The leader of the Venezuelan opposition, María Corina Machado, sent a message this Tuesday asking for help Freedom Manifestoin which he assures that the country is “on the threshold of a new era”. “The regime’s long and violent abuse of power is coming to an end,” he claims in a recording he initially warns was recorded somewhere in Venezuela.
“No ruler, faction or tyrannical force can dictate what is rightfully ours: freedom is not a privilege granted by government,” he observes. “The people will rise from this dark age of oppression with one mission: freedom.”
Machado, on the run for more than a year, talks about the government program he promoted together with Edmundo González Urrutia during the campaign for the July 28 elections last year, which ended with Nicolás Maduro in power, despite Chavismo not showing the minutes demonstrating the legitimacy of its electoral victory, while the opposition presented its victory with more than 80% of the official documents filled out.
In the message, Machado returns to his ideas of free market, limited state, economic growth exploited by the energy business and return of the more than eight million Venezuelans who emigrated due to the prolonged Venezuelan crisis.
This video follows another published last weekend and addressed to the Armed Forces and those who support the Government of Nicolás Maduro, in which he invites them to support a peaceful transition. Chavismo has been under threat from a huge fleet of US naval vessels in the Caribbean since Donald Trump began a crusade against drug trafficking in August and targeted Maduro by identifying him as the alleged leader of the Cartel of the Suns. Machado said the change of government he has been waiting for since last year’s presidential election is “hours” away.
The leader also warns in her message that she will seek justice for the crimes against humanity of which the Maduro government has been accused. “The cry of the murdered, tortured and disappeared people has echoed unanswered for too long since Maduro took power,” he says. “There are already more than 18,000 political prisoners who have suffered unjustly, each of them a testimony to the king’s brutality. The rest are human lives. They are our friends. Families, colleagues, comrades. The world cannot turn its back on them. The criminal regime must be held accountable. Because Venezuela will only fully rise again when those who committed crimes against humanity are judged by law and history.”
