A Month long controversy over the Venezuela's presidential election
Hwang Jeongeun (General Secretary)
* The writer traveled to Venezuela from July 23-29 as an international observer for the presidential election. The writer received an overview of the election process and visited five polling stations in Caracas to observe the voting process in person. Voting was taking place in a free and peaceful environment. After the election, the writer participated in the announcement of the results and witnessed the Venezuelan people gathered in front of the Presidential Palace in Caracas to celebrate the results. The writer also saw the violent protests that took place in Caracas the day after the election.
On July 28, Venezuela's presidential election was held, and the National Electoral Council (CNE) announced that total voter turnout was 59%, with President Nicolas Maduro receiving 51.95% of the vote (6.4 million votes) and Edmundo Gonzalez receiving 43.18% (5.3 million votes) of the nine opposition candidates. As a result, incumbent President Nicolas Maduro will begin his third term in January 2025. However, the results of Venezuela's presidential election have been under debate for a month now, both within the country and around the world.
Opposition and U.S.-led election challenges
After the election, the CNE officially announced that President Nicolás Maduro had been elected, but opposition candidate Edmundo González immediately challenged the results, alleging electoral fraud. Maria Corina Machado, who actually ran the opposition's campaign, called on the United States and the international community not to recognize the results. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken quickly followed suit, saying, “We are gravely concerned that the results announced do not reflect the will or vote of the Venezuelan people.” In Latin America, Argentina, Costa Rica, Peru, Panama, the Dominican Republic, and Uruguay, all of which have right-wing governments or pro-U.S. diplomacy, also announced that they would not recognize the results.
Conversely, countries with leftist governments have a more complicated picture. While Chilean President Gabriel Boric, who opposed Maduro's government from the start, announced that he could not support the election results, Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia offered to act as peace mediators to defuse the instability in the immediate aftermath of the election. While Mexico has taken a more neutral route, with the Organization of American States (OAS) and its leader Luis Almagro boycotting the event, saying it was unfair to Venezuela's current government, Brazil and Colombia have remained cautious about intervening in domestic politics, suggesting a rerun of the presidential election or the formation of a coalition as a way to address the ongoing political instability. Traditional allies Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Honduras, and six members of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) (15 countries in total) immediately recognized Maduro's victory and congratulated him.
These complex reactions and patterns of the international community were mirrored in civil society. On August 17, both the incumbent Maduro government and the mainstream Machado-González opposition called for rallies to celebrate their victory, and rallies in support of Nicolas Maduro's government and rallies in support of the opposition took place not only in Venezuela but around the world. However, mainstream Western media outlets have been biased in their coverage of the opposition's domestic and international rallies, misrepresenting the overall trend in public opinion. In fact, there are various videos and sources that report that Machado's rally on August 17 was significantly smaller than his rallies before the election, and a young social media influencer who was known for supporting Machado has withdrawn his support and released a video saying that he would choose Maduro for peace and prosperity. Domestically, Venezuela has also seen massive rallies in support of the government in nearly every major city. Nevertheless, these facts remain largely unknown outside of Venezuela. Instead, photos and videos of large anti-government rallies by Venezuelans living in the West and other Latin American countries, mostly opposition-leaning, circulate.
Photo of a pro-government rally in the capital Caracas
Source: Telesur(left)), Nocolas Maduro’s Instagram account(the rest)
Photo of a pro-government rally in the capital Caracas
What the evidence of election fraud reveals
The opposition first raised allegations of fraud on election day, claiming that an exit poll cited by González's campaign showed Edmundo González receiving 65% of the vote and Nicolás Maduro receiving 30%, which was too different from the exit polls. However, the exit poll was published by Edison Research. In addition to the fact that exit polls are illegal in Venezuela, it's important to note the source of the exit poll, Edison Research. Edison Research is a New Jersey-based company whose clients include the CIA-linked U.S. government propaganda outlet Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Middle East Broadcasting Network, all of which are run by the U.S. Global Media Agency, a Washington-based organization used to spread disinformation about America's enemies.
