A Reflection On Venezuela
What Is at Stake Is the Geopolitical Turmoil That Maduro’s Victory Is Causing
I am not, nor have I ever been, a staunch Chavista. Hugo Chavez was a benevolent political meteorite who shook the Latin American sub-continent and the world in the first decade of the 21st century. In 2013, shortly after Hugo Chavez’s death, I wrote a piece entitled “Hugo Chavez: the legacy and the challenges”. I identified some signs of authoritarianism and bureaucratization and ended the text with the following sentence: “Without external interference, I am sure that Venezuela would know how to find a non-violent and democratic solution. Unfortunately, what is happening is that all means are being used to turn the poor against Chavismo, the social base of the Bolivarian revolution and those who have benefited most from it. And, at the same time, to provoke a rupture in the Armed Forces and a consequent military coup to oust Maduro. Europe’s foreign policy (if it can be called that) could be a moderating force if it hadn’t lost its soul in the meantime.”[i] I have to admit that my fear has not been realized to date, although there has been no shortage of attempts to make it happen. I believe that the current moment is yet another such attempt. Hence the importance of reflecting on the clamor in the Western media about the possibility of fraud in the recent elections in Venezuela and the consensus on the right and left about the need to audit the results. This perplexes me greatly and forces me to reflect.
1. The Venezuelan electoral system has been unanimously considered one of the most secure and protected against fraud. It requires four stages of identification: registration on the electoral roll, electronic voting, paper ballot extraction, and the voter’s fingerprint. The numbers must match. Of course, no electoral system is completely immune to fraud, but when we compare it to the electoral systems of other countries (such as the US or Portugal), the Venezuelan system is more secure. Why is it so obvious to so many people that there may have been fraud?
2. The opposition had been announcing that it would only recognize the results if it won the elections. In this respect, it was following a practice that is becoming widespread among far-right forces running for election (Trump in 2020, Bolsonaro in 2022, Milei in 2023). This should call for some caution on the part of democratic forces, lest their insistence on auditing serve as a crutch for political forces that, supposedly in the name of democracy, want to destroy it.
3. Outside of Venezuela, the most vociferous forces in defense of Venezuelan democracy are far-right political forces that in their own countries have advocated or practiced coups d’état and electoral fraud. In Brazil, with the active collaboration of the US, Jair Bolsonaro and the political and military forces that supported him were the protagonists of the most clamorous electoral fraud of the last decade. They managed to disable and put in prison for more than 500 days the candidate who would certainly have won the elections, Lula da Silva; they easily manipulated the media and the courts; and the 2018 election was declared valid internationally without any reservations. This shows that the media-political clamor about the possibility of fraud and the need to verify the results is not based, contrary to what it seems, on a deep-rooted love of democracy, but rather on other reasons, which I’ll explain below.
4. The double standards go far beyond the far-right forces and the primitivism of their considerations. European countries, which pride themselves on being impeccable democracies, were almost unanimous in recognizing as the legitimate president of Venezuela a suit who had proclaimed himself president in a square in Caracas. I’m referring to Mr. Juan Guaidó, on 23 January 2019. How can it be explained that, in this case, no care was taken to verify the democratic processes? It’s all the more shocking when we compare this apparent negligence with the zeal of now, regarding an election that had more than 900 observers from almost 100 countries? Incidentally, in an aside that adds to the perplexity, one wonders why it is only in a few countries that it is so crucial to use external observers to give credibility to electoral processes. If the possibility of fraud always exists, the need for observers should be universal and supervised by the UN.
5. I don’t dispute the reasons for Maria Corina Machado’s disqualification (it is well known that she took part in several coup attempts against the Bolivarian government and even called for foreign military intervention), but the choice of her replacement, former diplomat Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, is quite perplexing. There is something disturbingly caricatured about the Venezuelan opposition. First, it was Juan Guaidó; now it’s a gentleman who looked like he’d just left a nursing home for a leisure activity that happened to be a presidential candidacy. I only mention this because Edmundo Gonzalez’s hands may eventually be stained with blood. Between 1981 and 1983 Edmundo Gonzalez was the first secretary of the Venezuelan Embassy in El Salvador, whose ambassador was Leopoldo Castillo, known as Matacuras (priest killer). At the time, the Condor Plan for counter-insurgency, promoted by Ronald Reagan, was being implemented in that country with the aim of preventing the advance of the revolutionary forces of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). This plan included the execution of Operation Centaur, which involved the army and death squads and aimed to assassinate revolutionaries and, in particular, members of religious communities based on liberation theology. A total of 13,194 people were murdered, including Don Oscar Romero, now a saint in the Catholic Church, four Maryknoll nuns and five priests. According to CIA data declassified in 2009, Leopoldo Castillo appears to be co-responsible for the coordination and execution of Operation Centaur. Edmundo Gonzalez was the first secretary of the Venezuelan Embassy. The crimes committed are crimes against humanity and as such are imprescriptible.[ii]
Why all the clamor about possible electoral fraud?
