HAVANA, Cuba.- This Thursday, the Electoral Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ) of Venezuela issued a ruling in the case initiated at the request of dictator Nicolás Maduro. As the extreme unconditional support of the judges towards the ruling regime suggested, the aforementioned judicial resolution ratifies the alleged victory of the current head of State in the elections held on July 28.
To begin with, neither the TSJ nor the Court itself Ripe They have explained, during the more than three weeks that have passed since the vote, the specific content of the document presented by that gentleman, a document that represented the trigger for the unusual process that has been brought to an end by the brand new sentence now handed down.
Let me explain: The normal thing is that, in the face of the jurisdiction In the case of electoral disputes, a losing candidate who is dissatisfied with the results announced by the corresponding administrative body (in the Venezuelan case, the National Electoral Council or CNE) comes to request the annulment of the results announced by it and the correction of any error that may have been incurred.
The facts
Surprisingly, in the case at hand this did not happen: The person who appeared before the TSJ was precisely the dictator Maduro; that is, the same presidential candidate who, according to the only announcement made by the President of the CNE a few hours after the end of the elections, had supposedly achieved victory in them!
What did Maduro allege in his brief? What did his “challenge” consist of? The aforementioned Electoral Chamber of the TSJ has taken great care to keep this secret with great zeal. A basic procedural practice establishes that, when a person requests a court to make a certain ruling, the jurisdictional body forwards its briefs to the potential affected parties, so that they can oppose the request of the first (or even, in specific cases, accept it with full knowledge of the facts).
This was conspicuous by its absence in the case at hand! The TSJ did call the opposition candidates, but it concealed the dictator’s allegations to such an extent that even one of them – Enrique Márquez – argued, quite rightly: “How can I sign something that I don’t know what it’s about! They have to give me the resource to find out; otherwise, I can’t sign anything!”
In a journalistic article that I published in this same newspaper on the 5th, I referred to these and other irregularities that vitiated what we could call the “judicial phase” of the electoral farce staged in Venezuela by the dictator Maduro and his unconditional supporters. But, over the course of these weeks, other anomalies have been added to these.
Reviewed by “experts”
It is assumed that the minutes delivered by the authorities from the CNE and various political parties to the TSJ were reviewed for days by people who, according to the Chavista radio station TeleSurwere “national and international experts, experts in statistics.” From what could be seen in the published images, they were mostly young people, dressed in modern clothes and baseball caps.
But the authorities never published a list of the so-called “experts,” so it is not possible to get an exact idea of the qualifications (or lack thereof) they had to do their work.
Their backgrounds are also unknown, so it is impossible to determine what moral standing (if any) they have.
To top it all off, in the photos their faces appeared covered by face masks (have they not heard about the end of the pandemic?). In short, these gentlemen well deserve the epithet “masked strangers”.
Turning the TSJ into an accomplice to fraud
In light of what has happened, it is clear that the dictator’s purpose in “challenging” his false victory declared by the CNE was to make the TSJ complicit in the electoral fraud. Now there are two organs of the Venezuelan State (both controlled from the Miraflores Palace) that claim Maduro’s false victory, but neither of them has published the minutes that would serve to corroborate this supposed success.
In this sense, the Chavistas not only turn a deaf ear to the demands of their own citizens, democratic governments and international organizations, who unanimously demand the publication of the damned minutes. Now they also intend to persecute the real winner —Edmundo González Urrutia— and his supporters for having made up for this obvious omission by the regime and for having published the minutes!
This is what the newspaper tells us. Digital Caraotawhich, as its name indicates, specializes in news from Venezuela. One of its headlines this Friday alerts us to the imminent perpetration of the aforementioned arbitrariness: “The Public Prosecutor’s Office will summon Edmundo González ‘in the next few hours’ for the publication of the minutes on a website.”
The pretext invoked by the head of the repressors, Tarek William Saab, is that, supposedly, the opposition leader “has usurped the competence that only corresponds to the CNE.” Chavismo appears, therefore, as a new kind of “dog in the manger”: If the latter neither eats nor lets others eatthe CNE does not publish the minutes and the Prosecutor’s Office at the service of Maduro persecutes those who do…
Maduro’s ruse
In any case, Maduro’s judicial trick has yielded poor results. Only his counterparts in Cuba and Nicaragua (a brave duo!) have boasted about the spurious sentence. As the well-known saying goes, For that trip so many saddlebags were not needed.The bulk of the international community remains adamant, demanding the official publication of the original minutes.
Following the publication of the verdict, the United States and ten Latin American countries (Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay) issued a joint statement, in which they reject and condemn the electoral farce of the Maduro supporters and insist on demanding the publication of the minutes. In the last few hours, the Representative of the European Union and the Secretary General of the UN have expressed themselves in the same sense. Let us hope that Maduro does not get his way!
