MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Uruguayan lawmakers call Venezuela's gov't “a dictatorship”

“We want to open a space for negotiation,” National Party Senator Graciela Bianchi stressed

Uruguay's Parliament passed Tuesday a unilateral declaration from the ruling Multicolor coalition stating that “no one can deny” there is a dictatorship in Venezuela. The opposition Broad Front (Frente Amplio - FA) of President-elect Yamandú Orsi, who is to take office on March 1, submitted a text of its own excluding the word “dictatorship” and hence no consensus. However, the FA reckoned that “the Venezuelan government has deepened its distancing from the institutional framework” and that the absence of audits in the electoral process “erodes the legitimacy of the result and questions any democratic transition.”

The document finally approved exclusively with votes from the Coalition maintained that Nicolás Maduro's Jan. 10 inauguration -deemed as a “coup d'état”- marked “the culmination of a long process of deterioration of the political-institutional situation” and “today no one can deny that it is a Dictatorship.”

Venezuela's government was “ignoring the resounding victory of the opposition, confirmed by international organizations and a large part of the democratic countries,” the Uruguayan Parliamentarians also noted.

“The systematic violations of human rights, with torture, forced disappearances, including the Uruguayan citizen Fabián Buglione, attacks on freedoms and the disregard of the most basic rights that form the basis of a democracy, committing crimes against humanity that are liable to be sanctioned by the International Criminal Court, motivate the forceful rejection of this Parliament,” the declaration went on.

“The person who was to assume the presidency, Mr. Edmundo González Urrutia, could not even enter his country, and the leader of the process, Mrs. María Corina Machado, was the victim of a kidnapping that has shown that the regime has reached unacceptable limits,” the lawmakers also pointed out.

“A peace process must be initiated immediately to culminate sooner rather than later” and allowing “the appointed president-elect Edmundo González Urrutia to assume the position he was invested with by the absolute majority of the citizens,” it further stated.

“We want to open a space for negotiation, although the Frente Amplio has not yet given any answers,” National Party Senator Graciela Bianchi stressed.

On the other side, the FA called for a process of dialogue that may lead “to the recovery and full validity of the democratic institutionality in Venezuela” after the Bolivarian regime deepened “its departure from the institutional framework promoted by the Constitution approved in 1999.”

The FA also expressed “its solidarity with the Venezuelan people and urges full respect for human and political rights” and requested the Uruguayan government “to contribute together with other actors of the international concert to the search for a solution in dialogue with the Venezuelan political actors so that democracy, freedom, peace, and development can continue to be guaranteed in our region.”

Meanwhile, future Presidential Secretary Alejandro Sánchez insisted that Uruguay should be “a platform for dialogue” in the Venezuelan case because it is a problem for all of “Latin America.”

“We have been very clear about what has happened in Venezuela in recent times. Yamandú Orsi has been extremely clear,” he said. “In Venezuela, there has been a process of deterioration of democratic conditions” to the point that “the last election has been questioned,” underlined the man conducting the transition on behalf of the FA, who also valued the fact that the outgoing Government of Luis Lacalle Pou has not broken diplomatic relations with the Chavistas.