The Venezuelan opposition has relied on spontaneous and diverse citizen organization to navigate the steep road to the presidential elections on July 28. The party of María Corina Machado, the leader who promotes the vote for Edmundo González Urrutia – the candidate that Chavismo has allowed to register – has deployed commandos throughout the country to activate their voters for the contest and the defense of the vote. In this way, it seeks to face one of the most complex scenarios in these elections, which have become a constant obstacle course for the opposition, which has the majority of voting intentions, but must ensure it at each voting booth.
The commanders have managed to encourage participation in voting, which most polls take for granted with a desire for political change reaching 80%. To establish them, it is enough for it to be a particular, partisan or sectoral initiative. A name is given, between 5 and 20 members are registered and they register on a Google form of the opposition campaign command. With the names, its organizers express their electoral mood, hopeful or revanchist, and their greatest wishes after the election. Commando Collect the Glass, Commando I Have Faith, Commando Lawyer, Commando for Health, Commando Our Children Back. There are even family ones. These names have appeared on handmade banners at Machado and González’s events around the country.
This is the way in which Vente – a young party, with little machinery and with a large part of its coordinating members imprisoned or persecuted – faces the 1×10 of the deflated United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), which in each election imposes as an obligation to its base structures that distribute food from the Local Supply and Production Committees (CLAP) and control the delivery of cooking gas in a large part of the country’s communities. In doing so, it coerces voters under the threat of suppressing them, as has been repeatedly denounced in recent elections.
In January, Machado spoke of the 600k, referring to the 600,000 people that would ideally be needed to defend the vote, particularly as witnesses and center coordinators. Magalli Meda, head of the Con Vzla national campaign command, sheltered in the Argentine Embassy, reported at the beginning of May through her X account that, to date, 15,000 commanders had registered to work for the candidacy of González Urrutia , formally established a month ago. They are still far from the goal, but “the commandos are the center of this campaign,” says Imeru Alfonzo, who articulates in Caracas these structures that have additional functions to the classic structure of counting, voter mobilization and defense of the vote used by the matches.
Alfonzo explains: “They are necessary to know the approximate number of people who are going to vote, to have contact and to direct the vote that day. But also to communicate word of mouth, neighbor to neighbor, because the information is kidnapped and people must be taught to vote.” This has been a complex election and it will also be the day when each voter is in front of the machine with the image on the card. “Almost all the classic cards of the long-standing opposition parties have been kidnapped, they are supporting the scorpions,” he adds.
The maneuver conceived with the judicial intervention of these organizations – and those that could come – is aimed at confusing the electorate at that crucial moment. “We are preparing for all scenarios, because the regime is risking everything for everything.” Alfonzo recognizes the fear that exists in some communities of appearing on the digital platform of the commanders in support of the opposition candidacy. The ghost of the call has not yet been buried Tascón List, a database with personal information of the signatories of the call for a recall referendum against Hugo Chávez that was leaked and began to be used as a mechanism of political discrimination. Given this, the activist explains, there are those who have chosen to keep manual records.

Do homework
Norlymar Miranda, a 22-year-old university student, talks about the way they have to stand up against the communication monster of Chavismo, which still fails to overcome in the polls: “It is us with our phones against the world.” Then he adds: “They have all the resources, toys, media, podcasts, social media ads and they are in all formats. But their narrative is making them look bad. These days he saw a mural that said ‘For peace I vote for Maduro’. And then you go on social media and see that a woman’s empanada stand was closed for selling breakfasts to María Corina Machado. “People are not stupid or as disconnected as we think.”
The young woman is studying Social Communication at a public university and in recent months she has dedicated herself to electoral pedagogy in this particular race in which the main opposition leader travels intensively throughout the country. It is a necessary educational work in a country fragmented by the crisis, with few independent media available, because most are self-censored and are closed after opponents are interviewed. The campaign runs with large information gaps.
For this reason, videos have spread on social networks of activists teaching people how to vote for the Democratic Unity Table (MUD) card by counting the boxes on the card that the voting machine will show, as if it were a diagram of some steps. dance or a kind of chess. “Counts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 in the first one, stop and go,” a young woman explained to a driver in one of the recordings released a few weeks ago. The formula, of course, has already become a slogan and a song.
Miranda made a narrative and turned it into a hashtag: #HagamosLaTarea. This is how it has developed a campaign on the street and like TikTok with videos that have gone viral, a social network in which, contrary to what one might think, it not only attracts young people in Venezuela, but also those over 50 years of age and connects the lowest social strata. Thus she managed, according to her numbers, to mobilize more than 9,000 new voters to register to vote. She will also vote for the first time this July 28. “In our adolescence we saw how they repressed young people and people our age and then the opposition called for abstention. We are a generation without references to vote, with zero democratic culture,” she says. “My mother tells me that before she went out to vote as a family, they made a sancocho that day. That has been lost and cannot be claimed from the people either. But everyone has something to contribute. What is brewing between now and the 28th will only happen if we all work together to make this change.”
The young woman began politics at the age of 15 in Trujillo, a city in the Venezuelan Andes, although she is now disconnected from parties. She now believes the opposition must go into overdrive. “It is time for electoral pedagogy. We must have a thousand different ways to explain how to vote for Edmundo, because we don’t know what can happen with the MUD card between now and the 28th. Once the crusade for the registration of new voters is finished, also hindered by the National Electoral Council (CNE) itself, Miranda is building a volunteer service that serves as support and links all citizens who want to do something more than vote and do not know How to do it without being in a game. In a short time she has formed a network of more than 400 people who are being trained in the defense of the vote, the reporting of electoral crimes and in the citizen verification processes that will be crucial next year. day D that comes in Venezuela.
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