<h6><strong>Eduardo González</strong></h6> <h4><strong>A group of nine former Latin American presidents grouped in the Democratic Initiative of Spain and the Americas (IDEA) will accompany the opposition candidate Edmundo González on his possible trip to Caracas to assume the Presidency of Venezuela on January 10, in clear defiance of the pretensions of the current president, Nicolás Maduro, to remain in office.</strong></h4> This was announced on Tuesday by former Colombian president Andrés Pastrana in statements to various media in the region. Among the former presidents who will travel to Venezuela are, in addition to Pastrana himself, Felipe Calderón, from Mexico; Ernesto Pérez Valladares and Mireya Moscoso, from Panama; Jorge ‘Tuto’ Quiroga, from Bolivia; Laura Chinchilla, from Costa Rica. The nine former leaders, who will board the same plane that will leave Panama with González Urrutia on board, are part of the Democratic Initiative of Spain and the Americas (IDEA), a forum made up of more than thirty former heads of State and Government of Latin America who, according to Pastrana, “fight for the defense of freedom, of democracy, not only in Venezuela but in the entire region,” and whose members include former presidents of the Spanish Government Felipe González, José María Aznar and Mariano Rajoy. Nicolás Maduro was officially declared the winner in the presidential elections of last July 28 against Edmundo González Urrutia. The electoral records published by the opposition gave the victory to González Urrutia, but the National Electoral Council (CNE) officially proclaimed Maduro's victory. In these circumstances, the two chambers of the Spanish Parliament, the Congress and the Senate, approved, on the initiative of the PP and with the vote against the PSOE, two non-legislative proposals in which the Government was urged to recognise González Urrutia as the “elected president” of Venezuela. To date, the Spanish Government has insisted on demanding the publication of the minutes as a condition for recognising the election results and has chosen (like most of the 27 EU States and the Ibero-American community) not to recognise González as the “elected president” for the time being. Both González Urrutia and Maduro have assured that they will assume the Presidency on 10 January. It is still unknown what exactly the opposition candidate will do, against whom an arrest warrant has been issued and a reward of 100,000 dollars for his capture. In any case, González Urrutia - who fled his country on September 8 after an arrest warrant was issued against him and currently enjoys political asylum in Spain - has been on a tour of several American countries since last week, which will conclude in Panama and the Dominican Republic on January 8 and 9 and which could be the prelude to his return to Caracas. "The government can close the airspace, it can close the highways, it can close the accesses to Caracas, but they are not going to prevent the resounding victory that we are going to obtain because that victory is to enforce the will of more than seven million Venezuelans displaced by the regime," declared the opposition leader in Buenos Aires. On one of the stops on his tour (which included Argentina and Uruguay), González Urrutia was received in the United States by the Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), Luis Almagro, to whom he gave copies of the voting records, and by the still-President Joe Biden, after which the Venezuelan government issued a “strong” condemnation of the support expressed by the American president to the opposition leader. Separately, Edmundo González also met in Washington with the next national security adviser to the American president-elect, Donald Trump, Mike Waltz, who, according to the opposition leader, assured him “that the United States and the world will be alert to what happens in our country.”
