Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/07/29/exit-polls-showed-opposition-easily-defeating-venezuealas-nicolas-maduro-but-he-has-declared-victory-anyway.html
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Absolute mediocrities like Maduro who weasel their way into positions of high status are desperate to create the impression that they did so on their own merits. Surrounded as he no doubt is by yes-men, it won’t even register to him that he’s a laughingstock at home and abroad.
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All types of awareness, esp self-awareness, is always found lacking in his ilk.
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Back in October, the US agreed to lift sanctions if Maduro agreed to conduct free elections. So he started the process, but then when things looked too good for the opposition, he started putting his thumb on the scales and the US reimposed sanctions back in April. After that, he didn’t really care whether the elections looked free or not. See gen., https://apnews.com/article/venezuela-united-states-sanctions-maduro-fair-elections-17589aed0dcab89ac1075dd041f8198d
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He can’t even depend on all the Latin American left.
Many Latin American leaders, including Chile’s leftist president, Gabriel Boric, were far blunter in their assessment of Sunday’s vote.
“Maduro’s regime must understand that the results are hard to believe,” Boric wrote on X. “The international community and, above all, the Venezuelan people – including the millions of Venezuelans in exile – demand total transparency.” Chile, he added, “will not recognise any result that is not verifiable”.
Edison Research, which conducts high-profile election polling in the US and other countries, published an exit poll showing González had won 65% of the vote, while Maduro won 31%.
“The official results are silly,” said Edison’s executive vice-president, Rob Farbman, adding it stood by the results of its survey. Edison’s exit poll was conducted nationwide with preliminary data from 6,846 voters interviewed at 100 polling locations. Local firm Meganalisis predicted a 65% vote for Gonzalez and just under 14% for Maduro.
(If the Edison Research exit poll is accurate, Maduro simply took 20 per cent from González and gave it to himself.)
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The voting places that were supposed to have monitors overseeing them were opened a day early by Maduro’s folks so it was clear that the vote was being rigged. Unsurprised that Maduro declared victory, the question here is will the international community allow this to happen again. The elections have brazenly been rigged with plenty of evidence of it being done for the past two decades and nothing of consequence has occurred.
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I don’t know who else has upcoming national elections, but those of us in the States need to pay attention to every aspect of how he’s attempting to pull this off. Why? Oh, I dunno……
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For the US backed and financed opposition…
I wonder why is fair that ones can have unlimited budget from foreign agents and the others have to accept that.
ETA: Don’t get me wrong, Maduro is an asshole, but the opposition is put there by foreign interests to help those interests get all the natural resources.
Maybe we should find a way to get those corporations grubby hands out of south america so the governors look less unhinged.
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Right?
Isn’t it strange that a socialist government in line with the Bolivarian Revolution, and subject to crippling US sanctions like say, Cuba (for perhaps similar reasons), would be rigging an election? Instead of, as is usually the case these days, the far right, which from what I can gather from sources that aren’t corporate media, is a fair description of Maduro’s opposition?
In 2021, UN Special Rapporteur Alena Douhan gave a press conference on their impact, and described them as:
'Lack of necessary machinery, spare parts, electricity, water, fuel, gas, food and medicine, growing insufficiency of qualified workers many of whom have left the country for better economic opportunities, in particular medical personnel, engineers, teachers, professors, judges and policemen, has enormous impact over all categories of human rights, including the rights to life, to food, to health and to development’.
That’s from a piece by Vijay Prashad, who’s struck me before as an insightful observer of global politics. He also writes,
The United States would like more Venezuelan oil to get into the market not to help the Venezuelan people, but to provide energy to Europe given the sanctions on Russia. There are far too many contradictions in play here. The US will certainly deny the legitimacy of the elections if Maduro wins, and allow the sanctions to prevent Venezuelan oil to provide relief to the Europeans.
I remember failed US efforts to install a candidate who would provide more ready access to Venezuela’s oil, Juan Guaidó. Would things be better for ordinary Venezuelans if that effort had succeeded? Seems to me that US meddling in politics to its South rarely results in anything other than neocolonial resource extraction, and continued neglected of the country’s ordinary people.
At any rate the situation in Venezuela looks a lot more complex than “Awful dictator subverts again the will of the people.” And I don’t think that Western leaders, especially in recent decades US ones, should be blindly trusted as they pretend yet again to be disinterested, uninvolved observers of elections in struggling, resource-rich countries.
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Anyone familiar with Latin American dictatorships/authoritarian regimes is not surprised a bit by this.
the question here is will the international community allow this to happen again
This is always something that comes up during election results in Latin America (like in my home country), and I always wonder, what can the international community do? Sanctions? Done. Block trade with those countries? Done. Not allow government officials to enter their soil? Done.
So what next? Is it a problem that needs to be resolved by the Venezuelan people? If that’s the case, then they’re in this for a long, long time. 
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Clearly sanctions, financing criminal groups to destabilize these countries, occupy them illegaly from time to time, organize coup d’etats, plant terrible dictators… has not discouraged south american countries to stop behaving in an anti-american way.
