Machado Plans a ‘Huge Protest’ Inside and Outside Venezuela For December 1

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado said Saturday that she is planning a “huge protest” for December 1, inside and outside the Caribbean country, because “everyone knows” what happened in the presidential elections of July 28, when, she says, the candidate of the largest anti-Chavez bloc won, contrary to the official result that gave victory to Nicolás Maduro. “We have the final stretch ahead of us.  Everyone knows what happened on July 28 and everyone knows that Venezuela will be free. It is up to us to lead this process and ensure, as we are doing, that each of the different actors, inside and outside the country, do what they are supposed to do,” said Machado in a digital meeting with international activists.

She also stated that “no one is going to turn the page on Venezuela”, but “on the contrary”, since every day it has “more allies and the actions will be firmer, more decisive, until the regime understands that time is up”, in reference to the Government of Nicolás Maduro. “Their only option is to accept negotiations with us and to do that we have to act now. This first of December will be a unique, unprecedented protest. The whole world will focus on the cause of a country that has decided to go all the way,” she said. Machado asked her followers to be the voice of the “imprisoned and persecuted” after, according to the authorities, more than 2,400 people were arrested in the post-election context, when protests broke out against the official result of the presidential elections, which gave Maduro reelection.

Following the elections, the largest opposition coalition, the Democratic Unitary Platform (PUD), denounced Maduro’s victory as “fraudulent” because it maintains that its candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, pictured above, is the president-elect, based on 83.5% of the minutes they claim to have gathered from witnesses, documents that the government calls false. Venezuelan Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello announced on Saturday a new plan to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro, in which he linked María Corina Machado and other anti-Chavez leaders. Cabello explained that this operation began in the state of Zulia (west, bordering Colombia), where “businessman José Enrique Rincón, owner of several companies, comes into play,” along with his sons Juan Diego Rincón Sabatino and José Enrique Rincón Sabatino, who, according to the minister, “have ties to opposition political sectors” and are in Spain.

Following the elections, the largest opposition coalition, the Democratic Unitary Platform (PUD), denounced Maduro’s victory as “fraudulent” because it maintains that its candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, is the president-elect, based on 83.5% of the minutes they claim to have gathered from witnesses, documents that the government calls false. Venezuelan Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello announced on Saturday a new plan to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro, in which he linked María Corina Machado and other anti-Chavez leaders. Cabello explained that this operation began in the state of Zulia (west, bordering Colombia), where “businessman José Enrique Rincón, owner of several companies, comes into play,” along with his sons Juan Diego Rincón Sabatino and José Enrique Rincón Sabatino, who, according to the minister, “have ties to opposition political sectors” and are in Spain.

“They have direct links with Iván Simonovis (former commissioner of the Metropolitan Police of Caracas), again with the terrorist María Corina Machado, with Tomás Guanipa, with Juan Pablo Guanipa and a large number of people who are here. They are all identified,” Cabello said in a broadcast on the state channel VTV in which he did not mention more names to avoid a possible escape.  According to the minister, businessman Rincón met with and recruited judges and prosecutors, at least five detainees, people from business groups and retired and active military personnel for this operation, called ‘No to Christmas’, which sought to deliver weapons to detained persons to generate “destabilization” in the country.  The minister said the case is in full swing and that companies are being raided, without giving further details.