PNN – The situation that is developing in Venezuela after the elections was predictable from the point of view of Venezuela’s internal experts and foreign observers. Not only the authorities of Caracas were preparing themselves for this issue, but the opposition had also mentally prepared the society not to accept the election results and cause internal disturbances by creating doubts in the electoral mechanisms.
Presidential elections in Venezuela and repeated claims of fraud, unrest and street riots in the largest owner of oil resources in the world. On July 28, 2024, the presidential election was held in Venezuela with the candidacy of Nicolás Maduro and veteran diplomat Edmundo González, representing the opposition. The election in which incumbent President Nicolás Maduro, who has been in power since 2013 after the death of his predecessor Hugo Chávez, won with 51 percent of the vote. According to the announcement of the National Electoral Council of Venezuela, Edmundo Gonzalez came in second with 44.2 percent of the votes.
It was after the announcement of the preliminary results by the Electoral Council that protesters led by Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado rejected the election results and claimed that Edmundo González won a landslide victory with 73.2 percent of the vote, and violent street riots erupted in Caracas and several other major Venezuelan cities.
What does Bolivar Maduro’s government say?
After the announcement of the results of the presidential election and the beginning of urban protests against the results in Caracas and several other big cities, the Maduro government emphasized that the leadership of the unrest in Venezuela was carried out by Western countries, especially the United States.
He pointed out that many rioters arrested in the state of Texas, Colombia and Peru were prepared to implement the coup plan and we have received sums of money from the intelligence agencies of some countries for their actions in setting fire to and destroying government and public places evaluated these actions by the protesters in order to create a “color revolution” in Venezuela.
The conditions of the opposition in Venezuela
In the elections that were held in the past few days, other candidates were also present in the electoral field, but all of them, especially the candidates of the opposite movement, have had severe conflicts and conflicts with each other over basic issues. This is the reason why no coherent and unified opposition force has been formed in the political environment of Venezuela for a long time.
In the current situation of the political sphere of Venezuela, only Maria Corinamachado, a former representative of the National Assembly and one of the most prominent figures of the Venezuelan protests in 2014, is still able to remain in the political scene of this country and become the main leader of the opposition and the only symbol of the protesting part of the Venezuelan society.
But now the Venezuelan political community and the opponents of the government based in Caracas support Mariana Machado, aka the “Venezuelan Margaret Thatcher” or the “Iron Lady”.
Machado, who was unable to run in the 2024 presidential election due to restrictions imposed by the government, nominated 71-year-old Edmundo González Urrutia as his candidate. Therefore, all the promises announced in the advertising campaigns were Machado’s plans to change the living conditions in Venezuela.
In his speeches, Machado promised that if his friend and representative Edmundo González wins the election, he will revive the economy, stop the repression, remove power and negligence from the security services and restore dignity to Venezuelans. Mariana Machado claims that I will bury this kind of “socialism” forever and build a government where criminals and corrupt officials sit in prison.
Polls published before the elections by Western Bangas showed that María Corina Machado and her friend Edmundo González enjoyed huge popular support. However, Nicolas Maduro, the current president, did not consider these polls to be in line with the current realities of the Venezuelan society and considered these data to be more in line with Western companies’ opinions in order to influence the election results.
What do the opponents say?
Opponents of Maduro’s government claim that in the run-up to July 28, the government has confused local residents, many of whom are illiterate, by changing the names of around 6,000 schools that serve as voting centers.
On the other hand, one of the biggest obstacles that Maduro’s government has created for the opposition is related to Venezuelan citizens abroad who wanted to participate in the presidential voting process. More than 21 million voters in Venezuela are registered to vote, but only 17 million of them are currently living in the country. According to the last census in 2010, the population of Venezuela was approximately 29 million.
Among the other things that Maduro’s opposition forces say is to imprison or impose severe restrictions on the leaders of the liberal movement. The leading opposition candidates were widely disqualified during the election campaigns or even in the previous presidential and parliamentary elections in 2019 and 2020 and were banned from participating in the current elections.