The short answer to this question is this: Venezuela is the only country in Latin America where two fundamental resources are not controlled by the US: the armed forces and natural resources (the largest reserves of oil, rare earths, gold, iron, etc.). Throughout the 20th century, the US repeatedly intervened in Venezuela’s elections with the aim of guaranteeing its access to natural resources. They have always done so with the help of a very small number of oligarchic families, some of whom have controlled the country’s wealth since the 16th century and the days of the encomiendas. Maria Corina Machado belongs to one of these families. Her electoral program is very similar to Javier Milei’s and she has already pledged in an interview that, if she were president, she would move the Venezuelan Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. It’s a far-right program that has been supported by the US and, lately, by the oligarch of oligarchs, Elon Musk.
Because it doesn’t control the two resources I mentioned, the US has used the two strategies at its disposal (in addition to electoral interference and support for the opposition): participation in coups d’état, which may or may not include assassination attempts on the leaders to be taken down; and economic sanctions. At the moment, Venezuela is being punished with 930 sanctions that have been imposed for almost two decades. The sanctions have caused the abrupt impoverishment of Venezuela and have been responsible for thousands of deaths due to the lack of essential life-saving medicines (for example, for a period, insulin). This abrupt impoverishment led to the suspension of many of the government’s redistributive policies and, ultimately, to emigration. More than seven million people.
There’s no doubt that a country with so many millions of citizens forced to emigrate can’t be doing well. And it’s understandable that many of these emigrants see the defeat of Nicolas Maduro as an end to the sanctions and their hope of returning. In this context, two thoughts come to mind. The first is that Maduro has liberalized the economy in recent years, adopting some measures that can hardly be considered socialist or even left-wing. Many deals are being signed with large US and European companies, in the oil sector and beyond. Today, the Venezuelan economy is one of the fastest-growing in Latin America, but obviously this comes after brutal impoverishment. How far this new (Chinese-inspired?) economic model can succeed is an open question.
The second thought is that, if we look at the international panorama of migration and refugees, Venezuela is the only case where the media attention is centered on the country from which the displaced people are leaving. In all other cases, attention is centered on the “receiving” countries (which often includes deportation). Once again, the reason seems to be this: the policy of destabilization and demonization of the Bolivarian government and the creation of a consensus to activate the third US weapon: the infamous regime change. In fact, I think that the social unrest currently underway is aimed at creating a Maidan Revolution ten years later. I’m referring to the social unrest in Ukraine in 2014 that led to the flight of the democratically elected president, Victor Yanukovych, and, shortly afterwards, to the election of Volodymyr Zelensky. The reason why a “color revolution” is unlikely to take place in Venezuela is that the US has no Venezuelan military trained at the School of the Americas, where so many coups have been forged. The Venezuelan Armed Forces have already recognized the election results.
But there will certainly be more attempts in the future, especially since Venezuela has three major allies: China, Russia and Iran, three enemies of the US. The first two are original members of the BRICS and the third will soon join them. This means that, although the discursive façade is about electoral fraud and democracy, what is at stake is the geopolitical turmoil that Maduro’s victory is causing. This should make the leaders of Latin American countries think, especially Brazil. Sooner or later, Brazil will have to decide which side it is on in the new global geopolitical and geostrategic horizon that is underway. I understand the caution because, after all, the US recently interfered brutally in Brazil’s domestic politics. But on the other hand, only by defending the sovereignty of other countries will Brazil, or any other country, be able to effectively defend its own sovereignty when the imperial storm hits. In any case, it’s better to act collectively than individually. The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) needs to be more active now that the Union of Latin American Nations (UNASUR) has disappeared.
[i] Pneumatóforo. Escritos políticos, 1981-2018. Coimbra: Almedina, 2018, p. 165-175.
[ii] May be consulted in: https://nlginternational.org/2024/07/national-lawyers-guild-report-election-monitoring-delegation-to-the-bolivarian-republic-of-venezuela/; https://www.elperiodista.cl/2024/07/vinculan-a-candidato-opositor-en-venezuela-con-asesinatos-de-religiosos-en-el-salvador/