Venezuela’s Berlin Wall Moment

Last week started in Venezuela with a moment that combined Berlin Wall spontaneity and a French Revolutionary spirit. Very late in the evening of Sunday, July 28, the government refused to recognize the opposition’s victory in that day’s election and declared incumbent President Nicolás Maduro the winner. The next day, protests broke out nearly everywhere: A think tank counted more than 200. In Coro, a small coastal city, a protester climbed up a statue of Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s late predecessor and mentor, and hammered his signature military beret as others cheered. When he got down, the crowd tied ropes around the statue and celebrated as it collapsed. What they wanted, in the words of a Venezuelan commentator, was to see Chávez’s head “dragged through the dirt.”

Also last Monday, a man waving a Venezuelan flag rode a horse onto the highway outside the city of Maracay. He was leading a caravan of motorists and screaming “Venezuela libre.” In Punto Fijo, in the country’s west, a police officer burst into tears, took off her uniform, and joined the protesters she’d been assigned to intimidate. Some of her colleagues on the scene followed suit. Elsewhere in the country, the police did follow orders: Nearly 750 anti-government demonstrators were arrested that day. Six were killed.

[Read: Venezuela passed the torch, even if Maduro didn’t]

Not long ago, Venezuela’s greatest lover of grand, revolutionary gestures was Chávez himself. Chávez was the one who embraced the image of a freedom lover on a horse—the independence hero Simón Bolívar, whose name Chávez appended to everything he wished to assert control over: the Bolivarian national bank, the Bolivarian army, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Chávez delighted in toppling the monuments of the ruling class, although the ruling class he rebelled against was not the type to build statues. Instead, he expropriated jewelry stores and shopping malls in the name of socialist revolution.

Chávez understood the power of symbols. He held onto the presidency not just because the oil boom of the 2000s allowed him to lavish subsidies on the poor, but also because he was an exceptionally gifted populist. That doesn’t mean Chávez had qualms about using force. He closed opposition TV channels, imprisoned less-than-subservient judges, and played dictator as needed. But he preferred to win elections, because he could. In 2012, the year before his death, he spent more on his reelection campaign and short-lived social programs than any other president in Venezuela’s history—buying, with public money, the popular support that would ensure the continuity of his legacy through his heir, Maduro.

More than a decade later, a humanitarian crisis has turned a quarter of Venezuela’s population into emigrants, and Maduro seems to have decided that popular support is a luxury he can do without. To stay in power, he must have concluded some time ahead of the election, repression would have to suffice. His charisma certainly wasn’t going to win him the votes he needed. And with the country’s oil industry in decrepit shape, Maduro could hardly have afforded the grandiose presidential campaigns of his predecessor, or the generous food baskets doled out only during election years. He went for the cheaper option: scaring activists, opposition leaders, and everyday people into voting a certain way by showing them that those who don’t can wind up in prison.

Distant observers of Venezuelan politics might have thought it obvious that Maduro was never going to recognize the election results. But some Venezuelan academics and political leaders I interviewed before the vote were convinced, or maybe hopeful, that Maduro would acquiesce if the opposition victory was overwhelming. Even dictatorships need some level of popular support, they argued. Perhaps military leaders would see the results and calculate that Maduro’s collapse was imminent. Perhaps they would be willing to negotiate a deal with the opposition, leaving the regime exposed.

The opposition victory was overwhelming. In the hours after the election, María Corina Machado, the leader of the opposition, coordinated more than 600,000 volunteer poll watchers in an effort to obtain the vote tallies from poll centers throughout the country. By last Monday afternoon—after the crowd had toppled the Chávez statue and the man on horseback waved Venezuela’s flag—Machado confirmed what everyone knew. In a press conference, she announced that, having obtained the tallies from 80 percent of the polling stations, she could say with certainty that opposition presidential candidate Edmundo González—the man who substituted for Machado on the ticket when Maduro forbade her from running—had won by a landslide, with 67 percent of the vote. González had won in every single state, despite the fact that only a few months earlier no one knew his name.

The opposition was exhilarated; Monday felt like the sprouting of a revolution. But Maduro, undaunted, swiftly cracked down. Almost immediately, the internet began failing more than usual. By the Thursday after election day, the government had suspended the most common flights out of the country. Low-profile protesters began getting arrested in what government officials informally called Operation Knock-Knock. (“It’s called knock-knock because that’s the bang on the door you get in the early hours of the morning,” an activist told Reuters.) The organization Foro Penal has verified more than 1,200 people have been arrested in protests since the election, including about 100 teenagers. Maduro announced that two new maximum-security prisons would be built in order to accommodate “the gangs engaged in the criminal attacks of these past few days”—meaning the protesters.

[From the December 2021 issue: The bad guys are winning]

Maduro has few friends left in the region. The only country in South America to recognize his electoral victory was Bolivia. Argentina, Ecuador, Peru, Panama, and the United States have all recognized Edmundo González as president-elect. Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia are awkwardly situated, because they’re governed by fellow left-wing leaders, but even they have asked Maduro to supply the detailed, tabulated results of the election, which Maduro hasn’t done. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva, a longtime buddy of Chávez’s, expressed outrage at Maduro’s threats of a “bloodbath” to those challenging him but has so far stopped short of using words like “fraud.”

Nothing further can be asked of the opposition leadership; Machado and González have pulled off something extraordinary. On the campaign trail, they faced every imaginable difficulty: Their staffers were thrown in jail; state-controlled media refused them airtime; gasoline stations and hotels were closed for supplying services to them. Yet the pair rallied crowds in the most remote corners of the country, places only Chávez had previously galvanized. When Maduro banned Machado from running for president, the opposition could have been derailed by intrigue and succession battles; instead it coalesced behind González, a career diplomat who comes across not as a power-hungry schemer but as someone happy to help.

In the past 25 years, the opposition has used three different tactics to challenge Chávez and Maduro: elections, protests, and international support. Never before have all three strategies gathered so much momentum, or come together so effectively all at the same time. Just about a week ago, when so many preconditions seemed to be finally aligning to bring the dictatorship to its end, the moment seemed full of hope. But if, with all of that serendipity, the Venezuelan opposition does not triumph, then maybe Maduro will be proved right that dictatorship can be sustained indefinitely with repression alone.