In June 2023 and January 2024, Venezuela’s Supreme Court, which is fully controlled by the incumbent government, barred 56-year-old María Corina Machado from running in new presidential elections, accusing her of various charges. However, he found among his friends a person who is now presenting himself as his presidential candidate and Maduro’s rival in the elections of the past few days.
Everything was prepared in advance
As noted, the situation unfolding in Venezuela after the election was predictable from the perspective of Venezuelan domestic experts and foreign observers.
Not only were the Caracas authorities preparing for this, but the pro-American opposition had also mentally prepared the society to reject the election results and cause internal disturbances, using polls as a lever to pressure voters.
Pro-Western polling firms flooded the country with poll data strongly predicting a Gonzalez victory. According to the data of these polls, Gonzalez should win this election with a margin of 20-40%. For example, according to data published by Delphos Polling Company, Gonzalez has the support of 52 percent of voters, while only 25 percent of Venezuelans are ready to vote for Maduro.
For Venezuelan voters, this was a prelude to the process of discrediting the country’s electoral mechanisms and its government organizers. In the aforementioned plan, the victory of Gonzalez was considered as a definite transition, and any result other than this in the 2024 presidential election was associated with widespread fraud in the opinion of the opposition.
According to this report, this institution, which operates under the title of “Edison Research”, has also been active in the unrest in Ukraine, Georgia and Iraq before.
The position of the western camp
In the background of the negative reaction to the Venezuelan elections, some Latin American countries, which are traditionally classified in the pro-Western camps, have not accepted the results of the Venezuelan elections and have taken unfriendly positions towards the established government of Venezuela and the winner of the presidential elections of this country.
In this regard, the Venezuelan government decided to call the diplomats of Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Costa Rica, Panama and the Dominican Republic and give them a serious warning about any interference in the inflamed situation of Caracas.
Caracas also decided to cut off diplomatic relations with the country after Peru’s leadership unexpectedly decided to recognize Edmundo Gonzalez, the rival of Nicolás Maduro in the elections, as the new president of Venezuela. Meanwhile, Peru is led by Dina Bularte, who came to power in 2022 as a result of a coup.
Also, the Costa Rican authorities have granted political asylum to the leaders of the opposition movement, as well as the leaders of the street protests, Edmundo Gonzalez and Maria Corina Machado. Machado thanked them for their support, but said he would continue to fight for democracy in his country.
On the other hand, Argentina has given residence and asylum in its embassy to several dissidents who participated in organizing violent protests in Caracas. As of today, local media are reporting that the power to the Argentine embassy is now out and the building is surrounded by Venezuelan police.
Regarding the European Union, it should be noted that according to the information published in some publications, there is no single document on the situation after the elections in Venezuela due to the fact that the Hungarian authorities will veto this document in any form.
US program for Venezuela
The United States may once again have a “color revolution” in Venezuela, as it did 6 years ago. 6 years ago, Washington recognized Juan Guaidó, then the speaker of the parliament and the leader of the Venezuelan opposition forces, as the “interim president” of Venezuela without recognizing the victory of Nicolás Maduro. At the same time, Washington forced 50 other countries to recognize Guaidó as the “interim president” of Venezuela.
The United States did the same during the 2019 presidential election in Bolivia. With the help of puppet organizations, Washington was able to create a social crisis in Bolivia, and most importantly, they pushed the army to take action against President Eva Morales, who should have been declared the president based on the counting of votes. The Americans also did exactly the same thing in Nicaragua in 2018.
The Venezuelan military has so far not only shown its loyalty to the legitimately elected government, but has actively participated in the suppression of rebellions that, according to the plans of the United States, were supposed to be the beginning of a “popular insurrection” or to try to counter an invasion from outside.
Armed invasion?
