“Don't let them come to us with Venezuelan stories”: Iván Cepeda responds to Álvaro Uribe

Given Alvaro Uribe Vélez's assertions that irregularities in the scrutiny of legislative votes are the result of “Venezuelan infiltration,” Senator Iván Cepeda asked the former president not to sell “Venezuelan stories” to the country. The Congressman of the Historical Pact assures that we must be rigorous with statements on this issue and not discredit the results based on political rivalries.

The senator's statement comes a few hours after former President Uribe assured on social media that there would be a Venezuelan interception in the Colombian electoral process. As proof of this, the former president would have a document prepared, supposedly, by the 'General Directorate of Counterintelligence' of the neighboring country's Army which details a plan to infer in the elections.

“Venezuelan penetration to contribute to electoral fraud in Colombia,” said the former president, and attached two pages of a document that, so far, has not announced how it got into his hands.

Prior to this message, Uribe and other right-wing politicians such as María Fernanda Cabal and former President Andrés Pastrana, have also assured that there was electoral fraud in the elections on March 13. They have even pointed to the current national registrar, Alexander Vega, of having allied with the opposition to change the election results.

It should be noted that these statements came after opposition parties, mainly those grouped in the Historical Pact, denounced that “they were hiding votes from them”.

It should be remembered that once the polls of the legislative elections were closed, the pre-counting of votes began and the Registrar's Office slowly reported the results. After a few days, the Historical Pact realized that there were no votes in around 29,000 tables. Immediately, coalition volunteers again checked the polls across the country and found nearly 400,000 additional votes in favor of this movement than were initially reported.

In addition to the Historical Pact, the Liberal Party and the New Liberalism also recovered votes.

So, and considering that in Colombia there are still other electoral days to take place this year, Senator Cepeda asked all sectors to remain calm and not to launch baseless accusations. He points out that

“There are some obvious problems in the electoral system,” but he argues that these must be a matter of discussion in order to resolve them.

“We have criticized the registrar. I quoted it when we were discussing the Electoral Code. What needs to be done now is to remedy the problems with rigorous scrutiny,” said Cepeda.

In this regard, for tomorrow (22 March) the national government convened an electoral monitoring table to discuss issues related to the counting process carried out during the last week. The objective is to legitimize the results of the March 13 elections and look for ways to regain the credibility of the Registry Office.

It was indicated that officials from the ministerial cabinet of President Iván Duque, the Registry Office, members of the different political movements and supervisory bodies such as the Office of the Procurator, the Ombudsman's Office, the Prosecutor's Office and the Electoral Observation Mission (EOM) will participate in the table.

KEEP READING: