Chavismo Must Be Defeated in Venezuela Tomorrow to Pull the Country Out of Oppression and Poverty

The anti-socialist opposition is strong but President Maduro might try to steal the election by fraud and violence

Venezuela opposition leader María Corina Machado at Puerto Ordaz, Ciudad Guayana, Venezuela, in early June (Machado’s Facebook).

Venezuela, the socialist petrostate and fifth most populous country in South America, will head to the polls this Sunday to vote in an election that the ruling regime has done its best to rig in favor of current leader Nicolás Maduro, Hugo Chávez’s handpicked successor. The duo have collectively run Venezuela for the last quarter century. Edmundo González, a little-known former diplomat in his mid-seventies, is the candidate of the opposition—but only nominally. González is a stand-in for the real opposition leader, María Corina Machado, the longtime Maduro foil and former legislator who won last year’s primaries for the right to lead the opposition. But she bowed out when Maduro’s allies in the Supreme Court disqualified her for endorsing U.S. sanctions against Maduro. Despite being barred, Machado is the driving force behind the opposition.

Venezuela is suffering from a terrible humanitarian catastrophe that has led to the largest refugee crisis in the world. A shocking 8 million Venezuelans, over one in four, have emigrated to other Latin American countries, the United States, and Europe over the last decade—fleeing mass hunger, rising crime, and political repression in what was once the world’s fourth richest nation and the richest in Latin America. The ruling socialist regime, first democratically elected in December of 1998, has remained in power through election fraud and centralized control of the state ever since.

This Sunday, a vote for González is really a vote for Machado. A self-described classical liberal, Machado has vowed to liberalize the economy, reengage with the liberal international order, attract outside investment, and lift Venezuelans out of poverty—a condition characterizing 80% of Venezuelans under Maduro.

A Machado victory on Sunday would augur the beginning of a desperately needed transition towards democratic accountability and market openness.

Maduro’s Meddling

The big question this weekend is: Will the opposition be allowed to win this time? Bloomberg has called the Machado-powered González campaign “the biggest threat yet” to Maduro’s hopes of extending his tenure. A glowing profile of Machado in the New York Times gives grounds for thinking an upset just might be in the works:

[Machado] has not only corralled Venezuela’s fractious opposition behind her, but has also captivated a broad swath of the electorate with a promise for sweeping government change.

Even former critics say her movement is the country’s most important since the one built by Hugo Chávez, Mr. Maduro’s mentor and the founder of Venezuela’s 25-year-old socialist project.

Maduro, for his part, is confident he will be reelected comfortably—and has warned that a “blood bath” or “civil war” will follow if he isn’t.

One reason for thinking the Machado movement won’t be able to pull off a victory is that Venezuela has only grown more authoritarian over time, which augments Maduro’s ability to restrict his opposition’s electoral prospects. It is widely believed that Venezuela’s 2018 elections were significantly rigged in Maduro’s favor, and there is clear evidence of election fraud in previous elections, leading to the U.S. and other countries declaring they would no longer recognize Venezuela’s government. A year before that a voting technology firm concluded that the Maduro government had egregiously manipulated a vote intended to select a body to rewrite the nation’s constitution that Hugo Chávez had already replaced in 1999.

Last year, Maduro’s election interference strategy grew even more cynical. He didn’t force voters to support him or stuff voting centers with fake ballots but instead simply announced the outcome he wanted, no matter how implausible. In a referendum in December over the territorial dispute with Guyana that Maduro’s opposition boycotted, Maduro’s election council announced a turnout of over 10.5 million—never mind that the streets and voting centers were empty on voting day and about a third of registered voters have emigrated.

This time around, Maduro has thrown everything at the opposition. Machado hasn’t merely been disqualified from running—she’s been banned from air travel, making campaigning more difficult; an alarming number of campaign personnel have been arbitrarily arrested; her security chief was also detained based on what Machado has called “a deliberate provocation;” her campaign offices have been raided; she says she’s been effectively barred from TV and airwaves. Some of her aides have taken refuge in the Argentinian embassy in Caracas because the Maduro regime has issued arrest warrants against them, too.

