Aragua, Venezuela - May 24, 2024

[Note: video contains Spanish language]

The until recently unknown Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia - who is running in Venezuela's presidential elections backed by Maria Corina Machado, an opposition leader who was barred from participating in the race - has a voting intention already close to 50%, according to the average of the polls that have been published so far. For his part, the ruling party's candidate and current Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, has climbed a few points, with support levels ranging between 22 and 25 per cent.

Gonzalez was born in La Victoria, Aragua state, located about 50 minutes from Caracas, the Venezuelan capital. It is one of the most important cities economically and was once an industrial centre, with factories such as Fiat and Iveco, which disappeared after the country's economic and social crisis. "Victorians are proud", Victor Vargas, a young councillor in the city for Accion Democratica (a member of the PUD), told El Destape. He has no personal ties to Gonzalez, but the candidate's family is well known in the town. He said they used to live near the historic centre and described them as "traditional", "Victorian", "respected" and of "impeccable conduct".

Although Gonzalez has not been a public figure until now, he has been a key player in the opposition for years and has a long diplomatic career. He studied at the Universidad Central de Venezuela and holds a master's degree in international relations from the American University in Washington, USA. He began his career in 1972 at the embassy in Brussels and continued in the United States - where he was responsible for bilateral relations between the two countries - and in El Salvador during the internal armed conflict, when he accompanied attempts at democratisation, according to his CV, to which this newspaper had access. He also served in the United Kingdom.

He held various positions in the Foreign Ministry in Caracas and was secretary pro tempore of the Ibero-American Summit in 1997. Over the years he rose through the ranks to become ambassador to Algeria and Argentina. He was in our country at two important historic moments, in the latter as his country's diplomatic representative: the return to democracy and between 1998 and 2002, when Hugo Chavez won the presidency. In Venezuela, those years are remembered as "the transition" and Gonzalez took a key position for the time and for posterity: he spoke out against the attempted coup against Chavez. During those years he was in charge of negotiations for Venezuela's entry into Mercosur.
According to his curriculum vitae, he devoted himself to academia since 2004. He wrote papers, participated in forums as moderator and speaker in which he critically analysed Chavez's Venezuelan foreign policy, the development of integration processes such as Prosur, Unasur, Mercosur, the geopolitical tensions between the United States and China, and the characteristics of the different Latin American leaderships.

However, he never really left political life. He was among the founders of the Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD) in 2008, the coalition that brought together 22 opposition parties and that today has the PUD as its electoral tool, with the backing of 11 parties. It was the first united alliance against chavismo.

In the bowels of the MUD, what became known as "La Salida" (The Exit) was conceived in 2014, a series of mobilisations against the government personified by Leopoldo Lopez. Not everyone agreed, and the alliance broke up in 2017 due to tensions between moderates who negotiated with the government and radicals who rejected dialogue. A few years later, Juan Guaido's leadership, which also rejected the ouster, also failed to reunite. After the failure of these two strategies, they decided to return to the electoral route and elected a candidate with no apparent past.

In the midst of this period of internal opposition politics, between 2013 and 2015, Gonzalez was the international representative of the MUD as a member of the Christian democracy in the Copei party. There he grew as one of the opposition's technical cadres and, as a result, became the coalition's candidate in 2024.

At the time when the nominations were being decided this year, he had just returned from Spain to visit his granddaughters. He had been on holiday and came back to sign up. "I never even imagined that I was going to be a cover candidate, it was not in my plans", he said in an interview on Venezuelan television, and he repeats this every time he is asked. He accepted, he said, with "patriotism" and stressed that his wife and two daughters support him.
Gonzalez acknowledged that "he is in the eye of the hurricane" and said he aspires to create a "government of national reconciliation". He says he is committed to changing "the atmosphere of polarisation and verbal confrontation" - which includes both the Chavista ruling party and a large part of anti-Chavismo - as well as "recovering institutional normality for the reconstruction and re-institutionalisation of the country, where no one can be persecuted for their ideas, where they can speak freely".

SHOTLIST:
1. various of Maria Corina Machado and Edmundo Gonzalez's act in La Victoria, Aragua (May 24, 2024);
2. Fragment of Edmundo Gonzalez's recorded speech (Apr 24, 2024).