2024-01-26 21:58:54
María Corina Machado will not be able to attend this year’s Venezuelan presidential elections due to a legal trick by Chavismo. The Supreme Court of Justice has declared inadmissible the lawsuit filed by Machado, the absolute leader of the opposition, in which she de facto claimed her disqualification. The Venezuelan justice has thus put an end to the suspense of recent weeks. Chavismo gets rid of Maduro’s main competitor, who led him in almost all the polls.
The sentence occurred this Friday afternoon in a series of decisions in which the participation of other disqualified politicians such as Leocenis García and Richard Mardo was allowed. The Political-Administrative Chamber of TSJ also issued a final ruling on the case of Henrique Capriles Radonski, who ratified the veto to run for public office for 15 years.
In the Barbados agreements signed last October, it was agreed to create a mechanism to unblock the political disqualifications that Chavismo has used in recent years to block competition in electoral elections, when it has lost much of popular support. The United States had pressed for the procedure to be presented and the Supreme Court opened a period of fifteen days in December so that interested parties could review their cases, especially that of Machado.
In his case, the Supreme Court has issued in the same decision the admission of the appeal and the negative decision on the appeal and the precautionary measure, which were the legal path agreed upon in the negotiations to provide greater democratic guarantees so that the presidential elections of this 2024 could help get Venezuela out of the long political and institutional crisis it is going through.
Since 2002, Chavismo has disqualified more than 1,400 citizens from holding public office, according to the NGO Acceso a la Justicia. Many of them public officials. With tight control over all the country’s institutions, Chavismo has used this legal trick to neutralize its opponents. The political persecution against Machado began in 2014. Then, Machado embodied the most radical wing of the Venezuelan opposition. Her direct encounters with Hugo Chávez are part of the country’s history. That year, Machado was dismissed from the National Assembly accused of “treason” for having agreed to join a Panamanian delegation in order to speak before the OAS General Assembly in Washington. In 2015, the Comptroller General of the Republic – the auditing body of the Citizen Power – disqualified her from holding public office for a year, just five months before the parliamentary elections, which Machado planned to attend. It was then an administrative sanction for the omission of income from a food voucher in a sworn declaration of assets.
The regime decided to end the Barbados Agreement.
What is NOT ending is our fight to conquer democracy through free and fair elections.
Maduro and his criminal system chose the worst path for them: fraudulent elections. That’s not going to…
— María Corina Machado (@MariaCorinaYA) January 26, 2024
The disqualification that now once again puts a brake on him was known just a few months ago. Machado has alleged that he has never received official notification nor has he been part of a trial for this cause. According to the decision, Machado has been disqualified since September 16, 2021 for her alleged participation in acts of corruption that occurred during the interim Government of Juan Guaidó, although she was never part of that parallel structure attached to the Parliament chosen in 2015, with which she He challenged the legitimacy of a Maduro then re-elected in a process questioned by the international community. Machado, at that time, even became one of the group of critics of the strategy of the Voluntad Popular leader who is today in exile in the United States. “He has been a participant in the corruption plot orchestrated by the usurper Juan Antonio Guaidó, which led to the criminal blockade of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, as well as the blatant dispossession of the companies and wealth of the Venezuelan people abroad, with the complicity of corrupt governments,” the ruling reads.
Chavismo was at a crossroads with the decision to let Machado participate, by far the most popular opposition candidate in recent years in which a large part of the population became disenchanted with political leaders. With 70 points above Maduro’s meager approval, Chavismo has now decided to go forward and definitively block his path.
“The regime decided to end the Barbados Agreement. What is NOT ending is our fight to conquer democracy through free and fair elections. Maduro and his criminal system chose the worst path for them: fraudulent elections. That’s not gonna happen. Let no one doubt it, this is UNTIL THE END” responded the leader in a message on her social networks.
The legal decision comes preceded by several weeks of intimidation and persecution of Machado’s political team, which has led to the imprisonment of several of his collaborators, who are linked to alleged conspiracies to assassinate Maduro, which the Venezuelan Government has used. to say that the opposition is violating the Barbados pacts.
It remains to be seen how the opposition will regroup in this new scenario. Machado has insisted that “nothing will get them off the electoral path.” But the options for a replacement in the leader’s candidacy, within the Unitary Platform coalition, had not yet been put on the table, at least publicly. From other sectors of the opposition, one that has agreed on spaces of coexistence with Chavismo, there are options that could still enter the field. The main one is Manuel Rosales, governor of the State of Zulia, who resigned from participating in the primaries, but did not abandon his presidential aspirations. Already in 2006, Venezuelans went to the polls in which they had to choose between Hugo Chávez and Rosales, as the last option.
The struggle that Maduro has given with the United States, beyond the talks sponsored by Norway, should now lead to the definition of the date of elections with uncertain guarantees, on which Washington temporarily relaxed the oil sanctions that Chavismo demanded and It led to an exchange of Americans imprisoned in Venezuela for businessman Alex Saab, arrested for money laundering and accused of being one of the financial operators in the president’s entourage.
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