Maybe they should try somthing different, like, IDK, cooperating with these countries, start paying reparations for all the harm done in the past 150 years, who knows what could happen!
(this post is not 100% sarcastic but clearly cheeky, take it with a grain of salt)
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If you don’t trust Western leaders, you can listen to Latin American socialists.
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Thanks, but I try to avoid the lazy option of operating on the basis of bluntly drawn binaries.
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Plus, a report on the BBC today said that observers were physically excluded from some polling stations/counts.
I saw a pic online last night allegedly showing a flotilla of boats crossing a river to get back into Venezuela, captioned ‘boatloads of Venezuelans crossing river to get back to vote, after govt closed the borders’.
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Somewhat agree. At this point, it seems these countries are the puppets of greater powers in play, which is sad. I mean, they don’t control their politics, it’s all influences from other (more influential) countries… left and right. FUUUCCCK 
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Agreed, though I think your left should be in quotation marks. I also think they sometimes control their politics; after all, the US establishment has been pissed off with Cuba for decades for a reason.
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So, because almost anybody here seem to know anything about it; the opposition in Venezuela is made of all the parties that ruled before Chavez took over after his failed coup attempts, they are almost all very left wing by US standards (that are not that high).
Venezuela have NO right wing parties, no mayors ones for that matter, If someone tell you that all the opposition is far right, that’s a huge red flag and a mayor telling of not-knowing-a-rat-ass-about-Venezuela, or plain a misinformation bot or agent (willingly or not).
The actual candidate is a figurehead placed by the coalition, because the natural candidates were all inhabilitated or ban by a suddenly efficient judiciary and in no way related to Maduro. Machado is the most right wing politician in our history to reach a viable candidacy, but she does not hold any actual mass popular support, she is the one the coalition and the circumstances placed in that position, and there are jokes about that, like; if the coalition chooses a Muppet; that is our guy, Venezuelans do not want another caudillo, they want a calm transition and someone (not chavista) must be in charge of that.
The main parties are part of the International Socialist and had been always popular and labor oriented parties, one of them can be called conservative (mainly for religious reasons) but heavily in to what the US considers far left policies.
In the 80s there was a corporate take over, and those corporations (Venezuelan and foreign corporations) were the co-authors of the economic downturn (Following Regan’s playbook and some local breed corruption), ironically they were the same ones that prep Chavez and support him into power, just to be betrayed and strip of their influence by him a few years later. When suddenly he was not a blue shirt moderate guy quoting Tony Blair, calling Cuba a cruel dictatorship, telling everybody that he will never hold to power more than his term, and became the Chávez most of the world know, with the red baret (crazy megalomaniacs likes red hats for some reason) and green oversized military uniforms.
Today, the new ultrarich are the Chavistas that took over after Chávez timely death, (this was by his design). Their party is not the PSUV anymore, The PSUV is a paper tiger. They are filling Venezuela of fancy resorts, restaurants and malls for the “Venezuela Premium” a group of New rich kids and Frontmen for the sanctioned officials that cannot move around money anymore, they are a few thousands ppl and their families, when you see anyone supporting or giving excuses for Maduro these are the people that they are supporting.
You can find virtually ANYTHING in any Venezuelan store now days. There are Porsche and Ferrari dealerships and fancy stores, that are just 3 or 4 years old, all this was set up after the sanctions, mainly bc the sanctioned people cannot leave and need some place to spend “their” fortune.
At the same time 6 million people left on foot crossing the once assumed “uncrossable” Darien and walking through the Andes. That’s the legacy of the “Bolivarian Revolution”; a complex humanitarian crisis not caused by war, ignored or mocked by the instigators.
There are no left wing policies under Maduro, no labor movement (lots of labor leader in prison), no healthcare system (lots of private clinics), everything is dollarized even gas prices, local taxes and food, all this has been set up by Maduro, or is that the Bolivarian Revolution is suddenly in its late stage capitalism phase? The main expenditure of the government is propaganda and the military.
In the other hand, Venezuela is not a rural country, there are almost no farms towns and un touched lands filled with “natural resources”. This is quite a gringo way to describe LATAM or Venezuela in particular, is a weird dumb cliché pulled out from TV shows or a lack of reading, I don’t know.
The resources have been already sold, rent, or just given away in exchange for political favors and influence years ago by Chavez and those deals are kept and expanded by Maduro. The US (Chevron holds today the only productive oils fields in Venezuela) the Chinese hold a big chunk of the Arco Minero and have literal cities with no spanish sings in sight and all Chinese workers, and since a few Years Russians are all over the oriental part of the country in mines and other trafficking from Brasil. There is a de facto port economy everything is imported, and local manufacturing is struggling to compete against Chinese made crap that is everywhere, Those are the Imperial forces today taking Venezuela’s resources, the same old same old, and all is under the direct orders of Maduro.
The Whole “take your hands off” approach to LATAM tragedy is just another way to patronize and keep meddling with our political mess. We are quite capable of be unhinged and corrupted without any US, Chinese or Russian participation, we are in fact the sole responsible for many of our own miseries thank you very much. Been told [deleted by moderator] what our problems are or who is responsible is peak imperialism, [deleted by moderator].
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