Tamara Almeida is surprised that there are only three posters of Nicolás Maduro in her neighborhood in Petare. Recently, she put them up and there were many. That’s how she measures what the polls say. For the opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia to have 59% of voting intention, a good portion of Chavistas have had to change sides. Tamara, 54, controlled several communal councils in the enormous neighborhood located east of Petare (metropolitan area of Caracas), was a spokesperson for a communal council, had a government food house, was part of the Chavista machinery that moved votes, coordinated voting centers on the long Venezuelan election nights. These days, she has neighbors who don’t even want to look at her when they cross paths with her, who will not be able to count on her in the crusade to once again seek votes for Maduro.
Until 2018, Tamara Almeida voted for Maduro. The controlled life with which Chavismo manages the collapse that its economic model generated pushed her to disillusionment. “We do not deserve a bag of money [del programa de reparto de alimentos básicos CLAP]“We want to buy whatever food we want. They trample and humiliate and make people fight over little things; there is division even over the use of a field in the neighborhood that should be for everyone and not for one or another communal council,” says the community leader, who defends the idea of socialism, but not the one that the Bolivarian revolution tried to implement. “Socialism is for those of us who are interested in the well-being of others and Maduroism is not. Now the poor are poorer.”
Since Maduro took power in 2013 with a 1% difference over his opposition rival, the base of Chavismo has been fraying until it is no longer a majority. Polls now place Maduro’s solid vote at 15%, which could reach 25% if moderate Chavismo is included. However, a survey published this week shows that even in these groups there is a desire for a change of government. Although the economy has stopped sinking in recent years, Venezuela has lost two thirds of its GDP along the way, as if it were a country at war. More than seven million Venezuelans have left, which is the largest exodus in the history of Latin America. Maduro’s government has barely left room for the opposition, which it has persecuted and imprisoned. The country has been breathing poisoned air for years.
Even so, Maduro’s campaign team claims that he can win, clinging to the so-called 1x10x7 strategy (which consists of each voter managing to convince 10 people, and these, in turn, convince another seven). “The 1×10 is not realistic,” says Tamara, who convinced many in the past. “Of those 10, two or three will actually vote for Chavez.” Even today, some of her relatives who work in the public administration demand that she vote for Chavez. She will vote for Edmundo González Urrutia and says that she does not identify herself as an opponent, but as a “generator of change”: “In 1998 I voted for Chavez for a change, now I will vote for a change for the better.”
Douglas Hernández, 54, and Cleimer Márquez, 49, were comrades in Chavismo. They were active in Hugo Chávez’s initial party, the Fifth Republic Movement, and rose through the ranks of the community in Antímano, considered a red zone in Caracas and a bastion of the government for years. In his political work, Douglas coincided with high-ranking members of the current Chavista movement, such as Cilia Flores (Maduro’s wife) and Freddy Bernal, as he became president of the parish council of his sector, one of the instances of decentralization of local power that the government eliminated. Before Maduro came to power, Hernández began his separation from the movement. He considers that period to be lost years for his life and for the country: “When I left Chavismo, I asked God for forgiveness for having supported them because the revolution was wasted time, years of misery.”

Hernández’s detachment aroused the concern of Márquez, who accused him of betraying the revolutionary process. He voted for Maduro, whom Chávez, who died in 2013, designated as his political heir. Márquez was spokesman for the Commune of Fighters of the Supreme Commander and today says that the only legacy left by Chavismo is that an elite has become millionaires. He lived through the years of scarcity and shortages, in which some leaders of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV, the official party), with whom he walked the streets to do social work, began to fill their pockets and drive luxury trucks. “The PSUV is a party of smart people and that made me realize it.” Like many Venezuelans, Márquez had to emigrate during the worst years of the supply crisis, when there was a lack of food and medicine. He was in Peru and returned two years ago. “I was one of those who believed in Chavez’s project, I supported him for many years, I campaigned… I realized that it was a failure, that I was wrong, that we have to get out of this quagmire.”
Both men are seeking votes for Edmundo Gonzalez. They are doing so even in the ranks of Chavismo, where they know that discontent is bubbling. Hernandez says that if Chavismo is declared the winner, it will be his turn to leave the country. On July 28, election day, Marquez will be transporting voters in his car. He works as a taxi driver, a job that is a survival job, like almost everyone else in Venezuela. Regarding the elections, he hopes that people will have money to pay for a ride and be able to stop on any corner. “I am also fighting for this for my three children: one who is 27, one who is 18, and another who just graduated from 12-year-old elementary school. So that they don’t have to leave and that the Venezuela that is coming soon will give them opportunities,” he says, unable to stop his voice from breaking.

Without family inclinations to the left, in 1998, Hernández and Márquez followed the political phenomenon embodied by Hugo Chávez, who aroused a euphoria for change similar to that inspired today by the leader María Corina Machado, who moves votes for the opposition candidate after being excluded from the elections by Chavismo. A quarter of a century ago, when they supported the commander, then a military man, outsider, Both men were in their twenties. Pedro Macho, a public transport driver in a neighbourhood in western Caracas, voted for Chavez to come to power and win re-election the first time. For the third time, in 2012, corruption, which was already making people’s lives worse, forced him to change sides. His bus was also stolen and he was never able to buy one again.
There is a sector of Chavismo, the most faithful, that was frozen on the day of the death of its leader, in March 2013. They separate Chavez’s ideology from what has ended up being Maduro’s command. In that group there are some former ministers of Chavez, who have formed a dissidence that torpedoes Chavismo in power. Also, political parties of leftist affiliation, such as Tupamaro or the Communist Party of Venezuela, which were previously grouped around the government; in addition to the opposition organizations, which have been persecuted, judicially intervened and stripped of their symbols and electoral cards for criticizing the future of the Bolivarian revolution. Neither Hernandez nor Marquez are of those. “You listened to Chavez for 10 minutes and applauded him, but I recognize that the person primarily responsible for everything we have experienced is him.”
Among those disenchanted with Chavismo, there is a conviction that there will be change on July 28. Having been part of the movement gives them another dimension of how diminished Maduro’s support bases are. Faced with the power of intimidation that the government has deployed in recent months — and which is gaining momentum as the date of the elections approaches — they respond that they are not afraid. “They are going to put us all in jail,” says Tamara Almeida.
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