8 de agosto 2024
AA
Share
When the results of the quick counts started to leak on the afternoon of Sunday, July 28th, showing Edmundo González with more than a 30-point lead over Nicolás Maduro, I felt relieved to be wrong about my worst predictions that Venezuela was destined for an outcome like Nicaragua’s in 2021.
When voting time came, against all odds, it seemed that a dictatorship backed only by a political minority had dared to expose itself to losing power in an election. The first signs indicated that there wasn’t the massive abstention the regime promoted with its electoral tricks and the threat of a “bloodbath” from Maduro. With a highly reliable electronic voting system like Venezuela’s, the opposition’s margin projected an irreversible victory.
However, a few hours later, we realized that Venezuela was experiencing the “mother of all frauds.” Not like the “stuffed ballots,” the “votes of the dead,” or the “re-election without electoral competition” practiced in Nicaragua, but a mega-fraud of more than five million votes. Shamelessly and with malice, the Maduro-controlled National Electoral Council erased more than two million votes for Edmundo Gonzalez and gifted Nicolas Maduro more than three million.
This fraud was clearly improvised, as there’s no other way to explain such a crude operation that exposed the footprints of a crime impossible to hide, especially when the opposition had prepared thoroughly to defend the vote and preserve the tally sheets that Maduro cannot replace.
In summary, there was a semi-competitive election under an authoritarian regime, the opposition won overwhelmingly, and Maduro committed monumental fraud. However, beyond his predictable resistance to relinquish power, the main result of the election is the formidable mobilization of a political movement that, with voting results in hand, continues to demand the regime’s departure and democratic change.
The most seasoned Venezuelan analysts I consulted during the electoral campaign never ruled out the possibility of Maduro imposing the “Nicaragua scenario,” but always insisted that there were some substantial differences between these two dictatorships and their elections.
First, the international institutional context in which the Venezuelan elections took place was a product of a negotiation facilitated by Norway between the Government and the opposition, with the support of Mexico, and the sponsorship of Colombia and Brazil, in addition to bilateral negotiations between the United States and Venezuela. For better or worse, the Barbados and Qatar agreements conditioned Maduro’s regime to hold elections with all the advantages of power and the loaded dice in the CNE but without daring to abort them like Ortega in 2021.
Second, the democratic resilience after 25 years of authoritarianism, repression, persecution, imprisonment, and exile of opposition leaders, and the massive exodus of the population, left Venezuela with a democratic civil society rooted in associations, political parties, media, universities, think tanks, and a democratic culture that neither Chávez nor Maduro could ever eradicate, and that Maria Corina Machado managed to catalyze into the demand for political change through electoral means.
Third, and to me, this is the decisive factor, the solidarity between civic resistance and the electoral movement, never one at the expense of the other. Despite the repression, the disqualification of candidates, and the State’s advantages, the electoral campaign became a movement of resistance and popular mobilization led by a leadership that restored hope to Venezuela.
In Nicaragua, on the other hand, the Government never agreed to negotiate with the opposition about the elections, and the international witnesses who participated in the second national dialogue in 2019, the OAS and the Vatican, also failed to reach an agreement to suspend the police state. Ortega’s foreign minister signed, but the dictatorship never complied, while the OAS was satisfied with the release of a significant number of political prisoners but never demanded Ortega’s compliance with the agreement. Thus, when the Supreme Electoral Council called the November elections in May 2021, the country had already been living under a police state for almost three years, without freedoms of assembly, mobilization, press and expression, and immediately the regime imprisoned and criminalized all opposition pre-candidates and major political and civic leaders.
Ortega first massacred civic protests with a brutal display of police and paramilitary violence; then, he imposed the police state; and finally, he canceled the elections. To consolidate his totalitarian dictatorship, aligned with Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Cuba, and Venezuela, he wiped out all civic spaces and closed more than 4,000 associations, unions, NGOs, universities, media, and unleashed a fierce persecution against the Catholic Church.
The Sandinista leader paid upfront all the political costs of his leap forward, but when he stole the elections and re-elected himself without political competition, amid massive abstention, the persecuted and leaderless civic movement had no protest capacity. Likewise, the international community’s reaction was lukewarm, despite OAS resolutions that didn’t recognize the farce as a democratic election, but didn’t exercise effective political pressure against the dictatorship either.
In Venezuela, the process sequence has been the opposite: first mobilization and elections, then fraud and repression, and now the threat of a police state to forcibly impose a model that only aims at totalitarianism. However, it may already be too late due to the enormous national and international rejection provoked by the new “top-down” coup by Maduro.
If Maduro’s goal was always to stay in power at any cost, then he made a strategic miscalculation by letting the demand for political change run too long. With the people mobilized and organized, clinging to their vote tally sheets, it will now be much more difficult for him to contain them. It will depend on the leadership’s ability, with the support of international political pressure, to sustain civic resistance in a medium-term struggle that is already being harshly repressed. Maduro is already sketching his police state model, and his first goal is to criminalize Maria Corina Machado and Edmundo Gonzalez, decapitate the leadership, and impose imprisonment and/or house arrest, silence, incommunication, or exile.
Therefore, days of maximum tension are looming in Venezuela, which will test the opposition’s cohesion and the true democratic commitment of Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico to facilitate a negotiation leading to a democratic transition.
Amid uncertainty and the threats of repression, Venezuela is already beginning a process of change that requires reaching a point of maximum political pressure, nationally and internationally, to weaken the regime and pave the way for a negotiated democratic exit.
An eventual democratic transition in Venezuela will have a definitive effect on the dictatorships of Cuba and Nicaragua, exposing their political elites to greater international isolation. But ultimately, it is the forces for change, the peoples of Cuba and Nicaragua, and their democratic leaderships, who must learn from Venezuela’s political lessons on how to win elections under authoritarianism: without a police state; with civic resistance and an electoral strategy in a simultaneous process; and in a great national alliance, for democratic change to end the dictatorship.
This article was published in Spanish in Confidencial and translated by Havana Times. To get the most relevant news from our English coverage delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe to The Dispatch.