How did Venezuela get to this point?

Venezuela’s Chavismo Era

Venezuela’s current malaise cannot be properly understood without reference to Hugo Chávez, the charismatic former military officer and failed coup plotter who ruled Venezuela for 14 years. Chávez went to prison for his role in a failed coup and then ran for president and won. He immediately moved to centralize power around him by packing the courts and rewriting the constitution. But when he lost popularity, he resorted to repression, imprisonment of his opponents, and election fraud. In late 2012, a cancer-ridden but still empowered Chávez informed the nation that Maduro would succeed him. At that point, Venezuela had gone through a decade-and-a-half of Chavismo, as Chávez’s left-wing populist project was called.

Chávez’s succession plans meant Chavismo, basically socialist authoritarianism, would outlast him. In 1998, the last time Venezuela held free and fair elections, Mauricio Armas, a voter, told the Washington Post, “This country is now on a road to disaster. … [M]y biggest fear is that everything is now up for grabs, democracy, our freedom, and free enterprise.” Time has proved Armas right.

Chávez’s supporters argue he lowered the poverty rate and increased literacy, but Venezuela experienced a ten-fold increase in oil prices—Venezuela’s main export and source of government revenue—during his first 10 years. Rampant corruption with oil revenue resulted in serious mismanagement of the oil industry. And the central bank printed money to pay for social programs at an unprecedented clip, which ultimately meant that the social improvements were short-lived and less impactful relative to less fortunate nations.

Chavez’s real legacy is the transformation of the richest nation in Latin America into one of the poorest. He seized private businesses and even entire industries—steel, farming, banking, factories, stores—and placed them under government control, most of which ended up bankrupt and closed. He presided over astronomical government spending, causing hyperinflation. Despite boasting the largest oil reserves in the world, Chávez’s ambition to use them to pay for social programs led to underinvestment and resulted in catastrophic oil production decline. A Congressional Research Service report described Chávez’s stewardship of his nation’s oil industry this way:

Under Chávez, the government engaged in widespread expropriations and nationalizations, implemented price and currency controls, and borrowed heavily. Corruption also proliferated. These policies introduced market distortions, deterred foreign investment, and did not diversify the economy. Venezuela’s economy was buoyed in the 2000s by high oil prices, but government mismanagement made the economy vulnerable to the 2014 oil price shock.

Once in power, Chávez made sure he won referendums and elections by using the apparatus of the state, giving away everything from food to appliances and using state TV and resources for his campaign. A retrospective profile of Venezuela’s drift toward authoritarianism written by Max Fisher and Amanda Taub in The New York Times in 2017 concluded: “When Hugo Chávez took power in Venezuela nearly 20 years ago, the leftist populism he championed was supposed to save democracy. Instead, it has led to democracy’s implosion in the country.”

The Failed Guaidó Gambit

The opposition naively believed that Chávez and Maduro could be defeated at the polls if they simply lost popular support. What they didn’t anticipate was the willingness of the regime to win through overt or covert election fraud. So the opposition eventually tried something different.

In 2019, Venezuela found itself in a significant presidential crisis, which seemed to draw the entire world’s attention. The democratically elected National Assembly, which was controlled by the opposition, declared Maduro’s 2018 presidential election fraudulent and attempted to set up a replacement government with the assembly’s leader, Juan Guaidó, as the nation’s new president. A coalition of dozens of democratic nations and ideologically aligned countries recognized it as the rightful government. President Trump welcomed Guaidó to the White House. Venezuela’s prominent neighbors, Colombia and Brazil, who were then run by center-right governments that opposed the Maduro regime, promptly recognized Guaidó, too. Trump even ramped up U.S. sanctions against the Maduro government—banning the foreign purchase of government debt, stopping all oil exports to the U.S. from Venezuela, and even punishing foreign firms that continued to work with the Maduro government—to put pressure on Maduro to leave.

And then … nothing happened. Maduro wouldn’t relinquish power and, Guaidó, unable to secure the military’s backing, fled to the United States, where he is currently teaching college courses in the Miami area. Venezuelans are also fleeing by the thousands every day and are among the asylum seekers at the southern border.

