Buenos Aires Herald 
The Venezuelan government has given diplomats 72 hours to leave the Argentine embassy in Caracas following a decision to expel all diplomatic personnel from seven countries that questioned the transparency of the Sunday election results.
The deadline raises questions about the fate of six Venezuelan opposition aides who have been living in the Argentine embassy seeking political asylum since March 20. The Maduro government has denied them safe conduct out of the country.
Venezuela’s Foreign Ministry issued a document on Tuesday morning to inform its Argentine counterpart that, due to the Milei government’s “interfering actions and statements” on the election results, it has decided to “demand the withdrawal of Argentine diplomats and consuls in a 72-hour timeframe.”
Argentine diplomatic personnel, the text says, will have “all guarantees for their immediate withdrawal from the national territory.” However, it states that those guarantees do not apply to the six Venezuelan aides. The embassy will have to resolve their situation, the government added.
According to Pedro Urruchurtu Noselli, one of Machado’s collaborators who is under asylum in the embassy, officers from the national police tactical team attempted to take over the building while wearing hoods and carrying rifles on Monday evening, but left later in the night.
“These serious actions violate international law and the Caracas Convention on diplomatic asylum,” Urruchurtu said. He also thanked Argentina for its solidarity.
On Tuesday noon, Urruchurtu said the Venezuelan public power company had cut the power to the embassy building. “We hold the regime responsible for the attack on this embassy by violating international law […] and for anything that may happen to us while we are here.”
The group of Venezuelans are part of the team of opposition leader María Corina Machado. Despite winning the opposition primary, she was banned from running in the presidential election. Edmundo González Urrutia ran in her place, with her endorsement. Machado claims the results announced by the government are false.
In a press conference on Monday night, she announced that the opposition had created a publicly-accessible parallel vote counting system. She claimed that they had tallied 73% of the votes, and added that González had 6.2 million votes compared with 2.7 million for Maduro. Official results claimed that Maduro won with 51.2% to González’s 44.2%.
On Monday, Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Yvan Gil announced the withdrawal of all diplomatic personnel from Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Panama, and Uruguay. He also demanded that each country recall their representatives from Caracas. The move came after political leaders and foreign ministries from those countries criticized the announcement of President Nicolás Maduro’s re-election.
The new diplomatic dispute escalated when President Javier Milei called Maduro a “dictator,” said the results were fraudulent and called the Armed Forces to “defend democracy and popular will” in an X post early Monday.
In response, Maduro called Milei a “cowardly bug” and a “Nazi fascist” during his victory speech. The Argentine Foreign Ministry also published a communiqué rejecting the result outright shortly before Gil’s communiqué.
