back of a motorcycle.
Carmen Elena Garcia, a 57-year-old street vendor, attended the rally even though she feared a government crackdown.
“They have to respect me and they have to respect all the Venezuelans who voted against this government,” García said. “We will not accept that they steal our votes. They have to respect our votes.”
A column of pro-government bikers, who have served as Maduro’s militias in the past, approached the opposition rally, but there were no clashes. The police presence was limited.
The Organization of American States (OAS) called Saturday for “reconciliation and justice” in Venezuela, saying that “all Venezuelans who speak out in the streets find only an echo of peace, a peace that reflects the spirit of democracy.”
Later Saturday, thousands of government supporters gathered outside Maduro’s office in the Miraflores National Palace. Wearing red caps and shirts (the color of Maduro’s party), they danced and listened to folk songs. There were fewer national flags and plenty of umbrellas to protect against the scorching Caracas sun.
In a long, rambling speech, washed down with several cups of coffee, Maduro shouted, whistled, sang and made jokes, moving from popular culture to religious references. He reiterated his threat to arrest and imprison more opponents, including González, but also called for reconciliation and peace.
“There is room in Venezuela for everyone,” he said, calling the country “a blessed land of opportunity.”
Machado and González, a 74-year-old former diplomat, said tally sheets they obtained from voting machines at polling centers across the country clearly show that Maduro lost his bid for a third six-year term.
An Associated Press analysis Friday of voting records released by the opposition coalition indicates that Gonzalez won far more votes in the election than the government claimed, casting serious doubt on the official claim that Maduro won.
On Friday night, Venezuela’s Supreme Court of Justice ordered the Maduro-controlled National Electoral Council (CNE) to release polling station vote tallies within three days. Several governments, including Maduro’s close regional allies, have called on Venezuelan electoral authorities to release polling station-level tallies, as they have done after previous elections.
The AP processed nearly 24,000 images of tally sheets, representing results from 79% of the voting machines. Each sheet encoded the vote counts in QR codes, which the AP decoded and analyzed programmatically, resulting in a tally of 10.26 million votes.
According to the calculations, González received 6.89 million votes, nearly half a million more than the government estimates Maduro won. The tallies also show Maduro received 3.13 million votes according to the published ballots.
By comparison, the National Electoral Council said Friday that, based on 96.87% of the ballots cast, Maduro had won 6.4 million votes and Gonzalez 5.3 million. National Electoral Council President Elvis Amoroso attributed the delay in publishing the full results to attacks on “technological infrastructure.”
The tally sheets, called “actas” in Spanish, are long printed documents that resemble receipts. They have long been considered the ultimate proof of Venezuela’s election results.
The AP was unable to independently verify the authenticity of the 24,532 voting records provided by the opposition. The AP was able to extract data from 96% of the provided vote tallies, with the remaining 4% of images too poor to analyze.
The Biden administration has thrown its full support behind the opposition. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued a statement Thursday citing “overwhelming evidence that González was the winner and discrediting the official results of the National Electoral Council.”
González posted a message on X thanking the United States “for recognizing the will of the Venezuelan people.”
Maduro said Friday that the United States should stay out of Venezuelan politics.
Venezuela has the world’s largest crude oil reserves and was once Latin America’s most advanced economy, but it went into a tailspin marked by 130,000% hyperinflation and widespread shortages after Maduro came to power in 2013. More than 7.7 million Venezuelans have fled the country since 2014, the largest exodus in recent Latin American history.
US oil sanctions have only deepened the misery, and the Biden administration – which had eased those restrictions – will now likely tighten them again unless Maduro agrees to some sort of transition.
Brazil, Colombia and Mexico have stepped up diplomatic efforts to convince Maduro to allow an impartial audit of the vote. On Thursday, the governments of the three countries issued a joint statement calling on Venezuela’s electoral authorities to “act quickly and publicly release” detailed election data.
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Associated Press photographer Matias Delacroix contributed to this report.
