By Jon Lee Arserson
Over the past several days, as videos have streamed out of Venezuela showing angry crowds toppling statues of the late Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez, I’ve experienced déjà vu more than once. Twenty-one years ago, in Baghdad, I was on hand as a crew of men and boys, assisted by a group of U.S. marines, pulled a bronze statue of Saddam Hussein down from a plinth in the central traffic roundabout known as Firdos Square. It was one of the first-ever actions taken by Iraqis in public defiance of their recently overthrown dictator, who had held power since 1979 and had become their country’s unassailable tyrant, plunging Iraq into several wars that cost hundreds of thousands of human lives. The rest of modern Iraqi history is something many Americans came to know all too well in subsequent years, even if—because of the many U.S. blunders that followed that moment of symbolic triumph—we have mostly chosen to forget it.
To fast forward back to the present, and to Venezuela: the statues of Chávez, the founding father of what he called the “Bolivarian revolution,” after the nineteenth-century Venezuelan independence leader Simón Bolívar, are being pulled down by Venezuelans enraged by his successor Nicolás Maduro’s questionable claim of victory in last Sunday’s election. Chávez, who came to power in 1999 and dominated life in the oil-rich nation until he died, of cancer, in 2013, still inhabits an exalted official status by his acolytes, including Maduro, who refer to themselves as Chavistas, and to him as their “supreme commander.” Saddam ruled for a quarter century and was removed from power only by a full-fledged invasion. Although Chávez died after fourteen years in power, the political force he created has continued to dominate Venezuela’s public life, via Maduro, for a similar length of time.
There have been sanctions of various types levied by the United States and its allies against Maduro’s regime, including a multimillion-dollar reward for his arrest for alleged narco-trafficking offenses. Still, as has become commonplace in the history of sanctioned regimes, Venezuela’s has acquired pariah status but it has not fallen, while the vaunted “civic-military pact”—which Chávez engineered with the armed forces, as an essential component of his revolution—has endured and become stronger. The Bolivarian revolution has failed in all of its promises, except for holding on to power, while the regime has become little more than a military dictatorship with a civilian figurehead.
Unlike Chávez, who was a former Army paratrooper, Maduro, a former bus driver and leftist union leader who became Chávez’s head of parliament, his foreign minister, and Vice-President, has never served in the military—but, in honor of the power dynamic that keeps him in place, he often wears uniforms, complete with camouflage. There is a brazenness to Maduro’s appropriation of symbols and imagery in his claims to power that would be comical if it wasn’t so deadly serious. When I met with Maduro in his office at the Presidential palace of Miraflores, in 2018, he removed a sword from a glass case and wielded it above his head, proclaiming, “This was used by Simón Bolívar himself.” Now, he seemed to be saying, it was his. On the hustings in the run-up to Venezuela’s most recent Election Day, Maduro roared jubilantly to a cheering crowd of loyalists that he would win, “because the National Bolivarian Armed Forces are behind me!”
At a time when a global ideological showdown between democracy and authoritarianism is at issue—in the looming U.S. Presidential election, and militarily, in the brutal Russian war against Ukraine—the latest iteration of Venezuela’s travails may well appear second-tier. But it is worth noting that Venezuela’s troubles are also the troubles of its neighbors and, indeed, of the entire region. Throughout the past decade, since Maduro became President, nearly eight million Venezuelans—the estimated population in the country today is twenty-eight million—fled the country as its economy collapsed. The effects of that great exodus are now felt everywhere, from neighboring Colombia, where some three million Venezuelans have crowded in, to faraway Chile and the United States. Social tensions are high in every country where Venezuelans have settled; they are often accused of causing violence and criminal activity. (Donald Trump has made political hay out of several violent crimes that undocumented Venezuelans have been charged with committing in the U.S., to highlight the risks of the spectre of uncontrolled immigration.) It has become a mordant refrain among certain Venezuelans that their country’s streets are safer because “all the criminals have emigrated.” Joking aside, it is widely believed that now, after Maduro’s “reëlection,” several million more Venezuelans will flee, their hopes of a return to democracy dashed.
The latest fracas was sparked when Maduro, running for a third six-year term in office, apparently stole Sunday’s election from his opponent, a soft-spoken former diplomat, Edmundo González: according to his supporters’ calculations, González won the election by a factor of nearly three to one. Most opinion polls, in fact, had predicted a significant victory for him, and partial paper-ballot summaries produced by the opposition appear to bear that out. González, as it happens, ran in place of María Corina Machado, a charismatic and immensely popular right-wing politician who would have run against Maduro herself. But, earlier this year, the country’s regime-dominated Supreme Court disqualified her from running for political office for fifteen years, for reasons widely discredited as an excuse to sideline her. When she was “inhabilitada,” González—a virtual unknown outside of diplomatic circles, and with few known enemies—was drafted. The anti-Maduro camp celebrated the move as a masterstroke, one that Maduro had not been able to find an answer to, until Sunday’s election.
