Maduro dismisses himself and experts warn Venezuela is headed toward Nicaragua’s authoritarian model

Despite allegations of fraud and backed by the questioning of the Supreme Court (TSJ) that validated his victory in Thursday’s presidential election without publishing the electoral record, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has resisted internal and external pressures and railed against the opposition.

“This time there will be no amnesty towards criminals and terrorists. I challenge you to look at each other in the streets,” he said boldly, adding that he advocates electoral reform “so that those who do not know the laws, public powers, the Constitution and want to impose a fascist regime cannot participate in the electoral processes.”

The National Electoral Council (CNE) declared Maduro the winner of the election without making the minutes public or breaking down the results by polling stations. The opposition says it has obtained a good part of the minutes and that according to its investigation, opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia is the winner with 67% of the vote.

Several Latin American presidents, including some progressives, have questioned the TSJ proposal. The first to do so was Gabriel Boric, who has been very critical of the opacity of the electoral results in Venezuela. The Chilean president said in his X account that “Today the Venezuelan TSJ has finished reinforcing the fraud.”

Boric assured that he does not recognize “the self-proclaimed victory of Maduro and Co.”, that it is “a dictatorship that rigs elections, represses those who think differently and is indifferent to the world’s largest exile.” “The Venezuelan dictatorship is not the left,” he concluded, “a deeply democratic continental left is possible and necessary,” “a transformative progressivism that improves the living conditions of its people by building community instead of individualism.”

“The crisis in Venezuela is undeniable and, from Guatemala, we have already said that its recent elections are only a demonstration of this: the Maduro regime is not democratic and we do not recognize its fraud,” said Guatemala’s progressive President Bernardo Arevalo. “The people of our entire continent must demand a peaceful solution that guarantees the will of the people and recovers the country for all Venezuelans.”

In fact, this peaceful solution through dialogue is what some countries in the region have tried after elections. Colombia, Brazil and Mexico Announced in early August They are willing to mediate a way out of this crisis, but this process seems to have failed, at least publicly. Presidents Gustavo Petro (Colombia) and Lula da Silva (Brazil), former close to the Venezuelan regime, seem to be running out of patience and last week proposed new elections, which have also been rejected by the parties.

The Nicaraguan model

Experts mention that Maduro’s position in Venezuela has an authoritarian bent that is similar to that of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. Michael Paarlberg, Sanders’ former senior adviser for Latin America, said in an interview with elDiario.es that “Maduro is taking Daniel Ortega as inspiration.”

“Ortega is the most important model not only for the left, but for the authoritarian axis, as he also serves as an inspiration for Bukele in El Salvador. He is the model of someone who came to power relatively popular and did not have to resort to state violence to stay in office,” Paarlberg explained.

Ryan Berg, director of the Americas Program at the Washington think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, explained in an early August Bloomberg article that “to stay in power, Maduro has moved the country in the direction of Nicaragua, which is a fully police state.” Although Berg believes Maduro still has “a way to go if he wants to create Ortega-style total control over Venezuelan society,” this may be the model “he’s headed toward.”

Tom Shannon, a US diplomat who first worked in Venezuela in the mid-90s, told The Guardian he sees two solutions: the Nicaraguan model or the Romanian model. “The Nicaraguan solution is for Maduro and his government to point the finger at the world and, as Ortega has done, continue the repression, detentions, expulsions and denaturalisations in an attempt to establish total and complete control.” The Romanian solution, meanwhile, would be that “people become so frustrated that they turn against the government in a very violent way.”

Daniel Ortega, leader of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, became president for a second time in 2007 and has remained in office ever since. He has been declared the winner of three other presidential elections, the last of them in 2021 with 75% of the vote and with questions about their legitimacy and the official results – which were not recognised by the US and the EU. After imprisoning seven presidential candidates, Ortega had no rivals.

In Nicaragua, the authoritarian drift has become evident. According to the country’s electoral law, there is no second round if a candidate reaches 35% of the votes. In the last elections, faced with the risk of not reaching that figure, the president increased repression. In addition to the arrests of opposition politicians in the electoral context – in total, 46 detainees – press freedom was also curtailed, dropping from 75th place in the Reporters Without Borders ranking in 2016 to 121st in 2021.

During this time he managed to keep legislative and judicial powers under his control, as well as the security forces, which have been key in suppressing citizen protests. The most obvious was in 2018, when the population demonstrated against social security reform. Police and paramilitary groups attacked protesters and carried out arbitrary arrests, disappearances and extrajudicial executions. “That’s when his true authoritarian colors came out and when he realized he needed to resort to brutal force. He did so and succeeded,” Paarlberg told elDiario.es.

“If Maduro were wise, he would reconsider his position,” the analyst says. “There is a possible scenario in which he realizes he will lose and leaves power, and then he could negotiate a path in which he is amnestied and in which he can go into opposition and run for future elections in a reformed Chavista party,” he adds.

“With that scenario, Maduro could be reassured, but at the moment I don’t think he is making these strategic calculations because he sees the possibility of a change in the existential context of life or death and in which he loses power forever,” the expert says. “There are many examples in other countries of long-standing authoritarian parties leaving power and then returning. In Mexico, for example, the PRI was an authoritarian party that ruled for 71 years, but managed to extricate itself through negotiations. “They recognized how unpopular they were and that they would lose the elections, which happened in 2000. But thanks to those negotiations they returned to power in 2012 with Enrique Pena Nieto.”

The Wall Street Journal Recently it was revealed that, in private conversations, the United States has offered Maduro an amnesty in exchange for resigning from his post, which the US government itself has publicly rejected. Nevertheless, State Department Deputy Spokesperson Vedant Patel said that “a number of options are being considered to pressure Maduro to return Venezuela to the path of democracy.”

repression

The repression of Maduro – who had already feared a “bloodbath” in the campaign if he did not win the election – did not take long to be met with opposition protests. The organization Foro Penal, which has compiled a registry of those detained since the election, counted 1,503 arrests on August 18. According to official figures, the number of those arrested is more than 2,400.

Meanwhile, the UN human rights office has been expelled from the country for condemning “large numbers of arbitrary detentions” as well as “disproportionate use of force”.

Patricia Tappata, an expert from the Independent United Nations Mission in Venezuela, assured a few days after the election that the country is witnessing “the accelerated reactivation of repressive mechanisms that were never dismantled and are now used to undermine citizens’ public freedoms, their right to political participation and the free expression of ideas.”

Foro Penal lawyer Stefania Migliorini announced in a press conference this week that of the hundreds of detainees “only 90 people have been released to date”. In several speeches to the public, Maduro assured that these people would be transferred to maximum-security prisons. The Victims Monitor initiative estimates that at least 23 people have been killed as a result of the post-election protests.