Edmundo González says he signed election letter under duress as condition for allowing him to flee to Spain

• Is it game over for Venezuela’s opposition as Maduro clings on?

Venezuela’s opposition candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, has said he was coerced into signing a letter recognizing Nicolás Maduro as the winner of the country’s disputed election as a condition for letting him flee to Spain.

The revelation of the letter is the latest strain to the country’s political crisis, which was exacerbated by the disputed election results and González’s recent departure for exile in Spain.

Opposition leaders are adamant their campaign to remove Maduro is very much alive – even as their candidate widely believed to have won the vote has gone into exile in Spain

Against all the odds, they pulled off a once-inconceivable democratic victory against one of the world’s most unyielding authoritarian regimes. Even more astonishingly, Venezuela’s opposition activists managed to prove it, gathering a vast cache of voting data that offered concrete proof of their success.

Yet six weeks after Venezuela’s presidential election, it was the candidate widely believed to have won the vote, Edmundo González, who has flown into exile in Spain, while the apparent loser, Nicolás Maduro, looks set to keep power.