MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Blinken recognizes González Urrutia as Venezuelan President-elect

Blinken is a confessed enemy of Venezuela, the Chavista Foreign Minister Gil said

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday that his country was recognizing opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia as the winner of the July 28 elections in Venezuela despite announcements -albeit with little credibility- by authorities in Caracas that the incumbent Nicolás Maduro had prevailed. González Urrutia, who ran on behalf of the Unitarian Democratic Platform (PUD) given María Corina Machado's disenfranchisement, sought asylum in September in Spain after the Chavista regime issued an arrest warrant against him.

 In his posting on X, Blinken also demanded that “the will” of Venezuelan voters be respected. It was the first statement by any US official to go to these lengths. The administration of President Joseph Biden had reckoned González Urrutia had earned the most votes but fell short of calling him “President-elect.”

“We deeply appreciate the recognition of the sovereign will of all Venezuelans,” the retired diplomat González Urrutia replied on the same social network after Blinken's statement. “This gesture honors the desire for change of our people and the civic feat that we carried out together on July 28,” he added.

In response, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yvan Gil claimed that Blinken “should dedicate himself to reflecting on his failures, getting rid of imperial and colonial complexes and going to write the memoirs of how the Bolivarian Revolution made him bite the dust of defeat, just like [it did] his predecessors.” Despite his defiant tone, Gil never challenged Blinken's statement regarding the election's outcome.

Many world powers have expressed their doubts as to the process' transparency after the National Electoral Council (CNE) failed to produce the minutes for each voting desk, unlike the PUD, which published 83% of them. Even if Maduro took 100% of the votes in the remaining 17%, González Urrutia's advantage was already unsurmountable.

Experts from the United Nations and the US-based Carter Center, which observed the election at the invitation of Maduro's government, agreed that the results announced by Caracas lacked credibility. In addition, Colombian President Gustavo Petro, one of Maduro's allies together with Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, told Globo News while in Rio for the G20 Summit that voting in Venezuela was not “free.”

Venezuela's next presidential term begins on Jan. 10 and Maduro has already received an invitation to be sworn in from the ruling party-controlled National Assembly. Only ten days later will Donald Trump take the oath of office marking his return to the White House. It remains to be seen what -if anything- the outgoing Democratic administration is willing to do.

Blinken is “a confessed enemy of Venezuela,” Gil also said while claiming that Washington's top diplomat was “one more Secretary of State, who sank, together with his puppets, trying to reverse democracy.” Gonzalez Urrutia is “supported by fascists and terrorists subordinated to the battered US policy,” Gil also maintained.

González Urrutia told the Colombian outlet NTN24 that he intends to return to Caracas for his inauguration on Jan. 10. “The swearing in will be done under the terms of the Constitution” before the legislative bodies, the 72-year-old politician argued. But he warned that he would not be disclosing any other details of his return because “they already told me that they had an entourage waiting for me.”