Nearly a month after the Venezuelan president’s roundup many expect him to ride out the threats to his 11-year rule
Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro and Clavel Rangel, 26 AUG 2024
Leticia Torrealba sheds tears as she speaks about the detention of her 16-year-old son who was detained during a government crackdown in response to anti-government protests. Photograph: Ariana Cubillos/AP
Nicolás Maduro has baptised his political crackdown Operación Tun Tun (Operation Knock Knock) after the spine-chilling visits his security forces pay their targets. But when members of Venezuela’s secret police came for Aixa Daniela Boada López, they announced their arrival with a thump not a tap.
“It was about half past midnight when we heard this loud bang on the roof,” said one witness to her detention in the industrial complex of Ciudad Guayana early on 1 August.
Black-clad agents from the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service, Sebin, were seen smashing their way inside. They carried guns and a picture of the 19-year-old law student they had come to arrest. López was bundled into a vehicle as panicked relatives looked on.
“Neighbours came out to try and protect her but they pointed their weapons at them and took the girl,” said the witness, asking to remain anonymous for fear of suffering a similar fate.
Nearly a month after López’s capture, her future remains uncertain, as do those of more than 1,600 people detained during Maduro’s roundup of perceived opponents. For protesting against his widely doubted claim to have won the 28 July presidential election, López and others face charges of criminal association and terrorism that could lead to decades in jail.
Venezuela’s outlook is equally unsure. “These days, fear and uncertainty are the most accurate words to describe the situation,” said Gonzalo Himiob, a writer and activist involved in documenting rights violations some compare to those committed under the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Maduro’s administration tried to draw a line under the crisis this week with the announcement from the pro-government supreme court that it had corroborated the president’s victory over his rival, Edmundo González.
The court’s verdict flew in the face of growing international suspicions – even among leftwing politicians traditionally supportive of the movement created by Maduro’s mentor, Hugo Chávez – that the incumbent’s claim to victory did not stack up.
“I’ve no doubt this election has been stolen,” Chile’s leftist president, Gabriel Boric, said after the court’s judgment, accusing what he called Maduro’s “dictatorship” of falsifying the result.
Even Brazil and Colombia, whose leftist presidents have long-established ties to Chavismo, are refusing to recognise Maduro’s win, with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Gustavo Petro on Saturday renewing their call for the publication of disaggregated results data at polling station level.
Distrust and outright rejection of Maduro’s claim to victory are based on studies of detailed voting tallies that González’s campaign published after the government-controlled electoral court declared Maduro the winner, without offering proof.
The author of one such study, Dorothy Kronick, a political scientist at University of California, Berkeley, said she was initially sceptical about the opposition’s claim that those tallies showed González had won a landslide.
“If the data from the opposition campaign are true, then these results are shocking. If you believe these data, then the opposition candidate likely got more than 8m votes, maybe even 8.5m votes nationwide, which is more than Hugo Chávez got in the 2012 presidential election before a fifth, or more than a fifth of Venezuelans emigrated. So that’s incredible, right?” added Kronick, whose past work debunked electoral fraud claims that helped topple Bolivia’s leftist leader, Evo Morales, in 2019.
Kronick said her investigations of Venezuela’s electronic voting system and election had led her to conclude that the opposition’s claim was almost certainly correct and that González had therefore won comfortably.
Of last week’s supreme court’s ruling in Maduro’s favour, Kronick said: “I think their attitude is: ‘What are you [the opposition] going to do about it? … Knock yourself out.’”
Many experts believe that that tactic could work and that Maduro will manage to ride out the latest threat to his 11-year rule, just as he survived mass protests in 2017 and the botched 2019 attempt to topple him as well as one of the worst peacetime economic meltdowns in modern history.
It’s a “high probability scenario” that Maduro will start a third-term next January, said Harold Trinkunas, a Stanford University Latin America specialist who studies Venezuela’s politics and military. Maduro’s grip over the armed forces was a major part of why.
But Trinkunas did not believe that Maduro’s inauguration was inevitable. A Bangladesh-style uprising, like the one that forced the prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, to flee in a helicopter, could not be discounted. A gradual negotiated transition to democracy such as the one that ended Pinochet’s military regime, in 1990, was also possible.
Venezuelan history offered a third possible denouement. In December 1957, its dictator, Marcos Pérez Jiménez – who, like Maduro, was notorious for unleashing his secret police on political foes – called a referendum he hoped would help extend his 10-year rule.
“He stole that election, and it was widely perceived as stolen, and the next five weeks saw an increasing buildup of popular mobilisation, street protests and increasing violence,” Trinkunas recalled. “Finally, the generals under him told him he had to go.”
Pérez Jiménez fled Caracas in a presidential plane nicknamed La Vaca Sagrada (The Holy Cow), and was welcomed to the Dominican Republic by its dictator, Rafael Trujillo.
Some wonder whether growing pressure might force Maduro to seek shelter from an ally such as Cuba or Turkey. The US has reportedly offered him amnesty from drug trafficking charges if he steps down. But Maduro, who blames criticism of his election on a US-spawned conspiracy to overthrow his “revolution”, has offered no hint that he will go.
Instead, in a sign of his determination to retain power, he has called a three-day conference in October to discuss plans for his next six-year term, which would run from 2025 to 2031.
That is an agonising, though very real prospect for relatives of those jailed during Maduro’s crackdown, and for millions of Venezuelans who have fled abroad since he took office in 2013.
María De Grazia, whose father was detained by secret police on 7 August, urged the international community to keep up the pressure, “not just to secure my father’s freedom, but the freedom of all Venezuela”.
Américo De Grazia, a 64-year-old opposition politician, is believed to be being held in a notorious political prison and torture centre called El Helicoide.
“We represent peace and they represent torture. We represent freedom and they represent dictatorship,” said María De Grazia, 30, urging the world not to forget her country. “We can’t do it on our own.”
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