Lima group says does not recognize Venezuela’s election

The Lima group of Latin American countries plus Canada issued a statement on Monday saying it did not recognize the legitimacy of Venezuela’s presidential election, which was held the day before amid criticism over alleged irregularities.

The Lima Group includes Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Santa Lucia, Canada, Colombia, Honduras, Costa Rica, Guatemala and Guyana.

The statement said the countries would call their ambassadors back from Caracas for consultations and hold a meeting to coordinate a regional response to outflows of Venezuelans “who have been obligated to abandon their country”.

Venezuela’s leftist leader Nicolas Maduro won a new six-year term in the vote, but his main rivals disavowed the election alleging massive irregularities in a process critics decried as a farce propping up a dictatorship.

The Lima Group is a multilateral body that was established following the Lima Declaration on 8 August 2017 in the Peruvian capital of Lima, where representatives of 17 countries met in order to establish a peaceful exit to the crisis in Venezuela.

(Extracted and modified from Reuters News Agency)