Venezuela Puts Reward for Arrest of the Candidate

The Venezuelan government has offered a $100,000 reward for information that leads to the capture of Edmundo Gonzalez, the exiled opposition presidential candidate.
Gonzalez fled the country in September and was granted political asylum in Spain after Venezuelan authorities issued an arrest warrant accusing him of conspiracy and document forgery.

Gonzalez had pledged to return to Venezuela before President Nicolas Maduro's inauguration next Friday, accusing the government of tampering with the election results.
Shortly after the reward was made public, Gonzalez announced that he was heading to Argentina to start a Latin American tour, where he is set to meet staunch Maduro critic, President Javier Milei on Saturday.

The voting tallies from the presidential election in July 2024 will not be destroyed as pledged by the United Nations Human Rights Committee to Venezuela.

The results of these voting tallies will be described officially into specific points coming from each polling station as they were the issue of the contention regarding the election result.

While pots declare the winner of the incumbent Maduro, it fails to produce any audited tally to validate its claim under the National Electoral Council (CNE) backed by the government.

Evidence of this claim by the opposition has worked with accredited observers of elections, collecting and releasing a voting collection of more than 80% of the tallies and the results clearly indicate that the candidate Gonzalez is the clear winner.

In March, when he was registering to run for the presidency of Venezuela, Gonzalez was a relatively unknown name around the country.

Having never held public office and unknown even within opposition circles, he was merely considered a long-shot candidate. But months later, the reserved former diplomat has skyrocketed past Maduro in opinion polls.

In the past decade, these differences have widened into a chasm between political followers in the government and the opposition in Venezuela.

His conciliatory approach during the presidential campaign shot a stark contrast to Maduro's threats of a "bloodbath" if Gonzalez emerged winner.

Maduro's re-election in 2018 was broadly described as neither free nor fair.