Venezuelan regime moves to arrest opposition candidate Edmundo González

The attorney general’s office of the Nicolás Maduro regime requested on Monday the arrest of Venezuelan opposition presidential candidate Edmundo González, accusing him of forging public documents, conspiring against the government and promoting public disobedience, among other charges.

The request, published on Instagram, was introduced to the judge assigned to oversee the investigation of top opposition leaders, following their denunciation that the Venezuelan strongman committed fraud during the July 28 presidential election.

The Venezuelan judiciary, which has often been described by the United Nations and other international organizations as a persecution tool subservient to Maduro, claims that González and opposition leader María Corina Machado led a plot against the government by forging the election tallies backing their claim that the Venezuelan strongman lost the election.

They also accuse them of hacking into the National Electorate Council in order to prevent officials from being able to gain access to the vote tallies, preventing them from being able to make them public.

Both Machado and Gonzalez have been in hiding in Venezuela for some time, suspecting that the regime would eventually move to arrest them alongside the close to 2,000 people Maduro has already detained as part of his latest wave of repression.

Last month, Maduro’s attorney general, Tarek William Saab, said his office was considering charging Gonzalez and Machado with murder, blaming them for the deaths of the more than 25 Venezuelans who have lost their lives during the protests that followed the election.

“At any moment, any of them could be charged and held responsible as the intellectual authors of all these events,” Saab answered when asked if Machado is in the process of being charged with homicide.

Claiming that Gonzalez defeated Maduro by margin of more than 2-1, the opposition published the official vote tallies, known as actas , gathered in more than 80% of the country’s voting stations.

Doubts about the electoral council’s results have also spread to the international community, leading a number of governments to repeatedly ask Maduro to produce the documentation proving his victory. To date, the regime has failed to do so.