Due to a legal ploy by Chavismo, María Corina Machado cannot take part in the Venezuelan presidential elections this year. The Supreme Court has declared inadmissible the action brought by Machado, the absolute leader of the opposition, in which she claimed de facto disqualification. The Venezuelan justice system has thus put an end to the tension of the last few weeks. Chavismo is getting rid of Maduro's main rival, who led him in almost all polls.
The verdict came this Friday afternoon in a series of decisions that allowed the participation of other disqualified politicians such as Leocenis García and Richard Mardo. The Political-Administrative Chamber of the TSJ also issued a final decision in the case of Henrique Capriles Radonski, ratifying the veto to run for public office for 15 years.
The Barbados Accords signed last October agreed to create a mechanism to lift the political disqualifications that Chavismo has used in recent years to block electoral competition when it lost much popular support has. The United States had pushed for the case to be filed, and the Supreme Court opened a fifteen-day window in December for interested parties to consider their cases, particularly Machado's.
In his case, the Supreme Court issued, in the same decision, the admission of appeal and the negative decision on the appeal and the precautionary measure, which represented the legal path agreed in the negotiations to provide greater democratic guarantees for the presidential elections this year in 2024 help to free Venezuela from the long political and institutional crisis in which it finds itself.
According to the NGO Acceso a la Justicia, Chavismo has barred more than 1,400 citizens from holding public office since 2002. Many of them are civil servants. With tight control over all the country's institutions, Chavismo has used this legal trick to neutralize its opponents. The political persecution against Machado began in 2014. At that time, Machado represented the most radical wing of the Venezuelan opposition. His direct confrontations with Hugo Chávez are part of the country's history. That year, Machado was dismissed from the National Assembly for “treason” for agreeing to join a Panamanian delegation to address the OAS General Assembly in Washington. In 2015, she was barred from holding public office for a year by the Comptroller General of the Republic – Citizen Power's controlling authority – just five months before the general elections in which Machado planned to participate. At the time, it was an administrative sanction for omitting income from a food voucher in an affidavit of assets.
The regime decided to terminate the Barbados Agreement.
What is NOT ending is our fight to conquer democracy through free and fair elections.
Maduro and his criminal system chose the worst possible path for them: fraudulent elections. This won't…
— María Corina Machado (@MariaCorinaYA) January 26, 2024
The disqualification that is now slowing him down again only became known a few months ago. Machado has maintained that he has neither received any official notice nor participated in any proceedings regarding the matter. According to the decision, Machado has been disqualified since September 16, 2021 for her alleged involvement in acts of corruption during the interim government of Juan Guaidó, although she was never part of this parallel structure attached to the parliament elected in 2015 which she He questioned the legitimacy of a Maduro , who was then re-elected in a process questioned by the international community. At the time, Machado was even one of the critics of the strategy of the Voluntad Popular leader, who now lives in exile in the US. “He participated in the corruption plot orchestrated by the usurper Juan Antonio Guaidó, which led to the criminal blockade of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and the apparent expropriation of the companies and wealth of the Venezuelan people abroad “Complicity of corrupt governments,” the verdict reads.
Chavismo found itself at a crossroads with the decision to allow Machado, by far the most popular opposition candidate in recent years, when a large part of the population was disappointed with the political leaders, to take part. With 70 points above Maduro's meager approval rating, Chavismo has now decided to move on and finally block his path.
“The regime has decided to terminate the Barbados Agreement. What is NOT ending is our fight to conquer democracy through free and fair elections. Maduro and his criminal system chose the worst possible path for them: fraudulent elections. That will not happen. Let no one doubt it, this is UNTIL THE END,” the leader replied in a message on her social networks.
The court decision follows several weeks of intimidation and persecution of Machado's political team, which has led to the imprisonment of several of his associates linked to alleged plots to assassinate Maduro that the Venezuelan government has used to oppose the opposition in violation of the Barbados Covenants .
It remains to be seen how the opposition will regroup in this new scenario. Machado has insisted that “nothing will take her off the electoral path.” But the options for a replacement in the leader's candidacy within the Unity Platform coalition had not yet been on the table, at least publicly. From other parts of the opposition, which have agreed on spaces of coexistence with Chavismo, there are options that could still be adopted. The most important representative is Manuel Rosales, governor of Zulia state, who decided not to take part in the primaries but did not give up his presidential ambitions. Back in 2006, Venezuelans went to the polls in which their last option was to choose between Hugo Chávez and Rosales.
The fight that Maduro has been waging with the United States, beyond the Norway-sponsored talks, should now lead to the setting of the election date with uncertain guarantees, after which Washington temporarily eased the oil sanctions demanded by Chavismo and led to an exchange of Americans working in Venezuela imprisoned over businessman Alex Saab, arrested for money laundering and accused of being one of the financial players in the president's entourage.
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