The President of the Peruvian Congress is confident that the rule of law will return in Venezuela

Eduardo Salhuana’s words provoked applause from his parliamentary colleagues / Photo: Congress of the Republic

Peru’s new Congress president, Eduardo Salhuana, said in his first official speech on Friday that he hopes that next Sunday’s presidential elections in Venezuela will mark a return to the rule of law and respect for human rights in that country.

Before the full Congress, after taking the oath of office, Salhuana said that they are waiting “with expectation” from the Peruvian Parliament “for the elections of next July 28 to mean the return to the rule of law, respect for human rights and the development of the sister republic of Venezuela.”

The words of Salhuana, from the conservative party Alliance for Progress (APP), provoked applause from his parliamentary colleagues during the session in which the plenary elected the new board of directors of the Peruvian Parliament for the period 2024-2025.

There are about 1.5 million Venezuelans living in Peru, of whom some 900,000 are of voting age, but according to figures from the National Electoral Council (CNE), only 589 were eligible to vote in Sunday’s presidential election in 2024.

For this weekend’s elections, only 70 more people managed to register, of which 6 are new registered voters and 64 correspond to cases of updating residency.

Venezuelans living in Lima have called for a vigil in a central square in the Peruvian capital next Sunday to await the results of the elections that pit the current president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, against the opposition candidate of the Democratic Unitary Platform, Edmundo González Urrutia.

Lima / EFE