Chavismo’s Chokehold

Venezuela has such a technologically sophisticated voting system that it can make the way elections are conducted in the United States look horribly dated. At their polling stations, Venezuelan voters sign in and have their fingerprints verified by a computerized reader. In the voting booth, they make their selections on a touch screen that shows the names and color photos of the candidates. The voting machine then prints out a paper receipt, allowing the voters to see that their vote was properly recorded. They place the receipt in a sealed box, which provides a physical backup for the count stored on the machine.

Once the polling stations close, every machine prints out a paper tally, known as an acta, showing the total number of votes cast on it for each candidate; witnesses for the candidates are given a copy, which includes a QR code and other information to authenticate it. The machines are then connected to a dedicated telephone network through which voting data is sent to computers at a pair of tabulation centers in Caracas, the capital. At no point are any of the devices or computer systems connected to the Internet. There are further safeguards that make it extremely difficult—if not impossible—to alter the vote count undetected.

There was, however, nothing sophisticated about the electoral theft perpetrated by the government of President Nicolás Maduro—Hugo Chávez’s handpicked successor—on the night of Sunday, July 28, after the polls closed in the country’s presidential election. The head of the National Electoral Council, a strident apparatchik named Elvis Amoroso, went on television just after midnight and read what we can now conclude were made-up numbers showing Maduro with a substantial lead over his main challenger, Edmundo González. Returns were still coming in, Amoroso said, but the trend was “irreversible.” He declared Maduro the winner of a third term in office.

About an hour later, elsewhere in Caracas, the opposition offered a very different version of events. González, a soft-spoken seventy-four-year-old former diplomat, appeared at a campaign office alongside fifty-six-year-old María Corina Machado, a charismatic and relentlessly focused politician who had been on track to be the opposition candidate when the Maduro-controlled Supreme Court forbade her from running. Instead, Machado backed González and became the campaign’s propelling force. On election night she announced to a crowd of journalists and cameras crammed into a narrow patio that the campaign—despite obstacles such as having its witnesses tossed out of some polling sites—had been able to compile more than 40 percent of the acta tallies from around the country; these were being uploaded to a website where the public could view and verify the results. Those tallies, she said, as well as exit polls and quick counts, showed that González had defeated Maduro in a landslide. “Everybody knows what happened,” she said. “Now it’s up to all of us to defend the truth.”

In the following days the González campaign collected and posted online more than 25,000 actas—83.5 percent of the total. What they revealed was stunning in a country that has been ruled for a quarter-century by a single faction—the self-styled revolutionary movement known as Chavismo, for Chávez. González had received 7.3 million votes to Maduro’s 3.3 million, defeating him 67 to 30 percent. (Several minor candidates received about 2 percent of the vote.)

The Chavista government had built Venezuela’s high-tech voting system with two goals in mind: to protect itself from the possibility of its opponents stealing an election (it considered this a threat in its early days) and to silence doubters who might allege that its claims to popular support were built on fraudulent elections. When Amoroso declared Maduro the winner, he broke with decades of precedent by failing to immediately make public a full breakdown of presidential results by polling place and precinct.

The opposition called his bluff. The reason that the government wouldn’t release the full results, Machado said, was obvious: they didn’t match Amoroso’s numbers. And the González campaign could prove it, because they had the actas.

Hugo Chávez, the leftist former paratroop commander who staged a failed coup in 1992, was elected president in 1998 and ran Venezuela for a tumultuous fourteen years. Chávez was a populist, dividing the country between “The People” and a supposedly sinister elite and exploiting the division to stay in power. He died in 2013 after anointing Maduro as his successor. Maduro had been a bus driver and union organizer. He attached himself to Chávez, becoming a legislator, foreign minister, and then vice-president.

Venezuela’s economy revolves around oil, and Chávez had the good fortune to be president during a time of rising oil prices. After Maduro took office prices plummeted, and the country ran out of money. Maduro mismanaged the crisis, hyperinflation followed, and the economy collapsed. Basic goods and medicines vanished from shelves. Families couldn’t afford food. Malnutrition surged, especially among children. Catastrophic power outages darkened the entire country.

