A major Venezuelan opposition movement says its headquarters has been vandalised amid ongoing tensions over a disputed presidential election, as the country's foreign minister said the US was at the forefront of what the government says is a coup attempt.
Vente Venezuela, the movement headed by Venezuela's opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, said that six hooded unidentified men overpowered its security guards overnight, entering its Caracas headquarters, taking equipment and vandalising the location.
"We denounce the attacks and insecurity to which we are subjected for political reasons," the movement said on social media.
Countries around the region, including Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, have called on Venezuela's government to release detailed voting tallies after the elections board declared President Nicolas Maduro, in power since 2013, the winner of a third term.
The opposition says its tally of about 90 per cent of the votes shows Maduro's opponent and opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez received more than double the support of the incumbent president, in line with independent polling conducted before the contest.
Vente Venezuela on Friday released two videos showing walls daubed with black graffiti at its headquarters, a two-storey house in the east of the city.
Machado, who was barred from challenging Maduro herself, is currently in hiding, she said in a opinion piece published on Thursday by the Wall Street Journal but she is expected to appear at opposition marches called for Saturday.
At least 20 people have been killed in post-election protests that have gripped Venezuela since the election, according to US-based NGO Human Rights Watch.
Venezuela's Foreign Minister Yvan Gil said on Friday that the United States was "at the forefront of a coup attempt" after the US State Department a day earlier recognised Gonzalez as the election's winner.
Gonzalez on Friday thanked the US in a post on social media "for recognizsing the will of the Venezuelan people reflected in our electoral victory".
On Thursday, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, whose leaders have traditionally been friendlier with Maduro, called on Maduro's government to "move ahead quickly" and publish detailed voting tallies.
"We are disappointed with the CNE's delay in publishing the data," Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's top foreign policy advisor Celso Amorim told Brazil's RedeTV in an interview that aired late on Thursday.
Amorim, who met with Maduro on Monday after being sent by Lula to observe the elections, said it was up to the government to prove that the figures released by the CNE were real.
"The question is whether the vote count really corresponds to the ballot boxes, so they must show the tallies," Amorim said.
"I asked President Maduro for that in the presence of the president of the National Assembly, and he said it was a matter of two or three days."