One of the options that is raised among some currents against Maduro in the current situation is a military invasion by the United States and some allies of this country in the Latin American region in order to overthrow the legitimate government of Venezuela. John Bolton, the national security adviser of the United States during the presidency of Donald Trump in 2018 and after holding the previous round of elections in Venezuela, proposed a theory according to which the United States would overthrow the Maduro government with a military operation and hand over the government to Juan Guaidó.
However, the above idea completely failed, and Washington during the Trump era also removed the armed invasion of Venezuela from its plans, even Donald Trump admitted this during his presidency. Even now, it seems that the Biden administration will not have the courage to intervene directly with an armed force to remove Maduro.
During the Trump era, the US military, contrary to Bolton’s opinion, predicted unacceptable potential losses and did not guarantee the success of any attempt to militarily overthrow the Caracas government. It seems that the situation is the same in the current situation.
In addition, the United States does not want to enter another war after the Ukraine war and the conflicts in the Middle East. The casket of American soldiers that could return to the United States from Venezuela will greatly affect the chances of the Democrats in the presidential elections in November.
The position of Venezuela’s friendly countries
Vladimir Putin was among the first to congratulate Maduro on his victory in a telephone call to an ally, and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: We see that the Venezuelan opposition does not want to admit defeat, although we believe that the opposition should do so and congratulate the winner of this election. It is important that efforts to destabilize the situation inside Venezuela are not fueled by third countries and that the country is immune to any foreign interference.
Examining the results of the elections in the Supreme Court of Venezuela
Maduro, who has faced international pressure, requested the Venezuelan Supreme Court to conduct an inspection of the election process a few days after the election results were announced. The country’s highest court accepted Maduro’s request and summoned him to testify on Friday alongside Edmondo Gonzalez, the opposition candidate who has also declared himself the winner.
Jenny Kay Lincoln, who led the above delegation, said in this regard: You have a government body whose members are appointed by the government to verify the government figures of the election results that are in question,” and that cannot be an independent assessment.
Maduro’s main challenger, Edmundo Gonzalez, and opposition leader María Corina Machado say they have won more than two-thirds of the ballots that each electronic voting machine prints after polls close. They claim that citing this data proves that Maduro has failed.
On the other hand, Maduro insists that there was a conspiracy against his government and that the electronic election system was hacked on election day. In response to the question why the country’s election officials did not publish the detailed vote count separately, Maduro said that the National Election Council was attacked, including by cyber-attacks. The government released videos to the media that the president said showed the opposition attacking and setting fire to some election offices. In this regard, “William Saab”, the Attorney General of Venezuela, announced the arrest of more than a thousand of these people.
Opposition leaders claim that the counting of votes by their election headquarters shows that Gonzalez won almost 6.2 million votes compared to Maduro’s 2.7 million. These figures are very different from the report announced by the Supreme Electoral Council of Venezuela, in which Nicolás Maduro won 5.1 million votes, compared to more than 4.4 million votes counted for González.
Conclusion
In examining the developments in Venezuela, one must first answer the question, what are the main interests of the United States in Venezuela? Washington’s most important interest in Caracas is oil, the country’s only capital. Experts and observers say that the main goal of the United States, contrary to all the claims of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of this country, is not to democratize Venezuela, but to restore the control of its oil reserves in the hands of American politicians, and this is only possible by changing the political regime of Venezuela, through elections or a coup.
In addition, Venezuela is one of Russia’s allies in America’s private life, that is, in the Central and South American region. Caracas has actively cooperated with Cuba and Nicaragua in the field of energy resources, and all three countries have defined friendly relations and extensive common interests with Moscow. The United States has named these three countries the “axis of evil” of Latin America.
In addition, Venezuela’s closeness with Eastern powers is one of the most important reasons for the continuous efforts of the United States to change the socio-political regime of Venezuela, and to achieve this goal, it uses lies, discrediting, economic sanctions, diplomatic and military pressure against the socialist government of Maduro.