“I have not been coerced by the Spanish Government or by the ambassador”

Venezuelan opposition leader Edmundo González issued a statement late on Thursday denying that he was pressured by the Spanish government to force him to leave Venezuela for Spain. These alleged coercions would have taken place within the Embassy in Caracas together with the Venezuelan Executive, a version that has been raised by the PP during the day. “I have not been coerced by the Spanish government or by the ambassador,” the note states.

On Thursday, the deputy secretary of the PP, Esteban González Pons, went so far as to call the Spanish government a “coup-monger”, while the leader of his party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, demanded the resignation of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, for his handling of the crisis in Venezuela.

Now, González has given another version of what happened. “The Spanish Government has promised to guarantee my safety during the journey to the Armed Forces plane,” the statement says. The opposition leader says that he made the decision to issue this statement “in light of the various versions circulating regarding alleged coercion by Spanish State officials.”

“The measures taken by Spain were intended to allow the processing of my asylum application before the Spanish State to continue under conditions of security and respect for my rights,” the statement said.

“I would like to stress that these arrangements were supervised and facilitated directly by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, under conditions of security and respect for my rights,” he stressed. The opposition leader had already thanked the government for its efforts to welcome him when he left Venezuela.

“Thank you Edmundo González for defending the truth against the slander and insults against Spain and its foreign service,” Albares himself said on the social network X. The minister also referred to the PP in his reaction to the statement: “There are times to be in opposition and others when you have to be one country.” “Spain is committed to democracy and human rights,” he concluded.

Feijóo had stated hours earlier in a press conference in Rome after meeting with the ultra-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni that “the Spanish Government has lied” about the asylum it has granted to Edmundo González. “Spanish diplomacy, an essential pillar of European diplomacy in Latin America, cannot be at the service of a dictatorial regime,” he added.

Maduro says González Urrutia asked him for “clemency”

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro said on Thursday that the flag-bearer of the majority opposition, Edmundo González Urrutia, asked him for “clemency” to leave the country, while denying that there had been any type of coercion by the government against the anti-Chavez leader to carry out his exile to Madrid.

“I feel sorry for you, Mr. González Urrutia, who asked me for mercy, who has no word, who has no word for what you have committed to and who alleges your own clumsiness and your own cowardice in trying to save I don’t know what,” said the president during an event broadcast by the state channel Venezolana de Televisión.

Maduro responded in this way to the opposition leader, who on Wednesday denounced having suffered “coercion, blackmail and pressure” that led him to sign a letter that allowed him to be granted safe conduct to take the flight, on a Spanish Air Force plane, which finally took him from Caracas to Spain, where he has requested political asylum.

“No one can claim his own cowardice and his own betrayal of his followers. I don’t know what he is going to save because he has already lost his morality forever, and here we are, the Venezuelans who are in Venezuela willing to continue working for this land, for this country, for peace, for life and for the real development of our republic,” the Chavista leader stressed.

The president of the National Assembly (AN, Parliament) of Venezuela, the Chavista Jorge Rodríguez, for his part, said this Thursday that the standard-bearer of the majority opposition, Edmundo González Urrutia, signed the “capitulation” to his presidential “aspiration” by signing the document with which his exile to Spain was made concrete: “This is nothing other than a capitulation (…) of a certain position and a certain aspiration that was overthrown by the people (…). It is a surrender.”