Venezuela has issued an arrest warrant for opposition presidential candidate Edmundo Gonzalez, a move that was condemned Tuesday by several countries, including Brazil, the United States and the European Union.
The warrant comes as the South American country is embroiled in an election dispute. Gonzalez says he is the rightful winner of the July 28 presidential vote, while incumbent President Nicolas Maduro says he was the victor and remains in power.
"There is no denying that there is an authoritarian escalation in Venezuela," Celso Amorim, Brazil's top foreign policy adviser, told Reuters on Tuesday. The arrest of Gonzalez "would be a political arrest, and we do not accept [that there should be] political prisoners."
"This is just another example of Mr. Maduro's efforts to maintain power by force and to refuse to recognize that Mr. Gonzalez won the most votes on the 28th of July," according to White House national security spokesperson John Kirby, who said Gonzalez's warrant was "unjustified."
Josep Borrell, the European Union's foreign affairs chief, posted on X, "Enough of the repression and harassment of the opposition and civil society. The will of the Venezuelan people must be respected."
Gonzalez has been in hiding since the election dispute, but "he has not requested asylum, he has not requested to be treated as a guest in any embassy," Gonzalez's lawyer, Jose Vicente Haro, said outside of his client's house in Caracas.
"He's not at his residence in order to preserve his freedom, his security, his life and to preserve the will of the Venezuelan people," Haro added.
Venezuela's Supreme Court has backed Maduro's claims that he beat Gonzalez in the disputed election.
The court, which includes Maduro loyalists, said that after reviewing materials supplied by the electoral authority, it agreed that Maduro had won a third six-year term.
Gonzalez has ignored several summonses from the Supreme Court.
Venezuela's electoral authority, which declared Maduro the winner of the vote within hours of the polls closing, reported that the president won more than half the votes, but it has not published any results.
The opposition claims that Gonzalez won the election in a landslide. It backed its claims with voting tallies that it said were gathered from 80% of the country's 30,000 voting booths showing that Gonzalez won by a ratio of more than 2-to-1.
On Monday, the U.S., which has urged Venezuelan authorities to release the election results, seized Maduro's airplane — a Dassault Falcon 900EX — in the Dominican Republic. The U.S. says the plane was illegally exported from the U.S., violating U.S. export control and sanctions laws.
"The Justice Department seized an aircraft we allege was illegally purchased for $13 million through a shell company and smuggled out of the United States for use by Nicolás Maduro and his cronies," U.S. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said.
The U.S. will continue to take moves against Maduro for his actions that "long predate his most recent anti-democratic action," State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said.
"There are a number of things that we have called on him to do — to stop cracking down on dissent, to release the actual tally sheets, which he still has not done, and to get Venezuela back on its democratic path," Miller said. "We are considering a range of options to demonstrate to Maduro and his representatives that their illegitimate and repressive actions in Venezuela have consequences."
Some information for this report came from Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
