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OPINION — Absent a last-minute alteration of the electoral calendar by Venezuela’s authoritarian regime, Venezuelans will go to the polls on July 28 either to elect a new president or reelect Nicolas Maduro. Available polling data suggests immense support for the opposition’s candidate for president, former diplomat Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, a stand-in for opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, whose own candidacy was banned by the regime after she won an overwhelming victory in the opposition’s primary last October. Supporting a credible election process and assuring acceptance by the regime and opposition of the outcome of the vote will be a challenge for the entire region but especially for the governments of Brazil and Colombia.
The Maduro regime signed an agreement with the opposition in Barbados last October to proceed to free and fair national elections in 2024. In support of the agreement, the Biden administration lifted many of the sanctions the U.S. had imposed several years earlier. Since October, the regime has banned Machado, harassed opposition supporters, detained some of Gonzalez and Machado’s campaign leaders, and threatened Guyana. Some regime critics, like prominent government critic Rocio San Miguel, are still imprisoned. Most recently, Maduro predicted an “armed revolution” and a bloodbath if he is not reelected.
In response to the regime’s bad faith since last October, on April 18, the U.S. reimposed many of the sanctions it had preemptively lifted in support of the Barbados agreement. In part because of the recent reimposition of sanctions and in part because relations between the U.S. and Venezuela have been toxic for years, the U.S.’s ability to influence political developments on the ground this week, on election day or in the days immediately following the vote is severely limited.
Thus, Brazil and Colombia’s may have more influence than the U.S. or European Union if they choose to use it. They need to do so. It is both urgent and important that they make clear to the Venezuelan regime their support for a free election, a demonstrably accurate vote count and a peaceful transition if, as seems likely from available polling data, the opposition wins.
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Venezuelans have been living a nightmare, particularly since Maduro succeeded Hugo Chavez in 2013. The GDP has contracted more than 70%. The oil industry’s production output has collapsed from more than 3 million barrels per day when Hugo Chavez was elected in 1998 to around 800,000 today. For years, critics of the regime have been met with repression and violence. This and economic hardship have propelled nearly 8,000,000 Venezuelans to flee the country.
Many of those who have fled have landed in neighboring countries, 2.5 million at least in Colombia alone. Hundreds of thousands of others have gone to Brazil, Ecuador, Peru and Chile – as well as to the United States.
Strong advocacy by Brazil and Colombia has become increasingly urgent as Maduro has worked to circumscribe the activities of the opposition and alarm the country with talk of post-election violence if he is not reelected. It is encouraging that President Lula has already called on Maduro to respect the election results. But the regime has begun to block opposition and independent online media. The decision to ban an election observer team from the European Union has ratcheted up concern that the regime is prepared to take the steps necessary to stage-manage a victory regardless of the vote count, effectively to steal the election if they cannot win it.
If that happens, another refugee surge is guaranteed. Recent polling suggests that as much as 20% of the country will look to leave if the election appears to have been stolen. This would impose an additional and crushing burden on countries already struggling to assimilate recent arrivals. Criminal activity would surge as well, as large criminal gangs have grown immensely more powerful since 2013. Ideally, Brazil and Colombia could communicate to Maduro that it will not be business as usual with his two larger and more powerful neighbors if the regime refuses to accept a verifiable defeat at the polls.
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Maduro and his closest associates likely fear what they would face were they to lose the election and cede power. Many in the Venezuelan military probably share their fear. Indeed, Maduro and several other top officials have all been indicted in the U.S. for allegedly running “a narco-terrorism partnership” with elements of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), and substantial rewards have been offered for information leading to their arrest and/or conviction.
Not surprisingly, the regime’s major figures, Maduro and national assembly president Diosdado Cabello, have reportedly not been willing even to discuss an off-ramp in the event of election defeat. But the personal stories of both Colombia’s Petro and Brazil’s Lula suggest that future political rehabilitation is often possible even in countries that have experienced the most wrenching national traumas. Electoral defeat does not, by definition, extinguish a legitimate political party or movement. Of course, transitional justice and the international community require that serious violators of human rights be held to account.
The stakes are high in Sunday’s election for the Venezuelan people and the region. Venezuela itself is immensely rich in natural resources and was once one of the richest countries in the Western Hemisphere. It could be so again. Opening Venezuela’s economy to legitimate business would benefit the country’s neighbors, permit more effective cooperation in the fights against drug trafficking and other international criminal activities. It would also help create the conditions necessary to convince many in the Venezuelan diaspora to return. Successful support for a democratic transition and re-establishment of plausible rule of law would also redound to the credit of both Lula and Petro. It would strengthen President Lula’s case for Brazil’s leadership in the subregion. It would aid President Petro in his efforts to consolidate political progress in Colombia by easing pressure on the border. It would also contribute to a stronger diplomatic partnership with the United States in support of democracy in the Western Hemisphere.
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