Venezuela minister reaffirms army loyalty to Maduro

CARACAS, Aug 08 (Reuters): Venezuela's Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino on Tuesday reaffirmed the military's "absolute loyalty" to President Nicolas Maduro, amid an ongoing dispute over the country's contested presidential election results.
The comments came after opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez and leader Maria Corina Machado urged members of the armed forces "to stand at the side of the people," in a letter published on Monday.
"We ratify our absolute loyalty to citizen Nicolas Maduro Moros," Padrino, an army general, said during a broadcast on state television, where he was flanked by other top brass of the military and the police.
These "fatuous and irrational calls seek to break our unity and institutionality, but they will never achieve it," Padrino added.
The opposition maintains Gonzalez won more than 6 million votes in the July 28 election, compared to 2.7 million for Maduro, and have published online a copy of ballots from 30,000 voting machines.
The government says it also has copies of the ballots but has not yet published them, nor has the country's electoral authority, whose website has been down since the early hours of July 29.
The electoral authority, who the opposition says favours the ruling socialists, has said Maduro was reelected with around 51% of the vote, beating Gonzalez.
An official from the US State Department said on Tuesday it would have been "nearly impossible" for the opposition to fake the voting tallies it has published.
"We have examined this evidence and have determined that it would be nearly impossible to falsify the tallies that were rapidly compiled and uploaded," Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs Mark Wells told journalists.