Opposition wins tense Venezuela vote in Chavez home region
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Loading... - Joan Davidson
- 10 Jan 2022
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Venezuela’s opposition won an historic victory in a tense rerun gubernatorial election in Barinas, a region ruled by the family of late President Hugo Chavez for more than two decades.
According to results announced late on Sunday, opposition lawmaker Sergio Garrido, 54, defeated the ruling party’s candidate Jorge Arreaza, 48, who served as the country’s vice president and foreign minister and was Chavez’s son-in-law.
Garrido, who according to the National Electoral Council (CNE) won 55.36 percent of the vote, welcomed the result.
“With the unity and strength of each of you, we have succeeded … succeeded in overcoming obstacles and adversity despite all that we have had to face,” Garrido wrote on Twitter.
Arreaza conceded defeat before the results were announced tweeting “we did not achieve the goal” of winning.
The rerun gubernatorial election in Barinas state, where Chavez’s father and brothers have held political power since 1998, was conducted amid widespread claims of ruling party interference.
An initial election on November 21 was cancelled by a court after it appeared to be going the way of opposition figure Freddy Superlano, marking the first defeat in Barinas in 23 years for the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), now headed by President Nicolás Maduro.
Venezuela’s Supreme Court, which is one of many government bodies seen as loyal to Maduro’s government, granted a request by the country’s public finances watchdog to declare Superlano “ineligible” because of “administrative and criminal investigations” into accusations of corruption and ordered new elections to be held without him.
Superlano was disqualified on November 29 while he was ahead by less than a percentage point over Argenis Chávez, one of Hugo Chávez’s brothers. Superlano’s wife, who was chosen as his successor, was disqualified, too.
Argenis Chávez resigned as governor following Superlano’s disqualification and did not enter the race in the special election, leaving the governor’s ballot free of a Chavez family member for the first time in more than two decades. The ruling party then chose Arreaza as its candidate. Read More...