Over eight years Venezuela’s gross domestic product declined by more than 75 percent. The Trump administration, hoping to force out Maduro, levied punishing sanctions, including a ban on oil sales, which increased the suffering of ordinary Venezuelans. The United Nations estimates that nearly eight million Venezuelans, roughly a quarter of the precrisis population of about 30 million, have abandoned the country.

Chávez’s most ardent supporters were the poor, particularly those in the slums that tumble down the hillsides around the valley of Caracas. In 2002, when Chávez was removed in a coup orchestrated by business leaders, it was impoverished slum dwellers who descended from the hills by the thousands to fill the streets and demand his return. Two days later he was back in power. A popular song with the refrain “and they came down” commemorated the event.

Around midday on July 29 Venezuelans once again began walking down from the hillside slums. Many didn’t even know where they were heading; they just wanted to express their outrage. They’d voted, they’d seen the high turnout, they’d stood outside the polling places late into the night and demanded that the results be read aloud, so even in neighborhoods that had once overwhelmingly supported Chávez, people knew that Maduro had been defeated. Eventually the streets in the heart of Caracas filled with rivers of people carrying handwritten signs with the names of their barrios. “Libertad!” they chanted—“Freedom!” They banged pots, burned tires, and paraded on motorcycles, expressing a mixture of fear, indignation, and exhilaration.

Luis Alberto Gárate, who lives in a slum called San Agustín, took part in a rally led by Machado two days after the vote.^* He’d ridden across Caracas on his motorcycle, with his two sons, eleven and fifteen, on the back. “Here we are—we’re not stopping halfway,” he shouted above the noise of the protest. “I used to support the revolution,” he explained, “but I’m not in favor of what is happening and the lack of progress for my children. We realize now that this doesn’t lead to a future, a reality where our children can really have a life of dignity in Venezuela.”

Much of Gárate’s family had migrated: “They’re all in Miami, Colombia, New York, Peru, working like hell and having a hard time of it.” Promising that the economy would recover and families would be reunited was a signal element of González’s campaign. Everywhere he and Machado went, people approached them, weeping for their relatives to be able to return. “I’m the only one left here,” Gárate said. Now he feared what would come: “Here we started with blood, and unfortunately, in order to get out of this, it will take more blood.”

Maduro responded to the demonstrations with fiery televised speeches, calling the protesters criminals and drug addicts. He claimed that some were returning migrants who had been trained in the US to cause havoc. The army’s top generals immediately confirmed that they supported him. Soldiers, police, intelligence agents, and the shock troops known as colectivos were deployed to confront demonstrators. They also patrolled poor areas, intimidating and rounding up those who voiced dissent. The human rights group Monitor de Víctimas reported that twenty-three people were shot to death during protests in the first few days after the election. Another rights group, Foro Penal, said on August 17 that more than 1,500 people had been arrested. Lawyers said that many protesters have been charged with terrorism, a crime with a thirty-year maximum sentence.

Two days after the election Yorluis Betancourt, thirty-two, watched the police beat and arrest his younger brother, Alfredo Rondón, simply because he was on the street at night after their neighborhood, an impoverished area called Las Mayas, had erupted in protests. Betancourt has a government job, and he said he voted for Maduro because he feared that if he didn’t he would be fired (this is what Venezuelans call obligatory voting). But his sympathies were with González.

Betancourt used to support Chávez because “Chávez remembered the people. He delivered things for the people.” Maduro, he said, had lost touch. “I’d invite him to get in my car,” he continued,

and take a drive around Caracas so that he can see what it’s like, see the poor people, see the houses where they don’t have food, the people cooking over wood fires because they don’t have a canister of gas or even a stove.

María Corina Machado is an unlikely conduit for the hopes of poor Venezuelans. She is a member of a wealthy Caracas family that traces its origins to the conquistadors. Upper-class families like hers are known as los Amos del Valle, the Lords of the Valley, because for centuries they dominated the valley of Caracas, and therefore the entire nation.

Machado grew up in a large house with a tennis court and lush gardens. She attended a Catholic girls’ school in Caracas and then a boarding school in Wellesley, Massachusetts. She once referred to her upbringing as “a childhood protected from contact with reality.” In college back in Caracas, she enthused about the writing of Ayn Rand, and in business school she gravitated toward a professor who espoused a radical form of free market economics. Machado married early, had three children (she and her husband eventually divorced), earned a degree in engineering, and served on the board of her family’s steel company. With her mother she created a foundation that operated a home for troubled children. (The Chávez government seized and then shut down the youth home and expropriated the steel firm, without compensation.) Her first foray into politics came after Chávez’s election. In 2002 she cofounded a group called Súmate, with the goal of ensuring that elections met democratic norms. In 2004 Súmate helped organize a recall referendum to remove Chávez from office.

The recall failed. Results announced on election night showed Chávez with 59 percent of the vote. Machado and other recall proponents accused the government of fraud. They pointed to an exit poll that showed the opposition winning by a large margin. Some claimed that voting machines had been programmed with a cap on the total number of anti-Chávez votes. A report by the Atlanta-based Carter Center, which sent experts to observe the referendum, found no evidence of fraud. It said the exit poll’s methodology was flawed and that the opposition promoted fraud claims even though its own quick count of results validated the official tally.

It was a revealing episode, one that shaped both Machado’s career and the course of the opposition. A former Súmate leader who disagreed with the decision to claim fraud told me: “That promoted abstention: ‘Why should I vote if they’re just going to pull a fast one?’”

The doubts Súmate sowed laid the groundwork for the opposition’s call for a boycott of the National Assembly election in 2005. The result was disastrous: the legislature became a rubber stamp and appointed Supreme Court judges and other officials who were closely aligned with Chávez. Since then the opposition has been riven between an abstentionist wing—in which Machado was prominent—and a wing that favored competing in elections even when conditions were unequal.

For much of the last decade Machado has been seen as a divisive and mostly marginal figure in the opposition. She strongly objected to negotiations with the government and accused those who participated of betrayal. She backed boycotts of the presidential election in 2018 (which allowed Maduro to be easily reelected), the National Assembly election in 2020, and gubernatorial elections in 2021. She favored the crippling Trump sanctions (which most Venezuelans oppose). And she called for a military intervention by the United Nations or the Organization of American States on the grounds that Venezuela had been taken over by a criminal mafia, of which Maduro was the figurehead, and could only be liberated by armed action. Hers was the voice of retribution—she intended to bury socialism and punish the Chavistas for years of corruption and abuses. And her policy proposals were far to the right, such as calling for the privatization of the state-run oil company.

By 2023 the opposition was deeply divided and out of ideas. Machado emerged as a spark: voters exhausted by years of economic misery, rising authoritarianism, and opposition missteps responded to her fierceness and her outsider aura. Two people who spoke to her early last year told me that Machado was ambivalent about whether the opposition should participate in the 2024 presidential election. But opinion polls showed that she was gaining in popularity and that if she could win a primary she would become the undisputed leader of the opposition. So she ran and won the primary in October 2023 with more than 90 percent of the vote.

There was, however, a problem: earlier in the year, the government had banned Machado from holding office. In January 2024 the Supreme Court upheld the ban. Given her history, Machado might have been tempted at that point to call for an election boycott. Yet the polling that confirmed her surging popularity also showed that Venezuelans wanted to vote, and if she again told them to abstain, they would throw their support to someone else.

But there was no clear choice to replace her. González was first put on the ballot as a placeholder, to meet a government deadline for entering candidates. As weeks passed and no consensus emerged, he became the default choice. Machado resisted accepting him as her replacement, and according to three people familiar with the circumstances, she relented only after the nation’s two Roman Catholic cardinals personally intervened.

