Show the minutes!
Rallies in Support of the Re-Elected president Nicolas Maduro, Aug, 2024 Photo: EFE
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August 5, 2024 Hour: 3:24 pm
The thunderous and very well coordinated chorus of publicists at the service of the empire and its ruling classes has escalated its denunciations against the recent Venezuelan electoral process. The campaign has acquired cyclopean dimensions due to its generalization and its rabid and vociferous tone. For those who are mistakenly considered as “journalists” instead of what they are, propaganda operators, the exclusive international news has been the presidential elections in Venezuela. The genocide in Gaza, the catastrophic collapse of Ukraine, the danger of a Third World War and the climate catastrophe are trifles compared to the events that have their epicenter in the Bolivarian country. In this context, requests for the authorities of the National Electoral Council (NEC) to “exhibit the minutes” have been heard incessantly. This has been demanded since Monday, July 28, one day after the election, by the presidents of Brazil and Colombia, while their Mexican counterpart appealed to patience, to give the NEC time to act within the 30 days granted by the electoral law. It is worth recalling that in the 2000 presidential election in the United States, which pitted George W. Bush (Jr.) against Al Gore, the Supreme Court ruled on a challenge filed by the latter 35 days after election day, giving Bush the victory by a margin of 537 votes in Florida, a state where, surely by pure coincidence, was governed by his brother. The current media impatience was conspicuous by its absence on that occasion. Nor were there those who went out of their way to demand the minutes through which Juan Guaidó, recognized as such by Washington and its unworthy European and Latin American vassals, was designated “President in Charge”. Now, the demand to exhibit the minutes was updated last Saturday during the lecture given by Cristina Fernández de Kirchner at the Institute of Political Formation of Morena, in Mexico, which fueled the media offensive against the government of Nicolás Maduro. Yet he exemplary denunciation made by the former Argentinean president of the criminal blockade suffered by Cuba and Venezuela, something that Latin American progressives and the right-wing media never take into account and which speak of those countries as if they enjoyed a margin of national autonomy like that enjoyed by France or Canada, did not meet with the same fate as her request to show the minutes.
What is ignored amidst the shouting of the media and the politicians of the empire is that the ruling Great Patriotic Pole has already presented the minutes of the election and did so, in an unusual gesture of the “dictator” Maduro, before the Electoral Chamber of the Superior Constitutional Court. The minutes, it must be said, are delivered to each party and their respective witnesses at the end of the scrutiny of each polling station. And, of course, they are sent to the National Electoral Council, which receives them through the transmission system set up for such purpose, which connects the voting machine, where the voter marks his vote, with the central server of the CNE. The computer attack suffered by Venezuela caused a delay in the release of the results of the presidential election, which the CNE invariably makes public once there is a clear winner with an irreversible lead over his pursuer. The hacking affected the transmission of the data, but not the encrypted contents of the messages, backed up by the receipts issued by each machine and signed by all the election monitors of each candidate as well as by the presiding officer. That is why it is said that the electoral system of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is one of the most reliable and transparent in the world.
The problem is that it was the Mesa de Unidad Democrática of the far right candidate Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia who did not submit the minutes. It is incomprehensible that if both he and María Corina Machado are convinced that they were the winners, they refused to present their minutes before the highest instance of the Electoral Justice. The problem is that according to the web page of that political force what they have are some 9,400 minutes of the 30,024 that constitute the electoral roll, that is, in the best of cases, a third of the votes cast and from which they projected the landslide victory of Gonzalez. To top it all, many of the minutes that can be seen in the web site built for that purpose by Machado and Gonzalez are false or invalid because they do not contain the data of the members of the voting table, the witnesses and the identification of the voting machine, in addition to other irregularities. A curious fact: when one examines these very peculiar minutes, one finds that in the 24 electoral districts, the percentage of votes for Gonzalez was 63% and 30% for Maduro, which constitutes a socio-political miracle that I have never seen in half a century of profession. In the Amazonian states as well as in the highlands; in the countryside as well as in the city, the distribution of votes between Gonzalez and Maduro is exactly the same. In short: it is a drawing, a crude fabrication of data that in no way can support the supposed victory of Gonzalez. It would be good that journalists, academics and politicians who keep shouting for “showing the minutes” also take note of this absolutely anomalous situation. What we have here are not legitimate minutes but a “soft coup” in progress sponsored by Washington and synchronized by the vast majority of the media, tightly controlled by the right wing. The objective of this maneuver is to provoke a political and social crisis in Venezuela, to foment riots, violence and generate chaos that will propitiate an eventual intervention of mercenary troops hired by the Pentagon to achieve the much desired regime change that will allow the world’s largest oil reserve -which happens to be in Venezuela- to pass into the hands of the United States. That is the plan, make no mistake. The rest is painted cardboard, and the participation of the opposition in the elections was just a pretext to chant “fraud” months in advance and to provoke the violence they unleashed the day after the elections by hiring armed gangs to sow terror and destruction in the streets. But the plan backfired and now they will have to deal with the consequences.
Autor: Atilio A. Boron
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