Venezuela’s government is offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of an exiled opposition presidential candidate who many people believe won the greatest number of votes in the recent presidential election in Venezuela.
Venezuelan authorities have issued a wanted poster for Edmundo González, the exiled opposition presidential candidate. The poster offers a $100,000 reward for information leading to his capture and has been disseminated on social media and displayed at airports and police checkpoints across the country.
The poster says that Gonzalez is being looked for on charges of conspiracy against the state and forgery of documents.
He fled to Spain in September after being accused of conspiracy and forging documents. González claims the government rigged the election and had vowed to return before President Nicolás Maduro’s upcoming inauguration.
After the reward announcement, González said he was traveling to Argentina to meet President Javier Milei, a critic of Maduro.
The UN Human Rights Committee has ordered Venezuela not to destroy voting tallies from the disputed July 2024 election, which the government has withheld.
The opposition, having gathered over 80% of the tallies from polling stations, claims they show González won by a large margin, contradicting the government’s declaration of Maduro’s victory.
Parallel vote tabulations conducted by independent statisticians indicated a significant lead for González, estimating he secured 66.1% of the vote compared to Maduro’s 31.4%.
González, a former diplomat with no prior political experience, was a surprise contender who overtook Maduro in the polls during the campaign. His calm campaign approach contrasted with Maduro’s warnings of violence if González won.
Maduro’s 2018 re-election was widely seen as a rigged election in which only one candidate could win regardless of voting tallies.
Maduro was a bus driver in Caracas and became a union organizer for public transport workers, which marked the beginning of his political activism.
He was Chávez’s chosen successor and became acting president after Chávez’s death in 2013.
Sources: VOA, Instagram.
