-Analysis-
For the past 25 years, since the rise to power of Venezuela’s late, socialist strongman Hugo Chávez and under his successor as president, Nicolás Maduro, the country has suffered an acute process of socio-political and economic decline. The clearest sign of this descent is in the emigration of millions of Venezuelans who effectively voted with their feet. Mostly since 2015, more than seven million or about a quarter of the entire population, has migrated or left in desperation.
In 2006, the Bertelsmann Transformation Index (BTI), which measures the quality of democracy and economic performance in 137 developing countries, gave Venezuela a score of 5.06, placing it in 73rd position on a list of best-to-worst performers. By 2024, Venezuela’s BTI score had dropped to 2.74 and its position was 123, beneath communist-run Cuba, which. At this point, the NGO classified the country as an “autocracy.”
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Already in 2013, Maduro managed, with the full backing of the state and its resources, to narrowly defeat the opposition candidate Henrique Capriles and become president, though no international body or regional leader demanded a recount of votes in what had been a dubious electoral process.
Before the election held on Sunday — which Maduro has again claimed to have won — the self-styled Bolivarian movement or Chavismo was facing enormous public discontent and even a loss of some of its own supporters to the opposition.
How democracies die
Surprisingly, even the president’s regional allies were urging him to respect the vote and avoid shenanigans. He wasn’t pleased: telling Brazil’s Lula da Silva to “sip some tea” and calm down if he feared a “bloodbath” in Venezuela with an opposition victory, and barred Argentina’s former leftist president Alberto Fernández from entering the country as an observer, effectively calling him a “loser ex-president.”
We need active diplomatic pressures when a country begins to restrict freedoms
Polls giving the opposition a massive lead had created hopes and even expectations of an incipient transition back to democracy in Venezuela. People were envisioning a negotiated transition, giving Maduro and his chums impunity before possible lawsuits on rights violations, among other crimes, as the price to pay for recovering freedom, and “normality.”
Venezuela is an excellent illustration of cases cited in the book “How Democracies Die” by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (2018) and a textbook example of the four signs of authoritarian governance. Curiously, as Venezuelan democracy was being killed off by degrees over the pat two decades, leftist regional associations of states like UNASUR or CELAC and or the Organization of Ibero-American States, were busy adopting resolutions to defend democracy.
That experience may be a good reason for thinking up more effective international or multilateral initiatives to alert the world, and enact preventive measures, in cases of democratic degradation. That would mean active diplomatic pressures when a country begins to restrict freedoms — and that could begin right now, in response to the “autocrat’s” preposterous claim that Venezuelans have just voted him back into power in an election in which international observers once again had no say.
