Written by Vivian Sequeira and Mayla Armas
CARACAS (Reuters) – A Venezuelan court has issued an arrest warrant for opposition leader Edmundo Gonzalez, accusing him of conspiracy and other crimes amid a dispute over whether he or President Nicolas Maduro won July’s election, the attorney general’s office said on Monday.
Attorney General Tarek Saab shared a photo of the arrest warrant with Reuters via a message on the Telegram app.
Issuing an arrest warrant for Gonzalez would mark a major escalation in the Maduro government’s crackdown on the opposition in the wake of the disputed election.
Venezuela’s national electoral body and its supreme court said Maduro won the July 28 election with more than half the vote, but opposition results show a landslide victory for Gonzalez.
The arrest warrant comes after weeks of statements by senior government officials that Gonzalez and other opposition members should go to prison.
“This man has the audacity to say that he does not recognize the laws, that he does not recognize anything. What is going on? This is unacceptable. Citizens agree that the laws must work and that officials must do their job,” Maduro said in a speech broadcast on state television.
The opposition, some Western countries and international bodies such as the UN panel of experts said the vote was not transparent and demanded that the full results be published, with some explicitly condemning fraud.
A spokesman for Gonzalez said they were awaiting notification of the arrest warrant, but would not comment further. The opposition has always denied any wrongdoing.
“They have lost all sense of reality,” opposition leader Maria Corina Machado said on NBC’s “X.” “Threatening the president-elect will only create more cohesion and more support for Edmundo Gonzalez among Venezuelans and the world.”
The opposition posted what it said were copies of more than 80% of the ballot box results on a public website, while the electoral board says a cyber attack on election night prevented the full results from being published.
The arrest warrant request appears to be the latest salvo by the government in what the opposition describes as a crackdown on dissent.
Saab also launched criminal investigations into Machado and the opposition vote counting site itself, and arrests of opposition figures and protesters continued in the weeks after the vote.
The protests resulted in the deaths of at least 27 people and the arrest of about 2,400 others.
Gonzalez ignored three subpoenas to testify about the website, allowing an arrest warrant to be issued for him in the case.
The arrest warrant was issued after Attorney General Luis Ernesto Dueñez requested Gonzalez’s arrest on charges of usurpation of functions, falsification of public documents, incitement to disobey the law, conspiracy and association, all alleged crimes committed against the Venezuelan state.
Lawyers consulted by Reuters said Venezuelan law does not allow people over 70 to serve sentences in prison, but rather imposes house arrest on them. Gonzalez, who turned 75 last week, is married and has two daughters, one living in Caracas and the other in Madrid.
The United States has drawn up a list of about 60 Venezuelan government officials and their family members who could be sanctioned in the first punitive measures after the election, two people close to the matter told Reuters.
Since the vote, the ruling party-controlled National Assembly has passed a law tightening rules on NGOs and unions and denounced alleged forced resignations of state employees with pro-opposition views.
The arrest warrant request came hours after the Biden administration announced it had seized a plane used by Maduro in the Dominican Republic after determining that its purchase violated U.S. sanctions, a move the Venezuelan government called an act of “piracy.”