Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro assured this Friday that Edmundo González Urrutia had asked him “clemency” to leave the country, while denying any form of coercion by the government against the anti-Chavista to carry out his exile in Madrid. In the meantime, the president of the National Assembly, the Chavista Jorge Rodríguez, assured that the opponent had signed the “surrender” to his presidential “aspiration” by signing the document with which his exile was finalized.
“It makes me sad that you, Mr. González Urrutia, who asked me for clemency, do not have a word(that) he has no words for what he has committed and he invokes his own clumsiness and his own cowardice to try to save I don’t know what,” Maduro said in an event broadcast by the public channel Venezolana de Televisión.
Maduro responded to the opponent, who said on Wednesday that he had suffered “coercion, blackmail and pressure” which led him to sign a letter granting him safe passage to take the flight, aboard a Spanish Air Force plane, that eventually took him from Caracas to Spain, where he requested political asylum. Jorge Rodríguez assured that “this is nothing more than a capitulation of a certain position and a certain aspiration that has been overthrown by the people.” “It is a surrender,” he said.
Likewise, according to Rodríguez, he assured that the conversation took place in a “friendly tone” and that the Spanish ambassador was an “exceptional witness.” He also said that the ambassador received them with Venezuelan whiskey and chocolate.There was a certain smell of alcohol “at the meeting before the ambassador arrived with the bottles,” he added, to affirm that the meeting was relaxed. But he warned: “If they continue to violate the truth,” he will have no choice but to show the evidence.
In this sense, according to Rodríguez, Edmundo González “had expressed his desire to give up” and “flee” from the Caribbean country, he would therefore “present a document” with “his position” and “what his conduct would be” after “leaving” Venezuela. “They were looking for us,” the MP said.
However, in a video on social networks, González Urrutia, exiled since September 8 in Spain, said that the document presented by the representatives of the Maduro government under the threat that if he did not do it, he would have to “bear the consequences”a “coercion” which, according to him, cancels the text, and which he had already denounced upon his arrival in Madrid.
National Assembly suspends debate on break with Spain
Venezuela’s National Assembly (AN, Parliament), controlled by Chavismo, suspended on Thursday the debate on the severance of relations with Spain due to to the “items on the parliamentary agenda”, according to the Speaker of the House, who did not specify when this issue should be addressed in plenary. “These are issues on the parliamentary agenda (…) simply on the parliamentary agenda,” Rodriguez said at a press conference after the end of the legislative session, without including this point in the debate or any mention of the diplomatic tensions between Caracas and Madrid, although this was planned, as announced on Wednesday.
He explained that the topic had been left off the agenda “due to the urgency” of “an event that has occurred“, due to the approval in the European Parliament of a recognition of the Venezuelan opposition leader Edmundo González Urrutia as elected president of the Caribbean country. Rodríguez said that this motion of the European Parliament, rejected by the Venezuelan Parliament, has “no type of real impact” and is an action promoted by “fascists.”
The spokesman for Chavismo had declared the day before that the National Assembly would approve this Thursday the agreement with which it will install the Nicolas Maduro’s government will “evaluate” the severance of diplomatic and commercial relations with Spain, in response to the decision of Congress.