Enter: María Corina Machado

Venezuelans’ disillusionment after Guaidó created an opening for Machado, a courageous opposition figure, to become the driving force behind the anti-Maduro movement. The opposition had previously cast her aside due to her more confrontational approach (she once shouted down Chávez during his state of the nation address, prompting a dismissive retort from the president). But she has attracted intense popular support.

Machado ran for president in 2012 embodying a Spanish version of Margaret Thatcher’s “popular capitalism” slogan. She was among the first to warn that Chávez was transforming Venezuela into a dictatorship and to raise the alarm about his election fraud. In 2019, she called for foreign military intervention to depose Maduro on grounds that Maduro was an illegitimate dictator who had cemented himself in power and would use electoral interference to ensure that he is never voted out. Machado has promised to privatize state-owned companies—or, rather, re-privatize them after they were nationalized by the Chávez-Maduro regime—including the state-run oil giant, PDVSA.

Machado won the October primaries intended to select the next opposition leader with over 90% of the vote. But the Maduro-controlled Venezuelan Supreme Court disqualified her and her preferred proxy, Corina Yoris, leaving González to lead the challenge.

Machado’s willingness to take on Maduro electorally surprised many since she had previously sworn off participating in Venezuelan elections while Maduro was in power, citing the regime’s refusal to conduct free and fair elections. The Biden administration, also optimistically expecting reform, lifted sanctions to encourage Maduro to hold free elections—a naive move. Ultimately, neither Machado nor her chosen successor were allowed to run, and Maduro made no reforms.

Maduro’s Response to Sanctions

Maduro responded to Biden by kidnapping Americans, imprisoning more political opponents, and introducing a “law against fascism” that criminalizes conservative and “neoliberal” speech with six to 12 years in prison. After nothing positive came of Biden’s ill-advised decision to release Alex Saab, a major terrorist and financier of the Venezuelan regime, as well as Maduro’s nephews who were convicted of drug trafficking in America, the U.S. president reimposed some sanctions in April. But it’s clear that sanctions won’t result in Maduro’s ouster, or even any meaningful democratic reforms given that the U.S. has had some form of sanctions on the country’s government for 20 years—since the middle of Chávez’s second term.

Yet the Venezuelan government has only gotten worse with the Maduro regime remaining intransigently unwilling to conduct free and fair elections. So if sanctions won’t help one way or another to prod Venezuela’s rulers to respect basic liberal democratic norms, what exactly is the solution?

If Maduro claims another victory Sunday, Machado must follow through on her promise to empower citizens in voting centers to guarantee their votes are counted. It will be a tall order without physical force, but Venezuela’s opposition must do what it can to ensure its supporters’ votes are counted. The likeliest scenario is that the electoral council will rig the results once again and announce Maduro won the election. Machado will rightfully denounce the fraud and call for demonstrations nationwide. But unless Venezuelans mobilize a full-blown popular rebellion, the demonstrations will meet their end at the hands of the Venezuelan army and national guard—in a repeat of what happened in 2002, 2014, 2017, and 2019. At that point, even more Venezuelans will lose hope and emigrate, bringing the refugee crisis in neighboring nations to critical levels.

This week, a video of a Venezuelan woman crying at a pro-Machado demonstration went viral because she expressed regret for supporting Chavez in the past.

“I was Chavista, but I regret it. I regret it because my grandkids don’t have a future, neither does my family. … I belonged to an organization that was trash. I feel terrible.”

Unfortunately, the question that will be resolved in the days ahead in Venezuela is not whether it’s too late for the Venezuelans who condemned their countrymen to socialism to regret their choices but whether it’s too late to walk them back.

On Sunday, the Machado-led opposition will try to do what past challenges—from failed coup attempts to the construction of parallel alternative governments—have been unable to do: beat Chavismo at the polls. Maybe there are enough women like that Machado supporter out there, and maybe enough of their votes get counted to topple Maduro. In Venezuela, the only thing the people have left is hope.

© The UnPopulist 2024