With the presidential elections in Venezuela about to end a month ago, the Caribbean country is stuck in a dead end of unknown dimensions after dozens of crises. The opposition and part of the international community denounce a lack of transparency and irregularities in the controversial victory that the ruling party gave to Nicolás Maduro. The opposition’s initiative to publish the minutes to declare Edmundo González the winner is beginning to fade in the face of the regime’s onslaught under the slogan of “Bolivarian fury.” The legal, political and repressive onslaught in the streets and in the communications sector has succeeded in inhibiting the opposition.
The latest chapter of this massive response of force remains active. This Monday, the opposition candidate did not appear before the Prosecutor’s Office and received a new summons for Tuesday. González faces an investigation for the publication on the web of copies of the electoral records that prove his victory in the presidential elections of July 28. The diplomat who replaced María Corina Machado on the ballots had already criticized the Prosecutor’s Office on Sunday in a video published on his social networks after the summons. “The public ministry intends to subject me to an interview without specifying in what condition I am expected to appear and prequalifying crimes not committed,” he said in the recording in which he attacked prosecutor Tarek William Saab, who had announced this summons on Friday. “He has repeatedly behaved like a political accuser,” he said. “He condemns in advance and now promotes a situation without guarantees of independence and due process.”
Both Edmundo González and María Corina Machado, the opposition leader who was disqualified from running, are cornered by a repressive onslaught that has stupefied the population. For days, they have maintained a repeated strategy behind closed doors: they have claimed their electoral victory again, they have thanked the expressions of support and solidarity from the international community and they have called for a new demonstration in the streets, this Wednesday, August 28, one month before the elections. In the current context, it has only been made public until the last moment where the rally will take place, in the place of the last one, in the anteroom of the Petare neighborhood. The leaders are sheltered, people do not want to meet, no one wants to make statements, many prefer not to go out to demonstrate. Anxiety and speculation are increasing. But the call has been made.
The “Bolivarian fury”
The so-called “Bolivarian fury” is a social alert device activated by revolutionary leaders when they notice a threat that could remove them from power. Decreed as a slogan by Maduro, it emerged as a response by Chavismo especially to the sanctions of the United States Government in 2019, after the proclamation of Juan Guaidó as interim president and in the context of the country’s economic collapse and the worsening of its political crisis.
Comfortably embedded in every crevice of the Venezuelan state, Chavismo manages its warnings effectively: it increases repression in the streets, general suspicion is activated, police and judicial procedures are refined and citizens are monitored more rigorously. The armed groups, the shock groups of Chavismo, remain on guard; the National Guard stands before the people with much less patience.
This display of “fury”, however, is the most extensive of all due to its intensity. The election results are water under the bridge for the ruling party. On Sunday, the State security forces arrested the journalist Carmela Longo, who was linked to reporting on entertainment in the official newspaper Latest News. The reasons for their arrest are not clear. Twelve journalists have been imprisoned in just over a month in Venezuela.
The Venezuelan Penal Forum documents the existence of 1,674 political prisoners, “the highest number in the entire 21st century in the country,” four times greater than the number that existed just a few months ago.
The human rights NGO Provea has issued a harsh statement on its social media, in which it denounces that, since the announcement of the election results, “2,400 people have been arbitrarily detained in 16 days, with an average of 150 arrests per day, far exceeding records of previous political crises in this time, such as those of 2014, 2017 and 2018; double the number of detainees and disappearances per day that there were in Chile after Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’état, and with a total of 24 people dead.”
Meanwhile, Maduro and the Chavista leadership are orchestrating an aggressive communication strategy to implicitly justify their actions and assert their truth in this difficult situation. The so-called “civil-military-police union” appears galvanized. The president addresses the audience several times a week, in rallies with his supporters, on his televised programs, in special speeches, on his own podcast.
Maduro and the PSUV’s tolerance for opposition demands has disappeared. “Hopefully this process will help organize a new opposition in the country,” Diosdado Cabello, one of the regime’s strongmen, declared in a speech before the National Assembly. “We cannot continue like this: here, every pardon is followed by a new conspiracy, and every conspiracy, a new pardon.”
Maduro is constantly talking, but not so much to celebrate his victory, but to denounce the plot of a coup in development. Until now, he has shown a very clear control of the levers of power in the country. This time, he says, “there will be no forgiveness.” There is much talk of issues such as fascist cyberbullying and a National Cybersecurity Council has been created that can penalize content in WhatsApp groups. The Chavista government is working to create a conceptual framework: the country is fighting fascism. It is necessary to protect Venezuela from the extreme right. The PSUV identifies it as a violent current, internationally trained, chronically dissatisfied with the election results, a friend of US imperialism, a promoter of discredit to the country’s institutions, of anarchy and misgovernment.
Attorney General Tarek William Saab acknowledges the existence of the deaths reported in recent days, but attributes them to the “sacrific” unrest in the streets, adding: “To this point, no one has presented this office with any substantiated accusation of human rights violations.”
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