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Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado emerged from hiding out on Saturday to address an anti-government rally in Caracas, despite a violent crackdown on dissent by the socialist government of Nicolas Maduro.
Machado, who has not been seen in public since Wednesday after Maduro and his aides publicly called for his jailing, waved a Venezuelan flag from the top of a pickup truck and was cheered by thousands of supporters.
“We have never been stronger than we are today,” Machado said. “Each of you here shows the world how strong we are and how determined we are to see it through.”
Protests erupted in the South American country on Monday after Mr Maduro claimed victory in presidential elections by seven points over opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez. The national electoral commission, controlled by Mr Maduro’s allies, has refused to release a detailed breakdown of the election results.
The opposition declared Gonzalez, who received 7.1 million votes to Maduro’s 3.2 million, the true winner and released thousands of polling station ballots as evidence. The United States recognized Gonzalez as the winner on Thursday, followed by Ecuador, Uruguay, Costa Rica and Panama. Maduro’s victory was also recognized by key allies including China, Russia, Iran and Cuba.
Gonzalez, a former diplomat, was running as a replacement for the charismatic Machado, who was barred from running months after winning a landslide primary in January. The Carter Center, a U.S. nonprofit that is the only independent body assessing elections in Venezuela, said the vote “failed to meet international standards for electoral integrity at any stage.”
President Maduro has referred the election dispute to the government-controlled Supreme Court. On Friday, Gonzalez did not attend a hearing where all 10 candidates in the election were summoned.
On Saturday, poor and middle-class supporters gathered in the wealthy Las Mercedes neighborhood to watch Machado, seemingly unfazed by a crackdown on sporadic protests that began in the capital’s poorer areas on Monday.
At least 19 people have been killed since Monday, according to human rights group Provere, and Maduro has claimed 2,000 have been arrested. Machado wrote to U.S. media on Thursday that he was in hiding out of fear of imminent arrest. Opposition campaign offices were broken into and vandalized early on Friday morning.
“We are all scared, but we are more scared that this oppression will continue,” said Louis Ghersi, a 43-year-old engineer who attended Saturday’s rally.
Colonia Pérez, a 34-year-old street vendor and mother of three, said she came together “for my children’s future.”
Maduro, who has unleashed an economic crisis, deepening repression and the exodus of 7.7 million Venezuelans since succeeding the late President Hugo Chavez in 2013, has characterized the protests against his self-declared re-election as an attempted “fascist” coup backed by Washington.
“The far right means hatred, revenge, foreign intervention and war,” he told supporters and public sector workers at a counter-rally in central Caracas on Saturday.
Earlier on Saturday morning, US Under-Secretary of State Brian Nichols said incidents of arbitrary arrests, vandalism of opposition leaders and violence against peaceful protesters would be reported to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
“Seeing the will of the Venezuelan people as expressed at the ballot box, President Maduro and his representatives have resorted to repression,” Nichols wrote on X. “These actions are unacceptable and demonstrate President Maduro’s reliance on fear to cling to power.”
At the rally, Machado’s supporters said they would continue to demonstrate in support of Gonzalez’s victory.
“We want a free Venezuela,” said spokesman Daysi Barrios, who fled the country with her family. “If we don’t get away from this dictatorship now, we’ll never get away from it.”
