On Monday, September 30, the Council of Europe awarded its Václav Havel Prize, which rewards human rights defenders, to the Venezuelan opposition figure María Corina Machado. METROme Machado, 56, who has been living in hiding in Venezuela since President Nicolás Maduro’s disputed re-election in July, was running against Azerbaijani activist Akif Gurbanov and Georgian feminist Babutsa Pataraia.
Maduro, whose victory was validated by the Supreme Court of Justice of Venezuela on August 22, was proclaimed the winner with 52% of the votes by the National Electoral Council, which, however, did not make public the minutes of the voting offices. According to the opposition, which published the vote count provided by its tellers, its candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, obtained more than 60% of the votes.
Threatened with prison in his country, Mr. González Urrutia went into exile in Spain, where he was granted asylum. After the announcement of Maduro’s re-election, spontaneous demonstrations left 27 dead and 192 injured. According to official sources, some 2,400 people were also detained.
Of a population of 30 million Venezuelans, 7 million have fled the country since 2014 due to the political and economic crisis the country is going through, and experts expect a new wave of migration.
Endowed with 60,000 euros, the Vaclav-Havel Prize has awarded each year since 2013 a personality from civil society for their “exceptional actions in favor of human rights in Europe and beyond”recalls the Council of Europe.
Vaclav Havel, fighter against totalitarianism, enduring symbol of opposition to despotism and president of Czechoslovakia and then the Czech Republic from 1989 to 2003, died on December 18, 2011, at the age of 75.
Venezuela: why is Nicolás Maduro’s victory questioned? Understand in three minutes
Cartoons with his image, derived products, crowd baths… Nicolás Maduro had put all the possibilities on his side to be re-elected for a third term at the head of Venezuela. And he obtained the expected result on Sunday, July 28, despite the fact that the polls showed him losing.
A few days before the election results, on Monday, July 29, it is difficult to see it clearly. If the victory of the outgoing president was officially announced by the National Electoral Council, nine Latin American countries demand a “complete review of results”. The opposition refuses to recognize the official results, which announce 51.20% of the votes in favor of Nicolás Maduro. According to her, it was her candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, who won the elections, with more than 70% of the votes.
In this video we take stock of the political context of this disputed election and the criticism leveled, inside and outside the country, against the Chavista heir.
To learn more about the economic crisis that has shaken the country since the mid-2010s, we recommend the analysis below.
“Understand in three minutes”
The explanatory videos that make up the “Understanding in three minutes” series are produced by the Vertical Videos department of the World. Mainly spread on platforms such as TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook, their goal is to contextualize big events in a short format and make the news accessible to everyone.
