5 de agosto 2024
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The unfortunate definition of “banana republic,” which has so plagued the history of Latin America, is based on two elements: the coup d’état, sometimes bloodless and sometimes bloody, but always with buffoonish overtones; and electoral fraud, sometimes so subtle it becomes credible, and most often so crude it is impossible to hide.
In 1947, the old Somoza ordered the electoral ballot boxes seized and locked in the basements of the National Palace until his electoral judges published results he had himself crafted, pencil in hand. For frauds to be accomplished, it matters little whether there are sophisticated systems to count votes or not, biometric or non-biometric.
In 1988, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas won the presidential elections in Mexico by a landslide as a dissident candidate emerging from the left rib of the old and eternal PRI. Shortly after those elections, Cuauhtemoc showed me the tabulation sheets in Mexico that demonstrated how he was winning at all the polling stations. Suddenly, “the system went down,” controlled by the PRI, and when it was restarted, he appeared to be losing at all the polling stations. Fraud by gunpoint had given way to electronic fraud.
The latest buffoonish scenario, the elections in Venezuela, brings us back to the classic times of banana republics in hot lands, a scene that seems to have come from the pen of Ramon del Valle Inclan, an expert in grotesque dictators, who, not in vain, created the prototype in his novel Tyrant Banderas.
The performance opens with a colorful scene: Maduro, who has ordered his National Electoral Council to declare him the winner of the elections he lost with less than a third of the votes, appears before his Supreme Court to file a complaint, of what? The magistrates receive him in a solemn session, all elegantly robed, while in his National Assembly, his deputies call for jailing the candidate stripped of his victory. His Bolivarian Guard represses the street protests against the fraud, and his defense minister appears on television in military fatigues, denouncing that it is all a vile maneuver by imperialism.
Maduro turns to his judicial magistrates to certify Maduro’s victory, gifted by Maduro’s electoral magistrates and defended by Maduro’s army, while Maduro’s police repress Maduro’s adversaries. A scene that can be crowned with an epigram by Ernesto Cardenal: “Somoza unveils the statue of Somoza at Somoza Stadium.”
His Judges. His Army. His Truth
The burlesque is an outrageous falsification of the truth, and its highest expression is the grotesque parody. The grand farce in Venezuela’s situation is pretending to believe that there is a rule of law where an electoral anomaly has occurred that can be remedied according to the mechanisms that the rule of law itself provides: legal appeals, audit procedures, constitutional remedies. And that Maduro, who ordered the fraud, will submit to the adverse ruling of serious and independent judges who will reverse the swift machinery of deception, that proclaimed him the winner even before the false votes had finished being “counted.”
In Venezuela, far from a rule of law, what exists is a dictatorship that long ago decided not to let power be snatched away, threatening a bloodbath if the popular vote so decided, as it did. A regime born under an already obsolete messianic conception: the Bolivarian revolution above all else. Elections are useful as long as they can win them, and they play at democracy as long as they can do so with treachery and advantage. I’ve seen this movie before.
When the revolutionary fuel runs out, is wasted, misappropriated, or falsified, and the necessary votes to win no longer add up because dreams turn into nightmares for the people. Those votes can no longer be counted transparently, sophisticated machines become a hindrance, but that does not prevent fraud. Losing is not an option. Then, you must resort to the gun or the blackout. Make the system crash.
Electoral frauds are neither left nor right. They are frauds. A left that turns a blind eye to fraud, justifies it, or supports it because the perpetrator is from the left will have no moral authority to denounce fraud when the right does it against the left. And a left that supports dictatorships, especially fraudulent ones, is left in tatters.
The best lessons these days about how frauds have no ideology have been given by Chilean President Gabriel Boric. Respect for the popular will falls within the defense of fundamental human rights, beyond outdated doctrines that mandate silence or abstention so as not to violate the self-determination of peoples. Which precisely consists of respecting the will of those peoples.
And the people of Venezuela today cry out for respect for their thwarted will.
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.
