18 de agosto 2024
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The irrefutable (and massive) evidence that an overwhelming majority of the Venezuelan people defeated the Maduro dictatorship on July 28 has placed the democratic governments of the world before a challenge that has an easy solution. If they want to remain true to the principles and standards by which they supposedly govern themselves, they must uphold the sovereign will of the Venezuelans. There is no room for dilemmas, alternative paths, or intermediate solutions. For Venezuela, what should apply is the same as what any democratic leader would want for their own countries. Freedoms do not admit double standards or complicit relativism.
Given the irrational reactions of the Chavista regime to the electoral results, one must ask what they expected from the elections. In line with other authoritarian electoral regimes, did they expect to manipulate the electoral system to legitimize their apparatus of domination before the international community? If so, they failed. On the contrary, their antidemocratic nature has never been so clear before the eyes of the world, except to other tyrannies.
Under Maduro’s leadership, Chavismo has reached its highest levels of mediocrity by failing, after three weeks, to even produce manipulated vote tally sheets or any other farce of the sort. Three weeks later, the absence of documented results has become the elephant in the room that no one, not even their most shameful accomplices, can ignore. Instead, this botched effort has transferred all the moral and political strength to the opposition, which has been able to present its copies of the tally sheets for national and international public scrutiny.
Did they perhaps expect the opposition forces to retreat to lick their wounds? Here too, Maduro’s calculations have failed; the knowledge of being strong, legitimized by the weight of more than six million votes and holding tangible evidence that is not just rhetorical slogans, has empowered them like never before, to the point of almost touching the doors of government and, with it, a change in the political regime.
Did they expect the rest of the world’s governments to end up accepting, as in previous occasions, a new fraud? It seems this was their goal with the hasty announcement in the early hours of July 29th and Maduro’s rushed proclamation that same day: to present others with the fait accompli of dispossession.
However, they did not count (did they really not count?) on the chain reaction of the previous two factors: the evidence of the precinct voting results and the opposition’s stance. Worse still: did they really expect the only independent international observers, the Carter Center and the United Nations experts, to swallow the fraud? Perhaps they relied on both issuing the usual statements in the customary deeply concerned tone. But no, neither the governments nor the observers have closed their eyes, and the mildest demand has been for the presentation of the vote tally sheets, precinct by precinct. Not even the Olympics’ intermission managed to silence these demands.
However, for these claims not to end up as howls at the moon, deadlines with clear expiration dates are needed. How much more time will be given to Maduro? Ultimatums without an expiration date lack teeth and tend to achieve the opposite effect. If, in three weeks, the regime has been unable to present “its records,” it is not because they did not want to, but simply because they could not: the manipulation would be so great and blatant that it would worsen the dictatorship’s situation.
Venezuelans should not be left alone in the face of such a dispossession of their sovereignty. The Venezuelan people have already done their part; they came out massively and civically to vote for political change on July 28. The Venezuelan opposition also did its part; first, it managed to unify around a candidacy, something it had been urged to do; secondly, it defeated the regime despite its antidemocratic rules; and thirdly, it has defended the results despite the repression unleashed by the tyranny. What more can be asked of Venezuelans?
After so many deaths, imprisonments, and exiles, they cannot be asked to sit down and negotiate with the henchmen for a transition conditioned by impunity, with full guarantees for those who have looted the public coffers and ruined a country so rich in natural resources. In Nicaragua, we know what it means to leave the oppressors unpunished and to falsely close dark periods of our history. The proposals from abroad that have been heard in recent days to repeat the elections, appoint a coalition government, declare a general amnesty, and other absurdities, are equivalent to killing the root of democracy that is embedded in popular sovereignty.
Any solution that does not involve a change of government in Venezuela will have consequences for democracy as the best form of government, even for those of us who believe that democracy, in addition to periodic elections of authorities, also implies a process of collective negotiations between governments and citizens. If the overwhelming evidence of the electoral results in Venezuela is invalidated for political convenience, it will legitimize the future actions of any authoritarian ruler who organizes elections to cling indefinitely to power, despite the rejection of the population.
In this sense, if with so much evidence in hand Venezuela loses and the Maduro dictatorship becomes entrenched, we will all have lost. The possibility of accrediting one vote per person would lose value, and the positions of strength of the enemies of freedoms in other parts of the world would be legitimized. The most documented fraud in contemporary history does not deserve a diplomatic response filled with niceties. Democracies can also die due to a lack of strong actions that set red lines against the temptations of despots.
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.
