The Maduro government still shows no signs of surrendering power in Venezuela
CBC
As the deadline expired yesterday for the Maduro government in Venezuela to show detailed poll-by-poll voting records, opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia was recognized as president-elect of Venezuela by the governments of Argentina, the United States and Uruguay. (Peru already recognized him on Tuesday).
But on the streets of Caracas and other Venezuelan cities, there was no sign this week that the Maduro government was reconsidering its strategy of claiming victory and seeking to crush dissent through force.
On Friday, the opposition reported that its headquarters, El Bejucal in the Caracas district of Altamira, was raided and vandalized overnight by a group of six armed and hooded men wearing camouflage.
Arrests of volunteer poll workers continued across the country, as the government sought to prevent the opposition from uploading digitized receipts from individual polls that show the opposition with a margin of victory of more than two-to-one.
Venezuelan social media is full of videos of raids showing opposition volunteers being dragged from their homes. In some cases, angry crowds have attempted to prevent the arrests.
Venezuelans have also been posting videos of uniformed foreigners on the streets of Caracas, including Cubans and a soldier wearing the insignia of the Wagner Group, a notorious mercenary group linked to the Kremlin that has played a major role in wars in Ukraine and various parts of Africa.
Others have tracked flights arriving from Cuba, or photographed Russian aircraft landing in Caracas.
One of the gravest allegations of foreign interference comes from Francisco Santos, former vice-president of Colombia. He said on Wednesday that China is helping the Maduro regime with a massive effort to make counterfeit versions of more than 30,000 "actas" — digital receipts produced by voting machines — that have been altered to indicate that Maduro won.
"In the warehouses of the National Electoral Council in Filas de Mariche in Miranda state there is a team of 150 employees, supervised by a group of four Chinese engineers," he said.
"All of this to print all-new actas and present them to international observers."
Santos said the 150 workers are dressed in grey overalls without pockets and are not allowed to carry cellphones, and that the Chinese engineers arrived from Cuba on a Conviasa flight.
CBC News has not been able to independently confirm that allegation.
If Santos's allegation is true, it would not be the first time China stepped in to help the Maduro regime with the digital aspects of repression.
Maduro's government is deep in debt to China and has had to offer Beijing generous concessions of Venezuelan resources to service that debt.
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