Chavismo has undertaken an internal remodeling with important changes in its structure. In the Miraflores Palace, the headquarters of the Government, there is a feeling that the presidential elections of July 28 have been a failure, according to several commanders and analysts close to the ruling party. Mainly, for two things: neither did they win – an affront due to the hatred they profess for María Corina Machado – nor did they know how to hide the defeat, after the CNE, the electoral authority, and the high command had not devised a plan b that masked the true results. Nicolás Maduro, the president, adjusts to this new reality, in which his legitimacy is highly questioned, surrounding himself with unconditional supporters, both in the ministries and in the police forces and the armed forces. This restructuring not only affects the leadership, but movements are taking place in the middle and lower echelons.
This week it has become clear that, far from paralysis, in Miraflores there is more work than ever. On Friday, without going any further, Maduro appointed Alex Saab as Minister of Industry and National Production, a Colombian businessman who has amassed a considerable fortune from the public contracts awarded to him by Chavismo. But above all, Saab became an achiever: he was able to do business and bring and carry goods while evading US sanctions. Saab, however, became a character from a Greek tragedy when he was arrested in 2020 by order of the United States, which still suspects he is Maduro’s front man. The businessman was faithful to the president by not reaching an agreement with the Miami court that was trying him to avoid a greater sentence and waited, patiently, for him to be released in a prisoner exchange with Washington. That loyalty has now been reciprocated.
“Not being a madurista is nothing anymore. There are no longer factions within the Government, if they existed before. Either with Maduro or against Maduro. Anyone who says otherwise is an opponent,” explains a middle manager in the government structure.
After the public disorders that swept through Venezuela due to the discontent caused by the electoral fraud, the State unleashed a repression that has led thousands of people to prison accused of terrorism, without indictments or access to private lawyers to guarantee due process. Among them, 160 minors. This authoritarian offensive rested on three public institutions: the civil secret service (Sebin), the military secret service (DGCIM) and the Attorney General’s Office of the Republic. The directors of the first two bodies have been dismissed and the third, whose head is called Tarek William Saab, is questioned and there are doubts about whether his mandate will be renewed. In recent days the Government publicly corrected him for having assured in a television program that the president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was a CIA agent. The fact may seem minor, but not in Chavismo, where a correction of this type is highly unusual.
These movements within the leadership do not surprise Juan Barreto, former metropolitan mayor of Caracas and a staunch defender of Hugo Chávez, the creator of the movement that handed over control of the country to Maduro when he was about to die of cancer. Madurismo, however, has disenchanted him and, although he remains ideologically on the left, he does not support what the Bolivarian revolution has become. “The Government has not resolved the problem of July 28: the legitimacy of origin and that problem is not minor. That makes it go from an authoritarian government to a despotic, absolutist one. And that is the stretch that they are covering and that they are making progress in settling. They try to adjust the State, the party and the Government to a political situation,” explains Barrero. “That Government has no legitimacy. There are surveys that say that 93% of Venezuelans believe that Maduro did not win. A four says he doesn’t know who won. The number of people who do consider that Maduro won does not reach five. Getting to a new government like this is uphill. And that makes them close ranks and swear in the unconditional ones.” It is certain that Maduro is not considering, right now, a dialogue, either national or international.
Maduro also included Diosdado de Cabello in his Government, as Minister of the Interior, the other option that Chávez had other than Maduro. He elected the now president, but Cabello has had immense power in these 11 years without the commander, to the point that he is considered de factothe second in command of the entire structure. Now, it literally belongs to her. Cabello is a tough politician, intransigent with any dissidence. He even publicly admonished Nicolás Maduro Guerra—the president’s son—when he said, in an interview with Morning Express, that they were willing to abandon power if Edmundo González, the candidate presented by a disqualified Machado, won. To do something like that you have to have a lot of power.
“The situation has overwhelmed everyone. And the Government is in the midst of an adjustment plan, of entrenchment. Now they place the most unconditional men, taking over positions of power and strategic places,” adds Barrero who, however, considers that to think that Maduro did not have an alternative plan is not to underestimate him. And he concludes: “Chavismo seeks normalization, turning the page, as they themselves say. It obeys a consolidation strategy where they combine selective repression, mass repression, judicial control, management of the media, handouts, perks, prior punishment and are in a phase of purification and adjustment. A much tougher phase is coming.”
