Venezuela is the only country in Latin America where two fundamental resources are not controlled by the US.
by Boaventura de Sousa Santos – Diario16+*
I am not, nor have I ever been, a staunch Chavista. Hugo Chávez was a benevolent political meteorite that shook the Latin American subcontinent and the world in the first decade of the 21st century.
In 2013, shortly after Hugo Chávez’s death, I wrote an article entitled “Hugo Chávez: the legacy and the challenges”. In it I identified some signs of authoritarianism and bureaucratisation and ended the article with the following: ‘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 the consequent military coup to overthrow Maduro. European foreign policy (if it can be called that) could be a moderating force if it had not lost its soul in the meantime.”[1] I must admit that my fear has not been realised to date, although there has been no shortage of attempts to make it happen. I believe that the present moment is another such attempt. Hence the importance of reflecting on the clamour 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 leaves me very perplexed and compels me to reflect.
1. The Venezuelan electoral system has been unanimously considered one of the safest and most fraud-proof. It requires four stages of identification: registration in the electoral roll, electronic voting, removal of the ballot paper and the voter’s fingerprint. The numbers must match. Of course, no electoral system is completely immune to fraud, but compared to electoral systems in other countries (such as the United States or Portugal), the Venezuelan system is more secure. Why is it so obvious to so many people that fraud may have occurred?
2. The opposition had been announcing that it would only recognise the results if it won the elections. In this sense, 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 Venezuela, the most vociferous forces in defence of Venezuelan democracy are extreme right-wing political forces that in their own countries have advocated or practised 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 staged the most blatant electoral fraud of the last decade. They managed to disqualify and imprison 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 elections were declared valid internationally without any reservations. This shows that the media-political clamour about the possibility of fraud and the need to verify the results is not, contrary to what it seems, based on a deep-rooted love of democracy, but on other reasons, which I will explain below.
4. The double standards go far beyond the extreme right-wing forces and the primitivism of their considerations. European countries, which claim to be impeccable democracies, were almost unanimous in recognising as the legitimate president of Venezuela a man who had proclaimed himself president in a square in Caracas. I am referring to Juan Guaidó, on 23 January 2019. How can it be explained that, in this case, no care was taken to verify democratic processes? It is even more shocking if we compare this apparent negligence with the zeal of now, with respect to an election that had more than 900 observers from almost 100 countries. Incidentally, in a further perplexing aside, one wonders why it is only in a few countries that the use of external observers is so crucial to the credibility of electoral processes. If there is always the possibility of fraud, the need for observers should be universal and supervised by the UN.
5. I do not dispute the reasons for María Corina Machado’s disqualification (it is well known that she participated in several coup attempts against the Bolivarian government and even called for foreign military intervention), but the way in which her replacement, former diplomat Edmundo González Urrutia, was chosen is puzzling. There is something disturbingly cartoonish about the Venezuelan opposition. First it was Juan Guaidó; now it is a gentleman who looked like he had just stepped out of a nursing home for a leisure activity that turned out to be a presidential candidacy. If I mention this, it is only because Edmundo González’s hands may end up stained with blood. Between 1981 and 1983 Edmundo González was the first secretary of the Venezuelan Embassy in El Salvador, whose ambassador was Leopoldo Castillo, known as Matacuras. At the time, Ronald Reagan’s counter-insurgency Plan Condor 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 Centauro, which involved the army and death squads and was aimed at assassinating revolutionaries and, in particular, members of religious communities based on liberation theology. A total of 13,194 people were killed, including Don Oscar Romero, now a saint of the Catholic Church, four Maryknoll nuns and five priests. According to CIA data declassified in 2009, Leopoldo Castillo appears as co-responsible for the coordination and execution of Operation Centauro. Edmundo González was the first secretary of the Venezuelan Embassy. The crimes committed are crimes against humanity and as such are imprescriptible[2].
Why so much clamour about possible electoral fraud?
The short answer to this question is the following: 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 era of the encomiendas. María Corina Machado belongs to one of these families. Her electoral programme is very similar to that of Javier Milei and she has already promised in an interview that, if she were president, she would move the Venezuelan embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. It is an extreme right-wing programme that has been supported by the US and, lately, by the oligarch of oligarchs, Elon Musk.
Since it does not control the two resources I have mentioned, the US has used the two strategies at its disposal (in addition to electoral interference and support for the opposition): participation in coups, which may or may not include assassination attempts on the leaders to be toppled; and economic sanctions. Venezuela is currently being punished with 930 sanctions imposed over almost two decades. Sanctions have caused Venezuela’s abrupt impoverishment and have been responsible for thousands of deaths due to a lack of life-sustaining medicines (e.g., 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 is no doubt that a country with so many millions of citizens forced to emigrate cannot be doing well. And it is understandable that many of these emigrants see the defeat of Nicolás Maduro as the end of sanctions and the hope of returning. In this context, two reflections are in order. The first is that Maduro has liberalised the economy in recent years, adopting some measures that can hardly be considered socialist or even left-wing. Many agreements are being signed with large US and European companies, both in the oil sector and elsewhere. Today, the Venezuelan economy is one of the fastest growing in Latin America, but obviously this comes after a brutal impoverishment. To what extent this new economic model (inspired by China?) can succeed is an open question.
The second reflection is that, if we look at the international migration and refugee landscape, Venezuela is the only case where media attention focuses on the country from which the displaced leave. In all other cases, the focus is on the ‘receiving’ countries (which often includes deportation). Again, the reason seems to be this: the policy of destabilisation and demonisation of the Bolivarian government and the creation of a consensus to activate the third US weapon: the infamous regime change. In fact, I believe that the social unrest currently taking place is aimed at creating a Maidan Revolution ten years later. I refer to the social unrest in Ukraine in 2014 that led to the flight of the democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, and, soon after, the election of Volodymyr Zelensky. The reason why a ‘colour revolution’ in Venezuela is unlikely is that the US has no Venezuelan military trained at the School of the Americas, where so many coups have been staged. The Venezuelan armed forces have already recognised the election results.
But there are bound to be more attempts in the future, especially as 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, even if the discursive façade is about electoral fraud and democracy, what is at stake is the geopolitical turmoil that Maduro’s victory is provoking. This should give Latin American countries’ leaders, especially Brazil, pause for thought. 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 has recently interfered brutally in Brazil’s domestic politics. But, on the other hand, only by defending the sovereignty of other countries can Brazil, or any other country, effectively defend its own sovereignty when the imperial storm hits. In any case, it is better to act collectively than individually. The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) must be more active now that the Union of Latin American Nations (UNASUR) has disappeared.
[1]Pneumatóforo. Political writings, 1981-2018. Coimbra: Almedina, 2018, p. 165-175.
[2] Information available at: 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/
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* Automatically translated from Spanish
