Venezuela prosecutor seeks arrest warrant for opposition candidate Gonzalez 

A judge in Venezuela has issued an arrest warrant for the opposition’s former presidential candidate Edmundo Gonzalez, who claims to have rightfully won July’s disputed election against President Nicolas Maduro.

The warrant was issued on Monday at the request of the office of the public prosecutor, which is conducting a criminal investigation into the closely-fought election. It sought the warrant after 75-year-old Gonzalez, a former diplomat, failed to appear three times to answer questions on charges including conspiracy and falsifying documents in relation to the election.

Attorney general Tarek Saab shared a photo of the warrant with the Reuters news agency via a message on the Telegram platform.

The warrant follows weeks of comments from top government officials saying Gonzalez and other members of the opposition should go to jail.

“This man has the nerve to say he doesn’t recognise laws, he doesn’t recognise anything. What’s up with that? That’s unacceptable,” Maduro said in a broadcast on state television. “Citizens agree that laws have to work and that officials do their job.”

A Gonzalez spokesperson said they were awaiting any notification of a warrant but made no further comment. The opposition has always denied any wrongdoing.

Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) declared Maduro the winner of the July 28 vote, giving him a third six-year term. The outcome has been disputed by the opposition and much of the international community, with the US going so far as to recognise Gonzalez as the victor.

The CNE, made up mostly of Maduro loyalists, has said it was not able to publish a breakdown of the results because its website was hacked and the data corrupted.

Observers have said there is no evidence to support the claim.

The opposition has published its own polling-station election results, which it says show Gonzalez winning by a wide margin.

Under Venezuelan law, each party participating in the election has the right to a tally sheet from every voting machine. Government supporters attempted to block opposition representatives from obtaining copies of the crucial documents, but it managed to secure them from more than 80 percent of the 30,000 machines. Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela refused to publish its copies of tally sheets.

Pedro Brunelli, a Latin America analyst based in Madrid, told Al Jazeera that the arrest warrant was predictable.

“Since Maduro opted to steal the election, he now has to follow through with it,” he said. “What we’ve seen since the election is, on the one hand, evidence that he [Maduro] lost and on the other increasing repression in a country where repression has actually been the norm for the past 15 years. I think it is very clear he lost the election and he is now going to cover that up by going after the winner.”

Gonzalez replaced opposition leader Maria Corina Machado on the ballot at the last minute, and has been in hiding since shortly after the election.

“They have lost all notion of reality,” Machado wrote on X. “Threatening the President-elect will only achieve more cohesion and increase the support of Venezuelans and the world for Edmundo Gonzalez.”

The declaration of Maduro’s victory prompted mass protests, which have continued. As of Monday, at least 27 people have been killed and 192 have been injured.

Amid growing pressure over the election declaration, Maduro asked the country’s high court to audit the electoral process, drawing immediate criticism from foreign observers who said the court was too close to the government to produce an independent review.

The magistrates of the Supreme Tribunal of Justice are proposed by federal officials and ratified by the National Assembly, which is dominated by Maduro sympathisers.

The court concluded on August 22 that the vote counts published by the opposition were false and certified Maduro’s victory.

Maduro has asked for Gonzalez’s arrest and that of Machado, citing charges that include “usurpation” of public functions, “forgery” of a public document, incitement to disobedience, sabotage, and “association” with organised crime and financiers of “terrorism”.