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Inauguration Day for the President of Venezuela is this Friday, and a somewhat doddering political opponent Edmundo Gonzalez recently stood before reporters in Washington DC and said he would soon be returning to his home country to fulfill his charge as president-elect.
Despite what President Biden may have told Gonzalez hours before that press conference, indications are that the troubled South American economy is on course for another 5 years of Chavismo under long-time president Nicolas Maduro, whose electoral victory on July 28th of last year was certified by the nation’s supreme court.
It is the second set of Venezuelan political election results in a row that the United States executive has openly denied the results of. Nearly 6 years ago civil unrest briefly rocked the capital of Caracas when a political nobody named Juan Guaido encouraged the people to install him as president.
The United States, first under Trump, and then Biden, used all its influence through the EU, UN, and the Organization of American States (OAS) to try and cripple the Maduro regime and force it to abdicate in favor of Guaido, who the overwhelming majority of voters had never even heard of, and who wasn’t even second place at the polls.
Guaido gradually lost control of the situation, as years of being the “Interim President” amounted to no actual power.
In contrast, this year’s political figure in Gonzalez enjoys significantly less support. In 2019, the US succeeded in convincing the UK to freeze the Venezuelan government’s gold reserves, and watched as nearly every influential Western European nation recognized Guaido as the legitimate president. A sanctions campaign blacklisted Venezuelan oil exports, and the economy tanked such that 40,000 people at least died from deprivation.
So far, apart from Italy formally recognizing Gonzalez as the president-elect, and the Spanish government offering him asylum, the 75-year-old reclusive former diplomat, who has only emerged into the public view post-elections, left a tour of the EU with little but verbal encouragement. El Pais reports that this is a direct example of the EU’s last decision to enter into Venezuelan affairs during the Guaido putsch.
Vote totals
The EU has, like the UN and other organizations, routinely urged the release of the vote tabulator records precinct by precinct, which Venezuelan election authorities (CNE) have failed to do. The CNE claimed a cyberattack in the hours following the elections created a security breach, and waited to present them directly to the supreme court.
The court invited all political parties and the CNE to turn over all evidence and vote totals during an official review. The hardline anti-government opposition claimed to have collected tabulations that show Gonzalez won with over 70% of the vote which they published on a parallel website. However the website’s links were broken from the launch, and the opposition ignored the high court’s summons to submit evidence during its electoral process review.
It wasn’t the first time this campaign cycle that the opposition has opted not to participate in the proper election procedures as established by the constitution, including organizing closed primaries and ducking the official nomination procedure for a presidential candidate and political party.
According to a UN election observer mission, the tallies collected and submitted by the opposition “exhibit all the security devices of the original protocols of the results,” including “several security elements such as QR codes and verification codes with unique signatures, as well as physical signatures of officials and agents”.
No member of the news media has been able to look at either the opposition or the government’s official vote tallies. Preceding the UN observer mission, which didn’t release the opposition vote tallies in their report, the US-funded Carter Center and OAS both released reports claiming the opposition’s numbers to be correct, though neither released them.
Mainstream media outlets are using the Carter Center and OAS reports as the basis of fact, but these institutions are deeply interconnected with the US government which has taken extraordinary actions in pursuit of removing Maduro from power, up to and possibly including an armed assassination attempt.
Not enough consensus
Over 50 nations have already offered congratulations to Maduro, including Qatar, Russia, Iran, China, Turkiye, and China in addition to the socialist country’s neighbors Nicaragua, Cuba, Honduras, and Bolivia. Three of the largest power brokers in Latin America, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, are maintaining impartiality.
Most of these have, like the EU, insisted that the only path forward is for the CNE to release the official vote tallies, but come Friday, Maduro will be installed in power again, and the Western Hemisphere will have to decide what to do with him.
EU ambassadors agreed at Gonzalez’s request to extend sanctions on 15 Venezuelan officials set to expire on the same day that Maduro is inaugurated. Even in doing so, however, several ambassadors noted that it will make little difference as the whole of the Venezuelan government is sanctioned already.
The hardest hardline opposition member, Maria Corina Machado has called for national protests on the 10th, and by comparing them to last election season, one can probably tell how much political will is being used around the world to force the Maduro regime out of the country. WaL
We Humbly Ask For Your Support—Follow the link here to see all the ways, monetary and non-monetary.
PICTURED ABOVE: Venezuela’s Edmundo González and Joe Biden in Washington, on January 6th, 2025. PC: Edmundo González’s press office
