Protesters gathered in the streets of cities and towns across Venezuela on Monday after President Nicolas Maduro secured a third term in a tight election, while opposition leaders said they could prove they had achieved a “categorical and irreversible” victory.

Media reports indicate that up to six statues of Hugo Chavez have been torn down in various regions of the country.

Crowds gathered in the streets in the afternoon, and in some areas the gatherings were broken up by security forces, as governments in Washington and elsewhere cast doubt on the official results showing Maduro’s victory over opposition candidate Edmundo González.

The National Electoral Council (CNE) said just after midnight that Maduro had won a third term with 51% of the vote, extending Chavismo’s quarter-century rule by six years.

On Monday afternoon, the council declared Maduro, a 61-year-old former driver and former foreign minister, the winner and presented him with a certificate of election victory.

CNE President Elvis Amoroso did not specify whether 100% of the votes had been counted, adding only that the president had won with a “relative majority of valid votes.”

Later, opposition leader Maria Corina Machado said the coalition already had 73.2% of the voting records, which showed González would have received 6.2 million votes, while Maduro would have received about 2.7 million votes.

“We have a way to prove the truth of the election results,” Machado added to reporters along with Gonzalez and opposition party leaders.

“The protocols demonstrate a categorical and irreversible victory,” added Gonzalez, a 74-year-old former diplomat.

Since the morning, anti-government protests have been registered in several cities across the country, the number of which, according to the Venezuelan Observatory of Social Conflicts, will amount to 187.

In the central city of Maracay, one person was killed during a demonstration, according to a medical center report. In Barquisimeto, in the west of the country, four were injured, according to the city hospital.

“We are tired of this, we want freedom, we want to be free for our children,” motorcycle taxi driver Fernando Mejia, 41, told Reuters as he marched through the city of Maracay with his family.

In Caracas, about four blocks from the Miraflores Palace, or government house, masked men dressed in civilian clothes and carrying guns blocked the path of a group of protesters, including women and men, who were shouting “freedom!” “freedom” from about 200 meters away, Reuters witnesses said.

In areas such as El Valle, south of Caracas, police used tear gas in an attempt to disperse protesters.

In Coro, the capital of the northwestern state of Falcon, protesters tore down a statue of the late president and Maduro’s mentor Hugo Chavez.

One of the demands of organizations such as the UN and the Carter Center, as well as several countries in the region, is to know the total number of votes in each of the more than 15,000 tables in force in the country, as has traditionally been done in Venezuela, to verify the transparency of the day.

US President Joe Biden’s government has accused the election of manipulation and repression and said the announcement that Maduro had won a third term had robbed the election of “any credibility”.

Caracas and Washington have long had a contentious relationship that dates back to the government of Hugo Chávez. Maduro first took office after his mentor’s death in 2013, and his reelection in 2018 was widely seen as fraudulent by the United States and others.

Independent exit polls pointed to a major victory for the opposition after enthusiastic shows of support for González and Machado during the campaign.

After winning the opposition’s primary election in October, Machado was disqualified from holding public office in January in a decision the opposition says is arbitrary and illegal.

Machado’s advisers, holed up in the Argentine embassy in Caracas, said on Monday that security forces were trying to seize the diplomatic compound.

KACEROLAZOS IN POPULAR AREAS

In the city of Maracaibo in the western oil-producing state of Zulia, the sound of pots and pans rang out from the early hours. Among the protesters was Dalia Romero, a 59-year-old retired teacher who said: “Yesterday Maduro destroyed my dream, the dream I had most of all, to see my only daughter again, who left for Argentina three years ago.”

“I stayed here alone with breast cancer so that she could work there and send me for treatment, now I know that I will die without seeing her again and alone,” she added, choking with tears, sitting in a square in northern Maracaibo.

In Valencia, Carabobo state, 51-year-old accountant Josefina Cardenas said authorities had “overdone it” or crossed the line.

“We already knew that this fraud could happen, but as we say in good Venezuelan, they went too far. They passed because no one believes them, that they won,” he said. He added that there were delays in the center where he supported and “despite this, under the sun of more than 30 degrees, no one moved until they voted. We have already woken up as a new Nicaragua.”

The ruling party will organize “big marches” in Caracas and the interior of the country on Tuesday, said Parliament President Jorge Rodriguez. The opposition called for popular assemblies or smaller gatherings on the same day, without giving details.

The governments of Paraguay, Argentina, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Panama, Peru, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay demanded early Monday morning “a complete review of the results in the presence of independent election observers” and announced that They will demand an urgent meeting of the OAS. about the elections that will take place on Wednesday.

In response, the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry said it had decided to “recall all diplomatic personnel from missions in Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Peru, Panama, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay, while demanding that these governments immediately withdraw their representatives from Venezuelan territory.”

Russia, Cuba, Honduras and Bolivia welcomed Maduro’s victory.

The CNE is theoretically an independent body, but the opposition says it acts as an arm of the Maduro government.

Machado asked the country’s military to respect the results of the vote, saying voters had made it clear they did not want Maduro. Venezuela’s armed forces have always supported the president, and there have been no public signs that the armed forces’ leaders were breaking with the government.