Above photo: Venezuelans cast their votes during presidential elections on Sunday, July 28. Zoe Alexandra.
Latin American Right’s Attack On Venezuela Loses Wind.
Progressive and right-wing governments in the region make their positions on survival of the Bolivarian project known.
Following the proclamation by the National Electoral Council of the victory of Nicolás Maduro in the presidential elections, several fronts of conflict have opened within Venezuela. The opposition has refused to recognize the results and has declared that its candidate, Edmundo González, is the legitimate winner of the elections. This scenario was expected given that the opposition had already announced that they would not respect the result if their candidate did not win.
The international hegemonic media also started a campaign several months ago to delegitimize the electoral result if Maduro won the elections. To this medium and long-term electoral strategy of delegitimization of the electoral process, a set of actions outside Venezuela has been added in an attempt to pressure the international community to disavow the victory of the government of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV).
However, unlike in previous years, this coordinated attempt from right wing leaders in the region has not been able to galvanize the consensus it needs to achieve its objective. The response from the region is a far cry from the days of the Lima Group which in 2017 was able to carry out coordinated attacks and pressure campaigns against Venezuela’s democracy, electoral processes, and encourage the harsh sanctions campaign which the country still faces.
The Opposition Of Several Right-Wing Latin American Governments
Still there is a significant bloc of countries in the region that have rallied against Venezuela. Argentina, Chile, Peru, Guatemala, Ecuador, El Salvador, Uruguay, and Costa Rica, among others whose foreign policy is aligned with the geopolitical position defended by the United States, have announced that they do not accept the official results.
Javier Milei, President of Argentina, has been one of the most public commentators on the Venezuelan election (even before the official results have been presented, as have many of his Latin American counterparts), calling elections “fraudulent”, and has called on the Venezuelan Armed Forces to intervene to depose the PSUV government.
Gabriel Boric, President of Chile, has also questioned the legitimacy of the elections, claiming that the results are “hard to believe” and that his government will only recognize the elections once the voting records have been “verified”. Javier Gonzalez-Olaechea, Peru’s Foreign Minister, opposed the election results. The President of Costa Rica, Rodrigo Chávez Robles, called the elections “fraudulent”. Another right-wing president aligned with US foreign policy who expressed his opposition to the elections was Daniel Noboa of Ecuador, who called the Venezuelan government a “dictatorship”.
Given this coordinated onslaught by the right-wing governments of several countries in the region, Venezuela decided to withdraw its diplomatic personnel from Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Panama, the Dominican Republic, and Uruguay.
Setbacks For The OAS And Its Anti-Venezuela Campaign
The Secretariat of the Organization of American States, led by Luis Almagro, which has maintained a historic anti-leftist position, declared that the body does not recognize the electoral results in Venezuela. On July 31, at the request of several right-wing governments, a meeting was held with the foreign ministers of nine countries, including Argentina, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, Paraguay, Chile, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay, and the ambassadors of the other countries.
In the proposed document on the Venezuelan elections, the OAS proposed to recognize the peaceful participation of the electorate, to request the National Electoral Council to publish the results, to request respect for human rights and to express solidarity with the Venezuelan people who are going through tense moments and that the government guarantee the security of diplomatic headquarters. However, the final text was not approved due to lack of votes, demonstrating that there is no unanimity with respect to the official narrative of the right-wing governments.
17 countries voted in favor (Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, United States, Uruguay and Argentina), 11 abstained (Barbados, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Grenada, Honduras, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, Antigua and Barbuda and Bahamas) and 5 were absent (Dominica, Mexico, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago and Venezuela). The role of the Caribbean in resisting the imposition of the OAS agenda is crucial.
The “Caution” Of The Region’s Progressive Governments
Several regional governments have taken a moderate position which is to call for calm, but not to fully recognize or condemn the CNE results. Colombian President Gustavo Petro has maintained this position, but has also pushed back on the position of right-wing countries in the region and said that it is not the role of foreign governments to decide who is president of Venezuela, but “It is up to the Venezuelan people to reach a political agreement to end the violence in their country and to establish a transparent way in which a vote count can be carried out with guarantees for all.”
For his part, President Lula of Brazil has declared that “it is normal” for the Venezuelan opposition to act as it is doing, and requested the Venezuelan CNE to publish the minutes to prove Maduro’s victory, and that once this has been done, the PSUV’s victory should be accepted without delay.
The same diplomatic strategy of “caution” has been chosen by the President of Mexico Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who said that the CNE must resolve the doubts of the opposition. Furthermore, in a press conference, certain journalists wanted to compare the fraud suffered by AMLO’s candidacy in 2006 with the alleged fraud of which Maduro is accused. However, the Mexican president said that in 2006 he did present evidence of such fraud, while the Venezuelan opposition has yet to present any reliable evidence of fraud. In this sense, AMLO tacitly said that the opposition will have to prove the fraud with clear evidence. AMLO also rejected the maneuvers of the OAS and said that they would not send a representative to the July 31 meeting.
International Support For Maduro
Despite the efforts of the right, Venezuela is not isolated from the international community. Major countries have already officially recognized Maduro’s victory in Sunday’s elections, including Nicaragua, Bolivia, Honduras, Cuba, Russia, China, Qatar, Belarus, and Iran, among others.
Similarly, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), which includes more than 10 Latin American and Caribbean countries, congratulated Maduro on his reelection and warned about an attempted coup d’état in Venezuela: “ALBA-TCP repudiates the brutal campaign of hatred through the imperialist communicational machinery and the attacks and acts of vandalism against people, public infrastructure, patriotic symbols, which seek to stain a historic democratic day that peacefully took place, in its pretension to impose intolerance and an agenda different from the expressed will of the Venezuelan people.”
Maduro Calls For Audit To Clear Doubts About The Electoral Process
In view of these accusations and the doubts raised after the elections, Nicolás Maduro decided to officially request the Supreme Electoral Tribunal to conduct a full audit of the presidential elections. Maduro said that he and the PSUV are ready for the totality of the electoral records to be shown, thus hoping that the narrative of electoral fraud will lose credibility. “I have appealed to the Constitution for the peace of Venezuela,” Maduro declared, explaining that the action seeks to “settle this attack against the electoral process, this attempted coup d’état using the electoral process, and clarify everything that needs to be clarified about these attacks.”
Venezuela: The Eternal Field Of Global Geopolitical Dispute
In this sense, the future of Venezuela is presented to the world as a conflict that exceeds the borders of the Caribbean country and is constituted as a geopolitical battlefield amid a world that is debating between unipolarity and multipolarity.
If we follow the great attention that the different governments of the countries have placed on Venezuela, it is clear that several international interests want the future of this country to follow a path that serves their economic and political interests.
In this sense, Venezuela’s “path” will mark the political future of the region in the short, medium, and possibly the long term.