Venezuela’s Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered opposition electoral officials not to destroy lists of voters following primary elections, a decision that was promptly condemned by opposition leaders who vowed to keep voters’ identities secret.
The court order was sought by Rafael Velasquez, a mayoral contender who lost in Sunday’s primary and called for the voter lists to be reviewed.
Opposition politicians said the decision appeared to be an attempt to intimidate adversaries of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
“The government is never going to be able to expropriate the vote of our people. It’s never going to be able to expropriate hope,” opposition leader Henrique Capriles said during a speech Tuesday night at an event where he was formally proclaimed a presidential candidate.
Referring to the Supreme Court decision, Capriles said it appears to be part of an attempt to “instill fear.”
Capriles also focused his message on pledging a stronger economy and better schools, and on differentiating his candidacy from that of Chavez.
“Our government will be for everyone. The bus of progress has its doors open,” Capriles told the crowd, reading a prepared speech. On election day, he said: “It will be up to us to choose between two paths: the path of progress that you want, or the path of socialism that the government wants for you.”
The 39-year-old state governor will face Chavez in the Oct. 7 presidential election. Sunday’s primary vote also determined opposition candidates for state and local races across the country.
“The secrecy of the vote is a commitment, and we’re going to keep it,” opposition politician Leopoldo Lopez said in response to the ruling.
“There will be no court decision ... that will prevent what’s happening to keep happening: that more Venezuelans are joining,” he added.
After a failed 2004 recall vote against Chavez, a list of those who had petitioned for the election was leaked and widely circulated. Hundreds of people complained that after appearing on the list, they were fired from government jobs or prevented from working for the government.
Chavez’s government denied discriminating against those who appeared on that list.
The Supreme Court ruled that within 24 hours the books with voters’ names should be turned over to the National Electoral Council, the court said in a statement.
Velasquez told reporters that he had a right as a candidate to request a review of the lists of voters in the primary elections. Velasquez asserted there were irregularities, saying “it didn’t work as it should have.”
He didn’t publicly explain in detail why he thought it necessary to review the lists.
Ramon Guillermo Aveledo, who heads the opposition coalition, called the court’s decision “absurd.”
“After failed attempts by the government to sabotage the [election] day and to distort its significance, they turn to the ‘dossier of fear,’” Aveledo said in a statement.
He said many of the lists had already been destroyed.
However, opposition election chief Teresa Albanes said that not all of the lists had been destroyed.
Small clashes broke out between police and government opponents in the cities of Maracay and Barquisimeto on Tuesday as the authorities tried to detain members of the local election committees to seize voting materials. Officials did not immediately provide details about what occurred.
However, Lopez said that in Maracay, one young man died when he was hit accidentally by a police truck during a clash between police and government opponents who were protesting the detention of an election worker and the seizure of voter lists.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS