Even as the trial of several GECOM Secretariat officials for allegedly attempting to rig the March 2, 2020 General Elections is finally proceeding – albeit slowly – in our court system, over in Venezuela the Government of Nicolás Maduro appears determined to follow the Burnhamite PNC legacy of election rigging. But this is not mere coincidence since it flows from the inherent contradictions of populist regimes who upend the economic and political systems to “lift up the poor” at the expense of the supposed “rich”. The systems inevitably collapse under the contradictions and the poor end up worse off as the Governments are forced to adopt authoritarian measures to maintain their hold on power. These are justified by the rulers as necessary for the “greater good”.
So, we had Hugo Chávez getting elected democratically in 1998 on his revolutionary ideas that would destroy the “oligarchy” and ensure that à la Burnham, the “small man becomes the real man”. Like Burnham he nationalised the “commanding heights of the economy” – there the oil industry – to retain the profits that were being “sucked out by the foreign capitalist” and now distributed to the poor. It worked for a while, but by the time Chávez died from cancer in 2013 and his hand-picked successor Nicolás Maduro took power, the society was beginning to split asunder.
The foreign oil majors had all left and the Government-owned PDVSA did not have the expertise nor capital to sustain oil production. That year, Maduro was re-elected by a whisker, and it was clear he was determined not to leave holding onto office to voting vagaries. The refugee crisis exploded as millions of Venezuelans, unable to deal with the astronomical inflation and endemic food and medical shortages, fled the country.
By the next elections of 2018, the arbitrary and draconian measures he had instituted to suppress the Opposition caused them to boycott the elections. The US, which had imposed economic sanctions, tightened these even as they – along with about 50 other Western nations – recognised the Leader of the Opposition, Juan Guaidó as the president of the country. Maduro, however, held on to power with the help of the armed forces, which he secured through bribery and patronage. As a diversionary measure, after Exxon struck oil off our national waters in 2015, he initiated a series of hostile measures that culminated with his ‘annexation” of our Essequibo – two-thirds of our national territory.
We initiated two peaceful measures to this de facto declaration of war against us. The first was legal when we took the Venezuelan border controversy to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) through the operation of the Geneva Agreement, which Venezuela had signed. The second was diplomatic when we signed the Argyle Declaration with Maduro, whereby he committed his country to creating a zone of peace in the region. But he violated these with impunity and signalled that he was not to be trusted since holding on to power was his primary goal.
The US, under the aegis of VP Kamala Harris, to whom President Biden had assigned responsibility for maintaining peace and order below their southern border, facilitated the Barbados Agreement where Maduro committed to a menu of measures that would lead to “free and fair elections in late 2024”.
The election was held on July 28 and we now know it was massively rigged, using the same mechanism that the PNC used here in their attempted 2020 election rigging. The electoral law of Venezuela stipulates that each of the 30,000 voting machines produce “tally slips” – comparable to our Statements of Poll (SoPs) detailing how the votes were cast for the candidates. To declare the results, Venezuela’s Elections Council was supposed to make these available, but claimed the system was hacked – yet declared Maduro to be the winner. This was immediately accepted by Russia, Cuba, China and St Vincent. The US, however, along with Brazil and Colombia, has asked for the tally sheets. The US has now gone further and accepted Opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez as the winner based on the tally sheets produced by the Opposition.
We must do the same.