As it turned out, González and Machado complemented each other. A little-known figure, González had served as Venezuela’s ambassador to Algeria and to Argentina before retiring from the foreign service. He grew up in a lower-middle-class family; his mother was a schoolteacher and his father a shopkeeper. His political roots were in the Christian Democratic party known as Copei. He was soft-spoken and moderate and appeared physically frail. While Machado had built a career as a radical opposed to negotiations, González believed in engaging in dialogue and lowering the costs to Maduro of giving up power.

Machado toured the country, drawing crowds and transferring her popularity to González. He made only a small number of public appearances and preferred to record videos that were viewed online. Venezuelans saw Machado as a maternal figure, the strong woman defending her children. Supporters brought statues of the Virgin Mary to her rallies and gave her rosaries. González was the grandfather, kindly, wise. Together they represented the Venezuelan family and the desire felt by so many to have their relatives return home.

The government arrested dozens of Machado’s aides and campaign workers. Her campaign director and several other staffers took refuge in the Argentine ambassador’s residence. Ordinary supporters found themselves the targets of government harassment. Hotels where Machado had stayed were ordered to be closed. An empanada restaurant was shut down by tax inspectors after the owners had served her breakfast. She traveled by car for fear she would be blocked from boarding airplanes.

Maduro used government resources to campaign, and his rallies were filled with government workers who had been ordered to attend. Even the date of the election—Chávez’s birthday—was selected to benefit him. The government made it almost impossible for the millions of Venezuelans living abroad to update their registration so they could vote; in Colombia, which has about three million Venezuelan refugees, only 248 people were able to change their registration and only 25 new voters registered. For years Venezuelan elections had been unequal contests; the obstacles this time were more extreme than ever.

On election night, after he was declared the winner, Maduro celebrated on a stage set up outside the presidential palace. Wearing a windbreaker in the national colors, he declared that he had “a clean conscience.” The crowd seemed lukewarm for a victory party, except when it roused itself to chant the combative and macho nickname that Maduro’s handlers had given him during the campaign: el Gallo Pinto, the Fighting Cock, the Red Rooster.

“You people are very serious,” Maduro said. “On July 28, at the end of the day, who got the vote of the people? Who won?” There was no roar of approbation. A few scattered voices answered: “Chávez.” He tried again: “Who won?” This time there were more shouts: “Chávez! Chávez!” It wasn’t the response he was looking for. “The Fighting Cock of the people!” he bellowed. “Here is your victorious Red Rooster!”

Several days later Maduro summoned foreign journalists to a news conference. He wore a blue pinstripe suit and held up a miniature blue book containing the constitution, as Chávez used to do. An emerald pinkie ring glittered on his right hand. He talked about the unrest in the streets: the protesters were criminals, terrorists, fascists, part of a right-wing conspiracy emanating from Washington. He produced a Bible and read from the story of Saint Thomas, who doubted accounts of Jesus’ resurrection: “Jesus saith unto him, ‘Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.’” He seemed to be saying to the nation: for shame, you unfaithful people, demanding to see the election results. Blessed are they who believe without seeing.

A few hours after the head of the electoral council awarded the election to Maduro, the attorney general announced that the transmission system for sending data from the country’s 30,026 voting machines to the national tabulation centers had been targeted by a cyberattack on election night. He said that the attack originated in North Macedonia and that Machado and a couple of exiled opposition leaders were behind it. The North Macedonian government said it knew of no such attack and that Venezuela had furnished no evidence that it had happened. But the “cyber-fascist” attack became an excuse for the electoral council’s failure to provide a full breakdown of election results. Its website, where results are usually posted, went dead.

Many observers pointed out that even if the transmission system were compromised, the protocol was for the voting machines to print out the actas before transmitting the results, and that the actas, which were in the electoral council’s possession, contained all the information needed to produce a full count and breakdown of the votes. The machines also retained the votes in their memory systems. And in any case, the government claimed to have repelled the attack, which is ostensibly what allowed it to announce its version of the election results.

