CARACAS, Venezuela — It only took the socialist Maduro regime a few days, a crooked “opposition” lawmaker, and a rigged court ruling to remind everyone that as long as it is in power, there will be no such thing as a free and fair election in Venezuela.
Apparently, some people forgot.
Some 2.3 million Venezuelans participated in October 22’s “opposition” primary election. Center-right former lawmaker María Corina Machado was elected to compete against socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro in next year’s “free and fair” election, which is slated to take place sometime during the second half of 2024.
A primary election should, by all means, be a normal occurrence within a democratic system. The winner celebrates, the loser accepts defeat, and we all move to the next step of the election process. However, Venezuela is under the rule of an authoritarian socialist regime that is about to mark its 25th anniversary in power next February. There is no such thing as a straightforward primary election under dictatorship.
Surprisingly, after a decade of forceful and deadly anti-socialist protests, some Venezuelans were actually enthusiastic about the primary and hopeful of what it could lead to.
It led to Maduro’s puppet Supreme Justice Tribunal (TSJ) issuing a ruling on Monday that erased the primary entirely. An “opposition” lawmaker, José Brito, filed the injunction that granted the TSJ jurisdiction for its ruling.
You can’t expect an authoritarian socialist regime to play the democracy game, even if, as in this case, that is how they got in power in the first place. Once they’re in power, it’s very hard to vote them out. Never forget that.
The ruling effectively renders the primary — and Machado’s victory — null and void. The primary’s status as a self-organized event by the Venezuelan “opposition” made no difference. Nor did Machado’s victory with upwards of 90 percent of the vote: the Maduro regime has still decreed her banned from politics through 2030 as punishment for her support of international sanctions on Maduro’s narco-regime for its long track record of human rights atrocities and involvement in drug trafficking and association with terrorist groups.
Maduro’s henchmen have also threatened legal action against others who organized the primary, describing the process as a fraud.
The most dangerous part of TSJ’s ruling is that the court demanded all of the primary’s “administrative background.” This includes all documentation, polling stations, voting notebooks, ballots, tally sheets, and much more.
Essentially, the Maduro regime wants to know who voted — perhaps to blacklist and punish participants. The socialists have done this before: in 2004, late dictator Hugo Chávez used what is now known as the “Tascon List” to persecute all Venezuelans who signed a petition to recall Hugo Chávez. The regime continues to use the list to this day to ban those on it from government benefits and keep them from respectable jobs.
The call for documents revealing all 2.3 million Venezuelans who participated in the vote should serve as a reminder that ousting Maduro will not oust the socialist regime. The regime has absolute control of the entire country. It controls the courts, it controls the National Assembly, it controls the Attorney General’s Office, the comptroller, and essentially all local forms of government. And that doesn’t even include the regime’s control of “opposition” governors and mayors who collaborate with it, such as Manuel Rosales, the governor of my birthplace, Zulia. Rosales began his career long before I was born, having occupied several local government positions until becoming elected Mayor of Maracaibo in 1995, eventually becoming a failed rival against late dictator Hugo Chávez in 2006. He is now a full-blown collaborator, making calls for an end of the sanctions imposed on the socialist regime.
To the socialist regime, it does not seem to matter that it signed an agreement on October 17 to respect the “right of political actors to choose their candidate” in talks attended by representatives of a variety of countries in Barbados. Maduro also shows no interest in abiding by a vague promise towards “free and fair” elections that the administration of leftist American President Joe Biden took at face value to reward the Maduro regime with generous oil and sanctions relief.
The regime invalidating the votes of the Venezuelan people through sheer might is not entirely new. The opposition has had two major victories against the regime in the past – both of which the regime simply annulled.
In 2007, late socialist dictator Hugo Chávez sought to reform Venezuela’s 1999 constitution, a new core legal structure that was one of his revolution’s first goals. The proposed reforms, in a nutshell, sought to implement socialism at a constitutional level.
The reform narrowly failed to pass by a two-percent vote difference. An upset Chávez told the opposition to enjoy their “shitty” victory. Shortly thereafter, the socialist regime began to implement the failed proposals by decree, ignoring the will of the people.
Similarly, when the opposition won a two-thirds majority of the National Assembly’s seats, the regime-controller TSJ — the same one that is nullifying the primary — passed a series of measures to nullify the legislative. The Maduro regime eventually replaced the entire National Assembly in 2017 with a “Constituent Assembly” allegedly tasked with rewriting the constitution. It never did any such thing and ceased to exist when Maduro held a sham election to force its members into the National Assembly.
