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Former presidential candidate Enrique Marquez recommended Nicolas Maduro – declared the winner of the July 28 elections in Venezuela – heed the calls for transparency that have arisen inside and outside the country after the majority of the opposition denounced fraud and assured that its standard-bearer, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, He won the election by a landslide.

“I think the government should pay attention to this, as well as to the group of three (Mexico, Colombia and Brazil) who are warning about the need for different treatment from the National Electoral Council (CNE) and publish the results”, the former MP said in an interview with EFE.

Failure to do so, he warned, “would be very bad” for the country, which has registered protests – some of which have turned violent, leaving 24 civilians dead, according to the NGO Provea – in the days following the election in opposition to Maduro’s proclamation, CNE said. without disclosing disaggregated resultsas this institution itself established in the election schedule.

Although the electoral body claims it was subject to a cyberattack, Marquez believes that the alleged “hack,” which delayed the transmission of results but did not prevent Maduro from being declared – will be included in the Guinness Book of Records as the longestsince 13 days have passed since the vote and the CNE website is still down.

“Something doesn’t quite suit me. If CNE has results, why don’t they publish them? “Isn’t that what everyone is asking you for? Why not settle the differences with the entire planet and with the Venezuelans by publishing the results and subjecting them to public scrutiny?” he asked.

The former candidate thus referred to the verification reports that, according to state channel Venezolana de Televisión, the CNE president presented this week: Chavista Elvis Amorosoin the Electoral Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ), which is carrying out the process of “validation” of the results requested by Maduro.

In his opinion, “established rules are not followed” Among other things, this is due to the lack of post-vote checks and, as he explained, it is the CNE, an institution whose majority of rectors are sympathetic to Chavismo, that must “ensure respect” for the will expressed in the elections.

“I think that there (at the CNE) “There were other things that happened that needed to be cleared up,” said the politician, also a former vice-president of the electoral body, who calls himself a “losing candidate” who decided to “warn that the foundations of the republic are shaking, they are under stress because of the current situation.”

He also criticized the fact that the CNE had been “closed” since July 29, and recalled that this was the reason he had asked the TSJ to conduct investigation into five key electoral rectors, whom he accuses of “conspiring to destroy the foundations of the republic” and of possibly “violating the people’s sovereignty as enshrined in the vote.”

“This is something we must think about and ask the President of the Republic, who is most interested in everything being good, to seek a political solution to this problem, because it is not good (…) it would be very bad for the country if such a situation “We would have come out worse than we were” he continued.

Regarding criticism of the Carter Center, which participated as an observer in the vote invited by the CNE, he stressed that these experts are doing “impeccable” work, which needs to be “paid attention to because “This is a very professional report.”

The Carter Center said it had no evidence of the reported “hack,” that the election could not be considered democratic because it did not meet established parameters, and that after reviewing the available data concludes that González Urrutia is the winner of the competition, A position that the Venezuelan government sees as a show of support for the “coup d’etat” it claims to be facing.