Russia, China, and Iran recognized Maduro’s victory. Cuba and Nicaragua, both left-wing dictatorships, extended their congratulations. Most other countries in the hemisphere, including the United States, insisted that the vote count be verified and that the electoral council reveal the full breakdown of results. The Carter Center, which again sent an election mission at the government’s invitation, concluded: “Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election did not meet international standards of electoral integrity and cannot be considered democratic.” On August 1, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that “given the overwhelming evidence, it is clear to the United States and, most importantly, to the Venezuelan people that Edmundo González Urrutia won the most votes in Venezuela’s July 28 presidential election.” The leftist presidents of Brazil and Colombia withheld recognition from Maduro and positioned themselves as possible mediators.

Three days after the election Maduro petitioned the Supreme Court, which is packed with loyalists, to certify his victory—and on August 22 it did so. Legal experts said that the court had no standing to intervene and that it was up to the electoral council to publish the full results. But it was a clever gambit to legitimize the theft, and the favorable decision may give other governments a reason to recognize his victory.

Meanwhile Maduro unveiled a smartphone app through which Venezuelans could report their fellow citizens for subversive activity. Security forces acted with a newfound aggressiveness and brutality as a screaming president encouraged them on television and they were freed of any vestige of rules, norms, and due process—the brazenness of the stolen election showed them that there were no limits. They went door to door, rounding up suspects. Some of those arrested included polling place witnesses who had received actas on election night, according to reports. Venezuelan journalists and opposition politicians were thrown in jail. Leaders and activists were informed that their passports had been revoked. On social media Venezuelans documented soldiers entering their homes to make arrests without warrants—evidence as flimsy as a video showing someone at a protest was sufficient pretext. Police stopped people on the street, reviewed the contents of their cell phones, and arrested those whose social media or texts revealed opposition sympathies. Desperate family members waited outside detention centers, seeking information about loved ones who had disappeared.

Machado and González have mostly been staying out of sight to evade possible arrest. Yet she has remained active, giving interviews on television and online platforms. “The regime is at its weakest position ever,” she told Christiane Amanpour on CNN. “They have lost total legitimacy.” Asked whether the United States might offer incentives to Maduro to leave power, she said, “We will certainly need the United States on our side for incentives to be real, important, significant, and credible threats as well.”

All of this sounded uncomfortably like 2019, when Juan Guaidó, a young legislator, challenged Maduro by swearing himself in as “interim president.” The Trump administration recognized him as Venezuela’s real president. But it was a fantasy: Guaidó had no power, and his challenge unraveled. And yet the Guaidó misadventure grew out of a conviction that only international pressure—including the threat of military action—could force out Maduro and rescue Venezuela.

The Biden administration met with Maduro’s representatives last year and eased sanctions as it tried to push him to improve election conditions. While those remained very unequal, the effort helped create the space for González’s candidacy and the resounding voter response. Not a lot of good options remain for US policymakers. A senior administration official told me that the immediate priority is to work with allies in Latin America, especially Brazil and Colombia, to maintain pressure on Maduro. Tough talk from Washington now would only undermine that cooperation. The US could take steps to make it easier for Maduro to give up power—he and other top officials are under indictment in the US on drug trafficking charges. And the Trump administration theatrically placed a $15 million bounty on his head. But any promises the Biden administration might make to Maduro before November will count for little, since they could be reversed if Trump is again elected. Furthermore, Maduro’s current term continues until January 10, and there’s no guarantee that a promise he might make today about a transition would be kept in January.

It was always understood that even if González got the most votes and Maduro recognized his victory, all he was winning was a chance to negotiate a transfer of power. Chavistas control the military, the legislature, the judiciary—all the state institutions. Even if González were to become president, the Chavistas could make the country ungovernable. The National Assembly and the Supreme Court could even remove him from office. An agreement that would allow for a successful transition was always going to be necessary.

On July 28 millions of Venezuelans sent a message through the ballot box that couldn’t have been clearer: they want change. “This was a plebiscite, a plebiscite against Maduro,” Enrique Márquez, an opposition politician who was on the ballot as the candidate of a small party called Centrados, told me. “The plebiscite worked, and Maduro doesn’t want to accept the result. Before the Venezuelan people he is completely naked.” The foundational myth of Chavismo—that it derives its power from the people—has been shattered.

—August 22, 2024