Edinburgh, Scotland – Venezuelans living abroad in 460 cities around the world gathered on Saturday for the “Gran Protesta Mundial” (Great Global Protest), a demonstration organized by opposition leader María Corina Machado to protest the country’s July election results.
The protest came two months to the day after highly controversial presidential elections in which the country’s National Electoral Council (CNE) declared Nicolás Maduro president for a third term.
Maduro’s government has yet to provide proof of his election win, and opposition members as well as third-party election observers have argued that the opposition candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, won by a large margin based on available, precinct-level voting tabulations the opposition has collected.
One of the cities where protesters gathered was in Edinburgh, Scotland, the capital of about 515,000 people. Around 20 demonstrators met at Royal Academy Square, draped in flags and waving signs.
They called for international recognition of González Urrutia as the winner of the election, and demanded that Maduro step down from power on January 10, 2025, inauguration day for the new presidential term. Protesters also called for justice for crimes against humanity allegedly carried out by Maduro’s government in his two terms as president.
Nicole, a 23-year-old who agreed to speak if we didn’t print her last name, told Latin America Reports that she attended the rally to “continue giving visibility to the censorship and repression happening in Venezuela right now.”
Since the election, Maduro’s government has released a wave of repression against dissenters and opposition members. According to the government, some 2,200 people have been arrested, including children, human rights activists and opposition politicians.
Nicole said she believes that “on the European continent, the news of what is happening in Venezuela can be very distorted.” She said that Venezuelans abroad have the opportunity, “if not to say responsibility,” to shed light on “the harsh reality of what happens in the country, given our first-hand experience.”
During the protest, participants carried Venezuelan flags and held banners which read “Freedom for Venezuela” and several participants spoke into a megaphone both in English and Spanish.
Demonstrations like the one on Saturday are a space for Venezuelan migrants to find community, especially in places like Edinburgh where Venezuelans are few and far between.
While there are 25,000 Venezuelans within the United Kingdom, the community in the northernmost country remains small. According to reports from 2019 there were approximately 2,000 Venezuelans in Scotland.
Nicole underlined how Venezuelan migrants in Edinburgh “are very dispersed” and there is little communication amongst them.
“It is thanks to these protests that I have gotten to know so many people from the Venezuelan community,” she added.
Another protester, 31-year-old Pedro Luis Guarema Paniccia, said that “maintaining unity within the Venezuelan community abroad is very important as we have the responsibility to communicate what is happening in our country.”
While Pedro has been in Scotland for 10 years, he expressed that participating in these protests helps him keep “the hope for freedom” in his country alive.
Pedro is holding out hope for political change. “There is a limit,” he said, and that limit was reached on July 29 and 30, when spontaneous protests against Maduro’s re-election broke out in once-Maduro strongholds, including in parts of the capital, Caracas.
Saturday’s protest culminated with heart-felt singing of the Venezuelan national anthem accompanied by musician Hugo Zuleta García on the cuatro, a four-stringed instrument from Venezuela and other Latin American countries.
