The strongman lost in a landslide, and the Venezuelan people are paying the price.
October 2024
This essay is part of a package on the elections that mattered most in 2024.
Fourteen years ago, María Corina Machado stood for her first election. She was one of the few independent female political candidates running for the National Assembly. Machado had already been targeted by Hugo Chávez’s government for her work leading an election watchdog group. Rather than back down, she stepped up, launching her campaign for office. I met her on the campaign trail one warm July evening in 2010 as she met with residents of a Caracas neighborhood, and I asked her why Chávez had been successful at the ballot box. “Fear,” she said, letting the word hang for a moment. “Fear does not leave fingerprints.”
This summer, Nicolás Maduro’s regime resorted to a chokehold — and left evidence of the crime strewn about for the world to see.
Maduro did not just lose Venezuela’s July presidential election, he lost in a landslide. Although the regime-controlled National Electoral Council declared that he had won with 51.2 percent of the vote, the opposition (in part using the government’s own vote-tallying system) showed that its candidate, Edmundo González, had won by a more than 2-to-1 margin. The day after the election, Machado, who leads the coalition of opposition parties but had been banned from running herself, announced to a crowd of thousands that the opposition had obtained more than 70 percent of the printed voter tallies and posted the results online. Where Chávez’s regime had been deeply skilled at tilting the playing field to its advantage, Maduro and his cronies engaged in open theft. The scale and audacity of the fraud underscored what has become apparent to many: Maduro’s government is essentially a criminal enterprise masquerading as a state.
Maduro badly miscalculated both the opposition and the depth of his own unpopularity. So plainly shorn of any legitimacy, he responded the way a mafia boss might: with wholesale repression. Reports of violence, arrests, kidnappings, and torture began almost immediately. In September, a UN investigative panel found that Venezuelan security forces were “massively involved” in human-rights violations after the election, including extrajudicial executions, arbitrary detentions, and sexual violence. This assault represented, in the UN group’s view, “unprecedented levels of violence” and “one of the most acute human rights crises in recent history.”
The failure to push Maduro aside through an overwhelming electoral victory shouldn’t mask something else: His position has never been more precarious. While he may be able to rely on state repression to keep the people at bay, what about the people in his own circle? There may be regime fissures behind a just-announced reshuffling of military and intelligence leaders. After 25 years of Chavismo, fear goes to the top.
William J. Dobson is the Journal of Democracy’s coeditor and author of the book The Dictator’s Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (2012).
Copyright © 2024 National Endowment for Democracy
Image credit: Gabriela Oraa/AFP via Getty Images
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FURTHER READING |
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Maduro Can Only Rule Through Fear and Terror |
Is This the Beginning of Maduro’s End?The Venezuelan strongman is attempting to steal the country’s presidential election and daring the people to stop him. But even if military leaders are backing him, Maduro is already weaker than he appears. |
Authoritarian Survival: Why Maduro Hasn’t Fallen |