What the regime does or says does not detract from Machado’s primary election triumph, which has given some faint glimmer of hope to Venezuela’s otherwise disenfranchised electorate.
Machado, a former center-right lawmaker, obtained an overwhelming 2.25 million votes, 92 percent of all votes cast. This itself is an achievement Machado should be proud of, as not only did she go from having only obtained 103,500 votes in 2012’s “opposition” primary election, but she also surpassed the 1.8 million votes obtained by twice-failed perennial candidate Henrique Capriles Radonski back then.
Machado’s victory represents a huge blow to Venezuela’s broad establishment “opposition.” I would not go as far as to say Machado is a new face in Venezuela’s skewed political chessboard, because she has been in the game for roughly two decades now, but it would be remiss of me to not acknowledge that her political platform has been working all year towards that victory.
I see the meaning of her victory in the people in my neighborhood. As part of my efforts towards wrapping my pending affairs in this country, I had to get a certification at my local civil registry office. This is a government office, so of course it did not open at 8:00 a.m. as the sign would suggest, so everyone there was engaged in our national pastime: waiting in line.
Several of the people present were discussing Machado. A woman proudly explained the work she had been doing as part of Machado’s local campaign team. To see that right outside a government office is a bit unusual. It’s definitely not a topic you’ll see discussed say, outside the Venezuelan tax office – not with all those staff members clad in red and all the socialist messages emblazoned inside the offices.
It’s worth considering that a few months ago, “nobody” was leading the primary race. To explain why someone would choose “nobody” over someone is quite simple. We Venezuelans are currently a rather politically defeated people – but not for lack of trying to save our country. Venezuelans have truly tried to oust the ruling socialist regime through protests and votes, only to end up disappointed or outright betrayed by the “opposition.” I have lived through every single major period of turmoil surrounding this socialist regime, and they all ended up with a combination of the “opposition” suppressing the protests and both sides going to the negotiating table, yielding zero results toward restoring democracy.
The “opposition” has spent nearly 25 years failing to oust the ruling socialist regime. Not just that, it has outright collaborated with it repeatedly. The Maduro regime accuses the “opposition” leadership of being right-wing, but the truth is that it is center-left at best, with some of the major “opposition” parties being proud members of the Socialist International.
I was 11 years old when Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999, I’ll be 36 next January, and with this “opposition” we’ve only gone backward and the Maduro regime, far from losing power, has a strong iron grip on this country than ever.
Between Capriles’ failed presidential runs, the failed 2014, 2017, and 2019 protests, the bizarre (and failed) Juan Guaidó experiment, and many more “opposition” mistakes, many in the country have been left politically orphaned. Many young Venezuelans have died in the past decade, especially during the 2017 protests. Thanks to the “opposition’s” teamwork ith Maduro, those deaths feel in vain for many of us.
Machado may not be new, but objectively speaking, she has not “screwed up” as badly as other “opposition” candidates. She has fiercely declared socialism as Venezuela´s main enemy.
Machado once stood up to late dictator Hugo Chávez, telling him that “expropriating is stealing” in 2012. Chávez, at the time, advised her to “win the primaries first.”
Well, she did it. Chávez has been dead for ten years, but she accepted and overcame his challenge.
Now, her being able to actually participate in next year’s election is a whole other problem that’s borderline edging on a cut-and-dry “no.”
The socialist regime branded Machado an enemy of the revolution long ago. The point of no return came when she met former U.S. President George W. Bush in 2005. I distinctly remember her being vilified over that encounter by state-owned media, it really was something that upset them. The socialist regime never got over that. I’m kinda half-expecting them to resurface that photo soon.
I personally don’t want to grasp onto that faint hope that some have justifiably chosen to embrace. It’s hard for me to do so right now — not after all we’ve been through in the country, and all I’ve been through at a personal level.
But I do believe Machado has all the right in the world to compete for the presidency on an equal playing field. And I believe beating Maduro in a proper free and fair election would be a first step towards rebuilding Venezuela. Yet even under a hypothetical Machado presidency, there would still be a lot to untangle.
Pervasive, all-encompassing institutional reform to eradicate all traces of socialism is necessary for any future democracy. Taking out Maduro would leave a socialist court system, socialist legislature, socialist leaders at essentially all levels of local government, a socialist military, a socialist police force, socialist paramilitary thug groups, socialist gang-run prisons, and so much more. And good luck to anyone attempting those reforms, because Maduro’s international allies – Cuba, Russia China, and Iran, among others – are not ceding influence so easily.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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