Two days after the election, the opposition launched a website with more than 80 percent of the votes counted, claiming a landslide victory for González. However, Diario Red's investigation found widespread irregularities in the initial upload, including forged signatures and falsified hash codes, raising further questions about the reliability of the opposition's records. For example, President Nicolas Maduro was shown as not having voted, the names of deceased people were included, the same person signed similarly on multiple observer and polling station signature lines, or their names and phone numbers were oddly filled in or left blank. Among other things, Freddy Ñáñez, the Undersecretary of Communications, Culture, and Tourism, has publicly stated that an analysis by intelligence experts showed evidence of software manipulation in approximately 83% of Machado's election results, and Francisco Ameliach, a member of Congress, has criticized the metadata of the documents, saying that nearly 80% of the documents showed evidence of photo alterations and manipulation.
Examples of evidence the opposition disclosed (Source: Diario El Universal)
Examples of evidence of manipulation that the opposition presented (source: Cubadebate)
Venezuela's Supreme Court under investigation based on voting records
The Venezuelan government and CNE have made it clear that the opposition has the right to claim the election was fraudulent and that it is only a matter of submitting evidence to prove it. However, Edmundo González's camp has not submitted any evidence to the CNE, nor to the Venezuelan Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ), which is investigating the official election results and hacking allegations at the request of President Nicolás Maduro. In early August, CNE officials said they had submitted evidence to the court, including actual voting records, and the nine presidential candidates who participated in the election (Nicolas Maduro and eight opposition candidates) and more than 30 political organizations also submitted voting records through witnesses at polling stations.
Edmundo González's campaign is the only one that has not provided any evidence or records, and has continued to make allegations of election fraud through social media, calling for rallies to denounce the current government. In the immediate aftermath of the election, Edmundo González called on the military and police to ignore orders from the government of Nicolás Maduro in a statement on the social network X, and urged his supporters to ignore the election results and organize nationwide protests. Opposition supporters staged violent protests, attacking civilians, military and police personnel, and vandalizing public property. In response, the Venezuelan government began formally arresting those involved in the violence.
Venezuela's Attorney General, Tarek William Saab, said that violent protests and sabotage have left at least 25 people dead and 192 injured, 97 of them members of the military. Notably among the deaths are cases in Bolivar state, where opposition thugs (comanditos) raided homes and brutally murdered people simply for supporting the current government (largest portrait in 5th photo).
Victims of opposition thugs and their locations (Source: Telesur)
The court is currently conducting a technical review of the evidence submitted with specially appointed experts. No deadline has been set for a ruling, but Chief Justice Carlia Rodriguez said the decision will be final and cannot be appealed.
Cui bono?
In what has been dubbed the world's election year, why is Venezuela's election results being called into question by the world? To answer that question, we need to look at who would benefit from a regime change and how it would hurt the current Venezuelan government.
In the 25 years since President Hugo Chávez was elected in 1998, nearly 30 elections have been held in Venezuela, but each election has been plagued by allegations of fraud. Whenever the opposition criticized the dictatorship's failure to uphold democratic electoral processes or claimed election fraud, the United States and its allies were quick to back them up. But is Venezuela's democracy really what the opposition and the U.S. are trying to protect? History makes it clear that it is not.
Since Chávez came to power in 1998, Venezuela has nationalized its oil and natural gas sectors and used the revenue from its abundant natural resources to provide free healthcare, free education, and affordable housing for its people. For the United States, which has considered Latin America its backyard since 1823 through the Monroe Doctrine, Venezuela's rise to power and strengthening of its sovereignty has been an eyesore. The U.S. solution has been economic sanctions, and the rationale for these sanctions is election fraud or a retreat from democracy.
For example, the United States froze $7 billion in assets of Venezuela's state-owned oil company PDVSA and banned oil payments in 2019 to pressure the Maduro regime, which was re-elected in January 2019, to step down. PDVSA has a subsidiary in the U.S. called Citgo Petroleum. The U.S. has also pressured Venezuela on a number of fronts, including ordering its oil company Chevron to pull out of Venezuela and signing an executive order to impose an embargo on Venezuela. The U.S. has also pressured its allies to join the sanctions against Venezuela, which resulted in the Venezuelan government's attempt during the pandemic to withdraw gold held in British banks to purchase medical equipment, medicine, and food, which the British government refused.
In fact, according to a recent Washington Post article, the United States has imposed three times as many sanctions on Venezuela as any other country or international organization in the world. It imposes some sort of financial penalty on people, property, or organizations against one-third of all countries. The U.S. has adopted a variety of ways to violate sovereignty and interfere in internal affairs, including economic sanctions, against countries and organizations that challenge its hegemony or do not conform to its order. That's why it's important to defend the Bolivarian Revolution against the U.S. and the democratically elected government of Venezuela.