Inside and outside Venezuela, pressure intensifies for a verifiable vote count

Public anger over suspicions that the government committed fraud in Sunday’s presidential election has spread across Venezuela. Statues of Hugo Chávez, the founder of the left-wing populist movement known as Chavismo, were knocked down with sledgehammers in three cities. Protesters decapitated one of the statues and dragged the bronze head through the streets on a chain tied to a motorcycle, evoking what the Greek mythological hero Achilles did with the corpse of the Trojan prince Hector in Troy. People applauded as they passed.

The country is going through a difficult moment. The opposition has made public its own vote count based on the paper tallies from voting stations that they have received, and which award victory to the main opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia by a very wide difference over President Nicolás Maduro: 6.2 million votes against 2.7 million. González Urrutia’s campaign, backed by opposition leader María Corina Machado, uploaded all these documents to a website to make them publicly available. These voting records appear to contradict the official story that the Venezuelan president won the presidential election with a million votes in his favor.

The international community openly distrusts the figures presented by Chavismo. First, because the government has not released the specific data recorded at each voting station. And second, because it has not demonstrated that the delay in the announcement of the vote count was really due to a hacker attack from North Macedonia, as denounced by the attorney general. Countries concerned about the Venezuelan situation — from the United States to the European Union or Latin American giants such as Brazil, Colombia and Mexico — demand that the Maduro government carry out a transparent recount, with the help of independent auditors, to clear up all doubts.

There is a lot at stake. Chavismo should be the first to benefit from transparency about the election, because it needs a victory that will be internationally recognized, opening the doors of the markets and multilateral organizations once again. Chavista leaders never say it out loud, but their nation’s pariah status on the world stage irks them. It’s a similar story with foreign newspapers, which Venezuelan officials are constantly attacking and denigrating, but whose articles on Venezuela they nevertheless read very carefully. This election was an opportunity to break out of the isolation that Venezuela has lived in for years, whether with the current president or with a new one who could normalize the political life of the country. In fact, these were the main reasons for setting a date and holding these elections, agreed on after more than a year of three-way negotiations between the opposition, the government and the White House.

Anger over the result has brought people out onto the streets. Crowds of young people surrounded Miraflores Palace, the presidential residence, in Caracas on Monday night. The city was taken over by Chavista security forces. The protests began on the balconies of houses, where people came out to shout fraud and brandish pots and pans. Later, they moved to the avenues, which were blocked by youths on motorbikes waving Venezuelan flags. They set up bonfires in the middle of the roads and threw photos and election propaganda of Maduro into the flames.

As the hours went by, the situation became more tense and led to clashes with the police. Foro Penal, a Venezuelan human rights organization, said 46 demonstrators have been arrested. The deaths of at least two people have been confirmed, and several more have been reported on social media, although these have not been verified. Provea, a non-profit group, claims that relatives of 25 students have reported the latter’s disappearance after they protested in front of the Experimental Security University, which trains police and security forces, claiming they were forced by the director to vote for Maduro. The organization details the names and surnames of some of the students. The colectivos, pro-Chavista street groups that are experts at confrontation, also clashed with the demonstrators, in some cases firing real bullets.

Maduro has assured that they have identified the individuals who toppled over statues of Chávez, who made him his successor shortly before dying of colon cancer in 2013. The president has embraced the narrative that the opposition, as contradictory as it may seem at first glance, wanted to stage a coup at the polls and establish a “fascist government.” “We declare ourselves in permanent vigil and action to end the coup against Venezuela,” he said. The role of the military is also being scrutinized at this time. Many wondered if the armed forces would endorse a potential fraud by Chavismo. For now, the military leadership has shown loyalty in the words of the Minister of Defense, Vladimir Padrino López, who assured that they will guarantee peace in Venezuela and that they will not allow the peace to be disturbed after “the demonstration of civility” that took place on Sunday. “I call for reflection once again. We don’t want unsuspecting people out there to start playing the role of useful fools to disturb the peace of this country,” he said in a video.

The next few days will be vital. Part of the international community was convinced that Chavismo would finally be able to accept defeat and go into the opposition, and from there rebuild itself as a movement after the wear and tear it has suffered in recent years due to the brutal economic crisis it has had to manage and the continuous violations of human rights it is accused of having committed. Now, asking for an audit of voting records is a way of insisting on the idea of the need for a process of change in a country that is currently governed in an authoritarian manner. For now, it does not look like there is an express desire on the part of Chavismo to bring transparency to the vote count. The rest of the world will continue to push for it.

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