President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Monday that Mexico would respect the result of the presidential election in Venezuela, as announced by the country’s National Electoral Council (CNE).
A few hours later, the CNE announced that incumbent President Nicolás Maduro of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela had won a third six-year term in office, triggering protests in the poverty-stricken nation.
Incomplete and hotly disputed results released Sunday showed that Maduro attracted 51.2% of the vote, seven points ahead of main opposition candidate Edmundo González.
López Obrador told his morning press conference that the Mexican government was awaiting the conclusion of Venezuela’s vote-counting process and the official announcement of the election results.
“If the electoral authority confirms this trend, we will recognize the government elected by the people of Venezuela because that’s democracy,” he said.
The head of the CNE, Elvis Amoroso, is a close ally of Maduro, who succeeded Hugo Chávez as president of Venezuela when Chávez died in March 2013. The entire electoral process in the once prosperous South American country was widely described as “flawed.”
Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SRE) said in a statement that the federal government “has closely followed Venezuela’s July 28 presidential elections and commends the civic and peaceful conduct of the voting process,” although one man was killed outside a voting center.
“Mexico awaits the final vote count and detailed reports from the National Electoral Council of Venezuela to ascertain the definitive results,” the SRE said Monday morning.
“In line with its constitutional foreign policy principles and fully respecting Venezuela’s sovereignty and the right to self-determination of peoples, Mexico trusts that the will of the Venezuelan people, as expressed at the ballot box, will be honored through a transparent verification process,” the ministry added.
The governments of various countries, including the United States, questioned the legitimacy of the election results.
“We have serious concerns that the result announced does not reflect the will or the votes of the Venezuelan people,” said U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
Numerous Latin American leaders also made public remarks about the election results.
Chilean President Gabriel Boric said that “Maduro’s regime must understand that the results are hard to believe” and declared that Chile “will not recognize any result that is not verifiable.”
Argentine President Javier Milei said that “not even [Maduro] believes the electoral scam he is celebrating,” while President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador said that “what we saw yesterday in Venezuela has no other name than fraud.”
The presidents of Cuba, Bolivia and Nicaragua were among regional leaders who celebrated the victory of Maduro.
“Nicolás Maduro, my brother, your victory, which is that of the Bolivarian and Chavista people, has cleanly and unequivocally defeated the pro-imperialist opposition,” said Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel.
Venezuela is in the midst of “the largest external displacement crisis in Latin America’s recent history,” according to the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration. More than 7 million Venezuelans have fled their home country since the Venezuela’s current economic crisis began in 2014.
Mexico News Daily
