The Popular Party increases pressure on the government due to the departure of opposition leader Edmundo González from Venezuela. The institutional vice-secretary of the PP, Esteban González Pons, accused on Thursday the executive of Pedro Sánchez of being “involved in the coup in Venezuela”, while other high-ranking popular officials, such as his spokesman in Congress, Miguel Tellado, accused the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, of lying after denying, a few hours after the arrival of the Venezuelan politician in Spain, that there were negotiations with the government of Nicolas Maduro to promote the exile of Edmundo González.
The PP’s criticism comes after the opposition candidate yesterday acknowledged the pressure and coercion exerted by the Maduro regime at the Spanish embassy in Caracas. Specifically, in a statement on his social networks, González assured that he had signed under duress a document in which he renounced being elected president outside of Venezuela and assumed Maduro’s electoral victory. “While they were at the residence of the Spanish ambassador, the president of the National Assembly, Jorge Rodríguez, and the vice president of the Republic, Delcy Rodríguez, presented themselves with a document that I would have to approve to allow my departure from the country. In other words, either I signed or I suffered the consequences,” he denounced.
The popular now accuse the head of Foreign Affairs of lying and González Pons, very critical of the work of the government and of former president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero since the elections in the Ibero-American country on July 28, has gone even further and accused the Sánchez executive of being “complicit” in the blackmail to which the Venezuelan politician was subjected on Spanish soil and of being “involved in the coup d’état in Venezuela.” In an interview on EsRadio, the popular man denounced that the Spanish government has been a “necessary collaborator” for “the departure of the elected president, his coercion and his sending into exile.”
According to Pons, the Maduro government could not blackmail the Dutch ambassador, where the opposition leader was initially housed, and that is why, later, he was transferred to the residence of the Spanish ambassador “so that blackmail and coercion would be possible.” “For the departure of the elected president, his coercion and his sending into exile, the Spanish government was a necessary cooperator and the Spanish government is involved in the coup that occurred in Venezuela,” insisted Pons. “Intolerable” and very “serious” statements for the PSOE, which demanded the resignation of the institutional vice-secretary of the PP.
“It is intolerable that the head of international relations of the Popular Party is a thug whose only problem is the frustration of not having known that Edmundo González was taking refuge in the Spanish embassy in Venezuela and would be welcome in our country,” stressed PSOE sources, who corrected Pons and criticized his “outbursts.” “If this man were to one day lead Spain’s foreign relations, we would find ourselves on the margins of international politics,” they stressed.
