The Venezuelan crisis is entering an unknown alley, even for the Caribbean country. The absence of verifiable official results a week after the highly attended presidential elections of July 28 has opened the floodgates for Chavismo to show its most repressive side amid suspicions of fraud. The opposition is defending itself as best it can, with its organizational strength diminished by the persecution it is suffering. By publishing on the Internet the minutes that its witnesses managed to gather, a key element in this story, the entire world, from journalists, data experts, international observers such as the Carter Center, have made their own analyses that cast doubt on the verdict of the National Electoral Council (CNE) that declared Nicolás Maduro the winner.
The international community, with the United States on one side and Brazil, Mexico and Colombia on the other, is trying to mediate without knowing how. Even traditional allies of Chavismo, such as Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, have asked for the publication of the minutes “for the sake of Chávez’s legacy.” At the same time, a wave of dissident Chavistas, close to the deceased Bolivarian leader, is growing and is confronting Maduro. If a week ago the bets were on the presidential elections as a way out of the already prolonged Venezuelan conflict, now it is difficult to see where the path that the crisis has taken will lead.
The government has unleashed an open, televised and unprecedentedly violent persecution against protesters, political leaders, activists and, of course, against the heads of the opposition leadership, María Corina Machado, the candidate Edmundo González and the leaders of the Unitary Platform. The police and intelligence services are on the streets hunting with the so-called “Operation Tun Tun”, with which the state has deployed intense propaganda warning how the security forces will knock on the doors of Venezuelans’ homes to arrest them. Terror is part of the programming imposed on social networks, where people have changed their profile photos and their contact details and deleted past messages that may seem critical. People have stopped talking.
The Attorney General’s Office says it has arrested more than 1,200 people in just one week. Other sources put the figure at 2,000. These numbers are far higher than those of 2017, when there were four months of protests. The NGO Foro Penal has confirmed that there are at least 80 teenagers among those arrested. On television, Maduro, the prosecutor Tarek William Saab and the number two of Chavismo, Diosdado Cabello, have exposed them as criminals. The recurring thesis of Chavismo is that they are young migrants who were recruited and trained in the United States, Colombia, Chile and Peru to generate violence during the protests.
The opposition seems to have no other option than to defend itself, limiting its exposure and public appearances – as has already been done by the candidate Edmundo González, 74, who did not attend the march on Saturday – while it deals with hundreds of arrests of its collaborators and raids on their homes. The strategy, according to various sources, is now to insist on the publication of the minutes and to denounce the violation of human rights.
The levers to move the Venezuelan crisis seem to be solely on the side of the international community, which is seeking a solution to the new conflict. After a long history of negotiations that have been left adrift, from Doha to Barbados and passing through Mexico, it is not clear whether it is possible to negotiate with Maduro and his leadership. This week, Colombia, Brazil and Mexico are expected to advance their plan to find a solution. A meeting of foreign ministers in Venezuela is not ruled out, which would only take place if there are guarantees of progress. The plan of the three leftist powers in Latin America involves an “impartial” verification of the minutes and a dialogue between Maduro and Edmundo González without the involvement of María Corina Machado, something that is rejected by a large part of the opposition.
Maduro has taken the conflict over the results to a safe ground, the Supreme Court of Justice, controlled by the ruling party. This seemed to be brewing since the beginning of the year, when changes were made to the composition of the magistrates that make up the court. The president of the Electoral Chamber, Caryslia Rodríguez, became president of the highest court despite not having a judicial career. Rodríguez was an active member of the PSUV until 2021, when she encouraged people to participate in the party’s primaries to choose regional candidates. Judge Edgar Gavidia, brother of the ex-husband of the first lady Cilia Flores, was appointed as vice president. Tania D’Amelio, who was a deputy for Chavismo and then director of the CNE for 15 years, was also incorporated into these ranks, according to investigations by the NGO Acceso a la Justicia.
In order for the problem with the results to reach the Supreme Court, the main electoral authority, Elvis Amoroso, a close friend of the presidential couple, remained silent for almost five days. On Friday he gave new figures that still do not clarify what happened. The National Electoral Council has remained closed in the week after the elections. An alleged conspiracy, orchestrated by opponents in exile from North Macedonia, to attack the CNE’s automated system during the transmission of votes is the argument on which they rely to not show the results. For this reason, they also did not hold the post-election audits established by law, including the telecommunications audit, which would allow them to unravel what happened during the alleged interruption in the transmission of votes that was made through an encrypted communication by the state operator Cantv.
After calling on the presidential candidates to request the collected minutes, the Supreme Court finally gave the CNE a deadline of 72 hours. The opposition published some 25,000 minutes of the 30,000 from the night of July 28. The machines print copies for each witness and also for each box that holds the ballots and which are kept safe by the electoral authority. The delivery of the data held by the CNE should take place this Monday.
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