If Nicolás Maduro promised to overcome the international isolation from which Venezuela suffers after twenty-five years of Chavista government with these elections, a necessary condition for ending sanctions that are hampering the country’s economy, it seems he dramatically miscalculated.
The outcome of the voting moves Venezuela away from the path of exhausting negotiations which had led to some easing of sanctions and a consequent improvement in the country’s economy. And it has the effect of repositioning Maduro among the international pariahs, with an arrest warrant for drug trafficking and serious accusations of human rights violations. Meanwhile, for the left made up of Lula, Mujica, Petro, Boric and Alberto Fernández, to mention just a few of the many progressive leaders who had taken a stand in recent days, Maduro returns to being the embarrassing relative who it is better to stay away from.
All of this is because the official result of the Consejo Electoral de Venezuela (CNE), a body whose autonomy from the executive is entirely superficial, awarded the victory to the former Metrobus of Caracas driver with approximately 51% of the votes, while his opponent Edmundo González Urrutia, a former diplomat around whom the entire right-wing opposition had united, received just over 44%. A total of 21,620,705 Venezuelan voters and 228,000 voters residing abroad had been authorized to vote in over fifteen thousand centers distributed throughout the country. That is a trifle if one goes by the data of the United Nations agency UNHCR, according to which there are already 7,700,000 Venezuelans who have decided or, rather, have been pushed to live abroad, of whom 6,500,000 have been welcomed in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Suspicions of fraud
The outcome of the elections overturned every expectation from the day before, given that, the polls showed the anti-Chavista opposition twenty to thirty points ahead of the incumbent president. Then, hours before the CNE’s official announcement, there were irregularities in the transmission of the reports and arbitrary expulsions of witnesses from polling stations. Consequently the opposition contested the official results, declaring that it was in possession of counts that gave Edmundo González 70% of the votes and 30% to Maduro. This allowed María Corina Machado to announce that:
Venezuela has a new president and he is Edmundo González Urrutia. We won by 70% and everyone knows it.
In a press conference yesterday, Machado took matters further by revealing that the opposition had managed to obtain roughly 73% of the reports issued in Sunday’s presidential elections, and that these gave the victory to former ambassador Edmundo González Urrutia, a “stunning” difference that contradicts the electoral body that declared Nicolás Maduro the winner. Machado said that Maduro received 2,759,256 votes, while González Urrutia received 6,275,182. She then explained that all these reports have been verified, tallied and digitized, and will be published on a “robust” web portal that “several world leaders are already consulting” and which will soon be made public, so that everyone can see the “evidence of the victory” of González Urrutia. For his part, the former ambassador promised that the opposition will enforce the will expressed by Sunday’s vote, and that this is the only path to peace.
At least until now, María Corina Machado and Edmundo González have limited themselves in their statements to asking their supporters for “civic vigilance”, but there is no doubt that the challenge of the CNE data has created a political crisis, the genesis and outcome of which are more uncertain than ever. Meanwhile, Caracas woke up on Monday to the noise of cacerolazos in some city neighborhoods and shouts of “¡Fraude!” and “ladrones”, while the government deployed the forces of the policia bolivariana and military personnel in riot gear on the streets. However, the demonstrations have spread to other states in the country, such as Barinas, Falcón, Carabobo, Miranda and Vargas, and the first clashes have been recorded: so far, at least four people have died and forty-six have been injured. Videos are circulating online depicting protesters tearing down statues of Hugo Chávez in various locations across the country.
International Reactions
Given the international importance of the Venezuelan elections due the concrete possibility of ending twenty-five years of Chavista power, last Sunday’s presidential elections were not unanimously recognized around the world.
China, Russia and Iran, the countries closest to the Venezuelan government due to their great economic and military interests – certainly not due to ideological sympathies – immediately congratulated Nicolás Maduro, followed by Cuba, Nicaragua, Honduras and Bolivia, while Syria and Madagascar also agree on the regularity of the elections. Meanwhile, some governments in the international community immediately rejected the outcome of the elections, considering it a fraud perpetrated by Maduro. These include Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Panama and the Dominican Republic, which will request “an urgent meeting of the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States (OAS) to issue a resolution that “saves the will of the people”. Chile’s Gabriel Boric said the announced results were “hard to believe” and called for:
Total transparency concerning the reports and the process, and for international observers independent of the government to account for the veracity of the results. From Chile we will not recognize any result that is not verifiable.
Meanwhile, the president of Guatemala, the social democrat Bernardo Arevalo, wrote in X that “Venezuela deserves transparent, accurate results that are consistent with the will of its people,” saying he had received “the outcome of the vote with many doubts”.
The United States, the European Union, Colombia and Brazil are also among the countries that have requested a transparent count. Secretary of State Antony Blinken expressed his “serious concern” that the result announced in Venezuela did not reflect the will of the people, and called for a “fair and transparent” vote count. Kamala Harris said that:
The United States supports the people of Venezuela, who expressed their voice in the historic presidential elections.
Joe Biden has made it known that he will speak with Lula da Silva this afternoon. In Brazil, whose president recently said he was frightened by Maduro’s threat of a bloodbath in the event of his defeat, the Foreign Ministry called for an “impartial verification of the results” and asked the CNE to publish “the data disaggregated by polling station” so that the electoral process has “transparency, credibility and legitimacy”.
It has also been reported that Brazil is in talks with Mexico and Colombia about issuing a joint statement that calls on Venezuela to count all votes and publish the electoral registers of each district. A joint statement by Maduro’s closest allies in the region would be a way to increase pressure on his government, which has so far ignored calls from the Venezuelan opposition and the international community to publish the reports. Meanwhile, last week Lula said of Maduro:
He needs to learn: when you win, you stay; when you lose, you leave and prepare to win other elections.
Warning that Venezuela’s economic future depends on a clean election with a result that the international community considers legitimate, Lula also sent his international affairs advisor, Celso Amorim, who met with Maduro and pushed for access to the election reports that certify Maduro’s victory. Finally, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres asked the Venezuelan government to count the votes “in total transparency”. Josep Borrell, head of European diplomacy, expressed a similar position.
Before the elections, the Venezuelan president said that:
On July 28, if they do not want Venezuela to fall into a bloodbath, into a fratricidal civil war produced by the fascists, we must guarantee the greatest success, the greatest victory in the electoral history of our people.
On July 29 the president of Parliament Jorge Rodríguez invited “all the forces of the revolutionary people” to “make great marches” in the states and cities of Venezuela on Tuesday at two in the afternoon, with the intention of “defending peace”. The crisis is underway.
Translation by Paul Rosenberg
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