The departure of Gustavo González
Gustavo González, one of the most feared men in Venezuela after a decade at the helm of Sebin, condescended to Maduro the day his dismissal was announced, on Tuesday: “The errors and mistakes are entirely my responsibility; success and triumphs are yours.” “Coming from the military ranks, I find in you [Maduro] to a leader,” he said with long circles under his eyes, looking up to reach the face of the president, who is almost two meters tall and that day he was dressed as a military man without being one. The president thanked him, in return, for “his courage and strength, mental, human, psychological and political, because there is peace in this country.” When he finished, he promised him “new missions.”
After almost a decade at the head of the Bolivarian Intelligence Service, dozens of mentions in reports about the serious human rights violations committed in Venezuela, always sanctioned by the United States and the European Union, González has been part of Cabello’s circle of trust. González’s mistakes had been forgiven before. He assumed the feared intelligence body in 2014, during the first year of Maduro’s government, when the protests were already beginning to shake its stability and the first repressive milestone of Chavismo without Chávez was marked. But on October 8, 2018, he had to disappear, when councilor Fernando Albán died in Sebin custody. The leader of Primero Justicia fell from the tenth floor of the building where the intelligence agency’s headquarters is located. The official version is that the man committed suicide. This is how prosecutor Saab sentenced him. His family, however, has reported murder. and he Alban case It is one of the thickest files on repression in Venezuela. Other incidents weighed heavily. Just two months earlier, Maduro had emerged unscathed from a drone attack during a military parade. However, he has been dismissed almost three months after the elections.
A striking fact, also, has been the disappearance of Elvis Amoroso, the president of the CNE, who did not appear in public for two months, after spending a full month making statements in defense of Maduro. This week, however, he was seen again, along with the leader, who did not give any explanation for his absence. Amoroso is, or was, a personal friend of his and the first lady, Cilia Flores. Added to this change by González is the strong hand of the General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence, Iván Hernández Dala, with a sheet of accusations similar to González’s. During his period, hundreds of military imprisonments have been recorded. The replacements of the hard men of Madurismo have highlighted the rearrangement of forces that has occurred within the Government in the midst of the post-election crisis, which has led to the incorporation of Diosdado Cabello into the Executive and, with him, people of his absolute trust. The new tokens come from environments that Cabello controls. Alexis Rodríguez Cabello, the new director of Sebin, is his cousin and last year he was appointed sole authority of Essequibo, after Guyana’s dispute over that territory. Rodríguez Cabello had to deal with a possible armed conflict with Guyana, something that never happened.
Someone who claims to know Chavismo from the inside, emphasizes, however, that this has to do with the fact that as of July 28, another Government has begun. “Given the new nature of the Government—illegitimate, dictatorial—the one who can best guarantee its survival and permanence is the one who has the most to lose if it leaves power,” says Andrés Izarra, former minister of Chávez and who accompanied Maduro by phone from Spain. in the cabinet for two years before becoming its critic. “The arrival of Cabello has to do with the nature of the Government. This is another type of Government. It is based on force, not on the construction of social hegemony. There is no social contract other than repression. There are no institutions other than those given by the power of force. There is no rule of law other than the legality that weapons allow. The Government changed,” he adds.
Izarra also highlights that “Maduro usually gives a lot of power to those he wants to eliminate.” He brings the example of Miguel Rodríguez Torres, another military former intelligence chief who was beheaded years ago, arrested when he expressed his intentions to be a presidential candidate and then exiled to Spain through José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. There is also Tareck El Aissami, who was one of the most powerful men of the revolution until last year, today imprisoned and accused of embezzling PDVSA, the national oil company.
With an origin failure in legitimacy, due to the impossibility of showing that he has won with the voting records, as the opposition has done, Maduro’s stability remains compromised, Izarra warns. “I don’t know what the outcome of this may be, but a Government like this is not sustainable. The people are now retreating from state terrorism, but I don’t think people are going to turn the page.” For that to happen, Maduro has undertaken a remodeling of his cabinet that, according to Chavista sources, is not going to stop for now. More changes are coming to adapt it to the new situation.