–OpEd–
SAN JOSÉ — When the results of the quick counts began to trickle in on July 28, showing opposition candidate Edmundo González with a more than 30-point lead over incumbent President Nicolás Maduro, I was relieved to be wrong in my worst predictions that a Nicaragua-like outcome was inevitable in Venezuela. I am thinking of 2021, when the elections were considered a sham by all international observers, and President Daniel Ortega reinforced his totalitarian regime.
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Come voting time, against all odds, it seemed that the Venezuelan dictatorship backed only by a political minority had dared to risk losing power in an election. The first signs indicated that there had not been the massive abstention encouraged by the regime with its electoral traps and the threat of Maduro’s “bloodbath” and, with a highly reliable electronic voting system, the opposition’s margin of advantage projected an irreversible victory.
But a few hours later, we realized that in Venezuela the “mother of all frauds” was underway. It was not the more limited phenomenons as practiced in Nicaragua, like the “vote of the deceased,” or the “reelection without electoral competition,” but a mega fraud of more than 5 million votes. With impudence and premeditation, the Chavismo-controlled National Electoral Council erased more than 2 million votes for González and gave more than 3 million votes to Maduro.
The fraud was clearly improvised. There is no other explanation for such a crude operation that revealed the traces of crime impossible to hide — especially when the opposition was prepared to defend the vote and preserve the records that now Maduro cannot forge.
In short: there was a semi-competitive election under an authoritarian regime; the opposition won in a landslide; and Maduro committed monumental fraud. But beyond his predictable resistance to surrender power, the main result of the election is the formidable mobilization of a political movement that, voting records in hand, continues to demand an end to the dictatorship and a democratic change.
Venezuela in 2024
The most seasoned Venezuelan analysts I consulted throughout the electoral campaign never ruled out the possibility that Maduro would make a move to impose the “Nicaragua scenario.” But they always insisted that there were some substantive differences between these two dictatorships and their elections.
First, the international institutional context in which the Venezuelan elections were reached was the 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 the bilateral negotiation between the United States and Venezuela.
For better or worse, the Barbados and Qatar agreements pushed the Maduro regime to hold the elections — with all the advantages of holding power and having the National Electoral Council captive. But at least Maduro did not dare to abort the elections, as Ortega did in 2021.
Venezuela has a democratic culture that neither Hugo Chávez nor Nicolas Maduro could ever eradicate.
Second, Venezuela’s democratic resilience — after 25 years of authoritarianism, repression, persecution, imprisonment and banishment of opposition leaders, and massive exodus of the population — left a democratic civil society rooted in associations, political parties, media, universities and think tanks. It is a democratic culture that neither Hugo Chávez nor Maduro could ever eradicate, and one that opposition leader María Corina Machado managed to catalyze in the demand for political change through elections.
The third decisive factor is the pairing of civic resistance and the electoral movement — never one at the expense of the other. Despite the repression, the disqualifications of candidates, and the state’s advantageous tactics, the electoral campaign became a movement of resistance and popular mobilization led by a leadership that gave hope back to Venezuela.
Nicaragua in 2021
In Nicaragua in 2021, on the other hand, the government never agreed to negotiate with the opposition on the elections. And the international observers who participated in the second national dialogue in 2019, the Organization of American States (OAS) and the Vatican, also failed to be guarantors of the 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 claimed Ortega’s non-compliance.
So in May, when the Supreme Electoral Council called for the November 2021 elections, Nicaragua had already been living under a police state for almost three years, without freedom of assembly and mobilization, nor freedom of press and expression. The regime immediately imprisoned and criminalized all opposition pre-candidates and the main political and civic leaders.
Cuba and Nicaragua must learn from Venezuela’s political lessons.
Ortega first massacred the civic protests with a brutal deployment of police and paramilitary violence; then, he imposed the police state; and finally, he annulled the elections.
To consolidate his totalitarian dictatorship — in alignment with Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Cuba and Venezuela — Ortega swept away all civic spaces and cancelled more than 4,000 associations, unions, NGOs, universities, media, and launched a fierce persecution against the Catholic Church.
The Sandinista caudillo paid in advance all the political costs of his leap forward. But when Ortega stole the elections and reelected himself without political competition, amid massive abstention, the persecuted and headless civic movement had no capacity to protest. The international community’s reaction was lukewarm. While the OAS resolutions did not recognize the farce as a democratic election, it did not exert effective political pressure against the dictatorship.
Too late for Maduro?
In Venezuela, the process happened in reverse order: first mobilization and elections; then fraud and repression; and now the threat of a police state to impose by force a model that only aims at totalitarianism. But it may already be too late for Maduro — the new coup d’état “from the top down” by Chávez supporters has caused huge rejection nationally and internationally.
If Maduro’s objective was always to stay in power at any cost, then he made a strategic miscalculation by letting the waters of the demand for political change run too long. With the people mobilized and organized, clinging to their voting records, it will now be much more difficult for him to contain them. It will depend on the capacity of its leadership to sustain the civic resistance in a medium term struggle that is already being harshly repressed, with the accompaniment of international political pressure.
Maduro is already outlining his own police state model, and his first objective is to criminalize Machado and González, to dismantle the leadership and to put them in jail or under house arrest, to impose silence, solitary confinement or banishment.
Uncertain days ahead
Therefore, days of maximum tension are looming in Venezuela, which will test the cohesion of the opposition and the true democratic commitment of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico to facilitate a negotiation leading to a democratic transition.
Amid uncertainty and threats of repression, Venezuela is already initiating a process of change. A point of maximum political, national and international pressure needs to be reached to weaken the regime and open the way to a negotiated democratic exit.
An eventual democratic transition in Venezuela will have a definite effect on the dictatorships in Cuba and Nicaragua, by exposing their political leaderships to further international isolation.
But, ultimately, it is the actors of change — the people of Cuba and Nicaragua and their democratic leaderships — who must learn from Venezuela’s political lessons on how to win elections under authoritarianism: with civic resistance and electoral strategy, in a simultaneous process; and in a great national alliance, which vindicates the supreme value of democratic change, to end the dictatorship.