In the event, Maduro’s victory, by an official count of fifty-two per cent to González’s supposed forty-three per cent, was simply proclaimed by the National Electoral Council, duly manned by a Maduro appointee, in a terse midnight ceremony. The announcement was made without publishing a breakdown of vote counts. Afterward, Maduro, pumping his fist, shouted, “I, Nicolás Maduro, am the reëlected President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.” His supporters shouted back their approval.
Maduro also claimed, without evidence, that there had been a “hacking” of the electoral council’s electronic system, and he accused González and Machado of being in league with an imperialist plot aimed at removing him from power. He has doubled down on his claims in subsequent days. Meanwhile, the leftist regimes in Nicaragua, Bolivia, Cuba, and Honduras congratulated Maduro on his win, joined by the leaders of countries including Russia, China, Iran, Serbia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Madagascar. The center-left Latin American governments of Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia have temporized, leaving themselves a potential role as intermediaries, by urging Maduro to produce the ballots. (On Tuesday, an envoy of the Brazilian President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, left Caracas after reportedly being assured that Maduro would release ballot counts soon, but the envoy also said that he was “worried” about Venezuela’s future. On Wednesday, Maduro ordered an election “audit” by the country’s Supreme Court, but, with that tribunal stacked with his own loyalists, his bluster struck a hollow note.) Alone among the region’s left-wing Presidents, Chile’s young leader, Gabriel Boric, has openly questioned the legitimacy of Maduro’s claims, given the absence of any proof. In response, Venezuela withdrew its diplomats from Chile and six other Latin American nations whose governments cast doubt on Maduro’s victory claims, also summarily expelling their diplomats. The European Union also refused to recognize Maduro’s reëlection until evidence is provided, and the Carter Center, which had sent monitors to observe the election, echoed the criticisms in a statement issued on Tuesday, saying, “Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election did not meet international standards of electoral integrity and cannot be considered democratic.” On Thursday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken cited “overwhelming evidence” in favor of González’s assertion that he is Venezuela’s legitimately elected leader. And so it goes, in a cycle that we have seen before. This time, however, it feels much more portentous and potentially calamitous.
The images coming out of Venezuela—sent by its own citizens, using their phones—show a regime determined to silence and neutralize its opponents, with motorcycle-riding, pro-government armed groups, roaring past protesters and opening fire, sometimes into the air, sometimes into the crowds. As of Wednesday, at least sixteen people had been reported killed in various incidents. Other images show men with long guns, wearing balaclavas, moving through neighborhoods on foot, and of armed plainclothes men shoving people into S.U.V.s, and whisking them away.
For now, despite fears of greater repression, the opposition crowds have remained out on the streets. On Saturday, they were led by Machado, who had previously gone into hiding but remained in the country, despite entreaties by some foreign governments for her and González to seek political asylum, as some Venezuelan government officials call for their arrests. There is much that is uncertain, but one thing seems sure: the contest between democracy and authoritarianism in Venezuela most likely will now be determined not by a vote but, sooner or later, by force.
Apart from a few soldiers who have joined the demonstrators, the bulk of the country’s armed forces appear to have made their choice. Before the election, the defense minister, Vladimir Padrino López, a tough-talking ideologue, decried the existence of foreign “conspiracies” against Venezuela—a fairly strong hint as to which side he’s on. This week, he has defended Maduro’s claim of victory, and, like Maduro and his comrades, has suggested that the demonstrators are enemy agents. There is now a playbook for stealing elections and for the overheated language that goes with it, and we have seen it everywhere lately. Maduro, meanwhile, has promised his followers that he will have the toppled statues of Chávez rebuilt and reërected. Appearances, after all, are everything. ♦
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Jon Lee Anderson a staff writer, began contributing to The New Yorker in 1998. Since then, he has covered conflicts in numerous places for the magazine, including Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Angola, Somalia, Sudan, Mali, and Liberia. He has also reported frequently from Latin America, writing about Rio de Janeiro’s gangs, the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, an isolated tribe in Peru’s Amazon, and a Caracas slum, among other subjects, and has written Profiles of Augusto Pinochet, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, and Gabriel García Márquez. He is the author of several books, including “Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life,” “Guerrillas: Journeys in the Insurgent World,” “The Fall of Baghdad,” and “The Lion’s Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan.” He is the co-author, with Scott Anderson, of two books, “War Zones: Voices from the World’s Killing Grounds” and “Inside the League.” He has been honored by the Overseas Press Club, and in 2013 he was awarded a Maria Moors Cabot Prize for outstanding reporting on Latin America and the Caribbean. He began his reporting career in 1979, in Peru, followed by several years in Central America, and has maintained a close relationship to the region ever since, reporting from there frequently and giving journalism workshops to Latin-American reporters. Energiesnet.com does not necessarily share these views.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The New Yorker, on August, 3 2024. EnergiesNet.com do not reflect either for or against the opinion expressed in the comment as an endorsement of Petroleumworld or EnergiesNet.com
Venezuela’s Moment of Reckoning | The New Yorker
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EnergiesNet.com 08 05 2024
