Carter Center will send a team to observe the Venezuelan elections

The Carter Center, founded by former Democratic President Jimmy Carter, will once again send a team to observe the elections to be held in Venezuela on July 28.

The organization accepted an invitation from the Venezuelan National Electoral Council that was sent in March, as Bloomberg learned.

In addition, it was learned that the team will arrive on June 29 to observe the electoral process, which includes the evaluation of the candidates' campaigns, the organization of voting centers and other aspects.

The information was made known amidst other reports that the Nicolás Maduro regime has prevented other organizations from observing the electoral process in the country. Recently, Maduro withdrew an invitation he had made to the European Union to visit the country during the election.

Spain's Popular Party achieved unanimous support for an initiative in the Spanish Congress of Deputies demanding socialist Pedro Sánchez's government to pressure Maduro to accept international observers in the election.

Meanwhile, several organizations have warned that the elections in Venezuela do not have democratic guarantees. For example, the 27 former presidents who are members of the Democratic Initiative of Spain and the Americas (IDEA) issued a statement warning that the electoral process is being held without transparency.

"We note that the presidential elections scheduled for July 28, in which the registration of the undisputed leader of the democratic resistance, María Corina Machado, as a candidate was prevented, then that of Corina Yoris, and the candidacy of Ambassador Edmundo González Urrutia was accepted at the request of Machado herself and the parties that form the Unitary Platform, will be carried out in a de facto context, without institutional guarantees," said IDEA.

"We will be very attentive and vigilant of the process towards the planned presidential elections, in proof of solidarity with the legitimate source of all power, namely, the free exercise of the right of every citizen to vote and to be elected without fear or discrimination of any kind," added the statement.

It is not the first time that there have been warnings about irregularities in the elections in Venezuela. In fact, the Carter Center itself assured in 2021 that the process by which Nicolás Maduro was named president was marked by "a pattern of political repression, severely restricted rights to political participation and freedom of expression, the government’s overt use of its political advantage, and an uneven playing field."

'The Chávez regime has been given a patina of respectability by Jimmy Carter'

However, the Carter Center has also been criticized by some dissidents due to its position regarding the elections in Venezuela. In 2004, part of the opposition published a preliminary report titled Fraud in Democracy, prepared by Tulio Álvarez, explaining the electoral irregularities that occurred in a referendum against then-president Hugo Chávez. However, the Carter Center said that it had found no evidence of electoral fraud.

This position was criticized by American voices. Doug Schoen, a Fox News pollster and analyst, told fellow political analyst Michael Barone on U.S. News and World Report that he had no doubt that Hugo Chávez was declared the winner after electoral fraud occurred. "I think it was a massive fraud. ... Our internal sourcing tells us that there was fraud in the central commission," Schoen said.

In that sense, Michael Barone insisted in that same article that "the Chávez regime has been given a patina of respectability by Jimmy Carter and the New York Times editorial page that it almost certainly does not deserve."