Thousands of people demonstrated yesterday in Caracas and other Venezuelan cities to protest against the government's refusal to release the results of the 28 July presidential election. Opposition leader María Corina Machado led the march in Caracas, which was not attended by the opposition coalition's candidate, Edmundo González. Although the police tried to stop María Corina Machado from getting on the bus in which chavismo mobilised its supporters, no incidents were reported at the time of going to press. The demonstrators welcomed Machado with shouts of "freedom" and chanted slogans against the government of Nicolás Maduro and against the National Electoral Council, which declared the victory of the current president valid but has not yet made the electoral records public, as requested by the opposition and some Latin American governments. Machado said, during her speech at the protest, that "28 July marks a milestone from which the transition to democracy in Venezuela began". "After a brutal repression," she added, "they thought they were going to silence us, frighten us or paralyse us, the presence of each one of you here shows the world the magnitude of the force and what it means that we are going to go all the way." The opposition leader was accompanied by Delsa Solórzano, Juan Pablo Guanipa, María Beatriz Martínez, Biagio Pilieri and Williams Dávila, all members of parties that make up the largest anti-Chávez coalition, Plataforma Unitaria Democrática (PUD).
