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In a major milestone for the upcoming elections in Venezuela, all candidates and parties have been registered and registration is closed: notably without the violent fringe political figure that the US State Department seems to be fawning over.
With 13 candidates already in the race, including far-right opposition parties, it is the farthest right of them all that the US seems to think represents the will of the Venezuelan people; a party whose would-be candidate has been barred from holding political office due to multiple scandals including trying to lobby for a military intervention in her own country.
That is despite the fact that Vente Venezuela is so small it’s not even a registered political organization, nor has it participated in the previous two election cycles—a requirement for a political party to remain registered according to Venezuelan law.
The leader of Vente Venezuela is Maria Corina Machado, a political figure who was banned from holding political office in 2015 after she participated in an OAS (Organization of American States) conference on behalf of another country, which was Panama, in violation of her duties as a member of the Venezuelan National Assembly.
At the conference, she advocated for imposing sanctions against Venezuela while calling for military intervention by invoking the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance.
Her ban on political office was appealed, yet upheld in March in advance of the national elections on July 28th, and it is on behalf of this delinquent right-winger that the US is now threatening Venezuela with a reimposition of harsh sanctions on crude oil exports that has led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people and a large wave of immigrants northbound for Texas, Arizona, and California.
Not playing ball
President Joe Biden’s government lifted sanctions on Venezuela’s oil and gas for six months last October to convince Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to comply with the Barbados Agreement, signed between the two countries that saw sanctions relief in exchange for promises of free and fair elections.
The US Federal Government under Donald Trump accused Venezuela of election interference in the country’s last executive race in 2018, despite there being no evidence to the point, and presenting no evidence on their own. In response to Maduro’s re-election, the US refused to recognize him as head of state, backed a political outsider named Juan Guaido whose far-right party got 2% of the vote and whom 81% of Venezuelans had never heard of, and imposed harsh sanctions.
This led to an attempt by this minimal opposition figure to violently unseat the government in April of 2019 which failed completely, and he was eventually driven out of the country into exile. Maria Corina Machado is closely linked with this exiled agent of Washington, as WaL reported earlier this year, and so it’s perhaps no surprise that it is on her behalf that the US is attempting another strong-arming of the Venezuelan socialist government.
A veteran and establishment left-winger and National Assembly representative, Roy Daza recently sat down with Venezuela Analysis to explain some of the aspects of the July elections that the US State Department never seems to have time to.
“Ms. Machado ran in a primary organized by a far-right group [the National Primary Commission] in October 2023,” Daza says. “It’s worth noting that, by the organizers’ choice, this process was not supervised by Venezuela’s National Electoral Council [CNE]. At that time, the far-right was already divided because Manuel Rosales, a prominent opposition figure, decided not to participate”.
Neither did, as it turns out, his party Fuerza Vecinal, which runs municipalities in half of greater Caracas and in various cities around the country.
“Moreover, everyone in the opposition knew that Ms. Machado would not be able to register. She decided instead to stage a drama by attempting to launch someone as a candidate with a name close to her own [Corina Yoris],” said the Assembly rep. “That didn’t work because Ms. Machado’s party is not registered by the CNE”.
“Incidentally, Ms. Machado‘s party could have also collected signatures to renew the subscription of her party, but they chose not to,” concludes Daza. “Finally, I should point out that nothing would have kept Ms. Machado’s proxy from being inscribed as an opposition candidate by parties like Un Nuevo Tiempo, Fuerza Vecinal, or Mesa de la Unidad, but they decided not to”.
Regime change in Caracas
Similar to a recent State Department statement calling on Maduro to produce a “road map” to “free and fair elections” by this Thursday, Brazilian state officials expressed concern over Vente Venezuela’s allegations that they had trouble registering their candidates.
Brasilia claimed the situation was “not compatible” with the Barbados Agreement. 13 candidates and 37 political parties were successfully registered by Monday’s deadline. The US-financially-backed coalition group Unitary Platform had difficulties registering Ms. Machado’s last-minute substitute, Corina Yoris, an unknown 80-year-old academic, who was allegedly unable to access online registration. The party demanded an extension.
The CNE complied and admitted the last-minute registration of 74-year-old ex-diplomat Edmundo González Urrutia. The Unitary Platform will reportedly try to replace him in the coming weeks. Rosales, a brief ally of Ms. Machado, had no issues registering his candidacy through his own party.
Elections seem to therefore be proceeding without issue from many who’d like to see the Chavismo government of Nicolas Maduro dismantled. The only difficulties appear to be completely within the bounds of Venezuelan law, albeit contrary to how Washington D.C. desires.
Venezuela is one of the longest political dissidents of Washington’s rule over the Western Hemisphere. Many countries in Latin America have had their leaders overthrown by the US, including Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, Honduras, and Panama. Another recent member on that list was Bolivia, when Evo Morales had to flee in the middle of the night after winning re-election as his family’s homes were ransacked and burned and his political allies kidnapped, blackmailed, or forced to resign.
Ted Snider, writing in the aftermath, titled his summary of the coup, which was plotted with American backing as revealed by leaked audio recordings, “Finally Got Him,” summarizing how relentless Washington will go to control what it sees as its backyard.
Ms. Machado has been funded by US government proxies like the National Endowment for Democracy since 2005, when she was invited to the White House to meet with George W. Bush Jr. She seems reasonably excluded from Venezuelan politics, and the fact that neither she nor her fringe party participated in the manners available to them this election year is telling.
When Juan Guaido’s party lost decisively, he didn’t wait for the next cycle, he tried to lead a bloody street putsch while taking millions from Washington and spending them on lavish parties in Bogota when it failed. The problem this time, as El Pais reports, is that allegedly the Biden Administration doesn’t want to create another large wave of economic migrants such as was seen after 2019, and so they believe that by preventing the use of dollars from facilitating international transactions in the Venezuelan oil market, they can steer Maduro into allowing Machado or her party to run without resorting to measures seen under the Trump Administration. WaL
PICTURED ABOVE: Maria Cornia Machado in 2014. PC: Carlos Diaz, CC 2.0.
