By Clifton Ross and Marcy Rein
Venezuelans turned out en masse July 28 to participate in and defend their election. People got in line long before the polls opened at 6 a.m. to vote in the presidential race that pitted retired diplomat Edmundo González Urrutia of the opposition’s Unitary Platform, or UP, against President Nicolás Maduro. More than 90,000 UP supporters volunteered as poll watchers, at great risk to themselves, and secured copies of the voting machine tallies. Those tallies showed González with two-thirds of the vote. Maduro claimed victory without releasing the official vote count. The government cracked down with increasing ferocity on the mass protest that followed.
As we confront the stark choices in this November’s U.S. election, we can take inspiration from the Venezuelan people’s determination — and a warning from their situation: authoritarianism appeals across the political spectrum. This is not a popular position on the U.S. left. Before Hugo Chávez’s death in 2013 and the irregular election that followed, we, as solidarity activists, would have rejected it ourselves. But our experience, and our connections with progressive Venezuelans who are not Chávistas, have changed our thinking and given us a deep respect for the Venezuelan people’s democratic struggle.
“The conflict in Venezuela has not been in this election a conflict between left and right,” Venezuelan sociologist Edgardo Lander said on Democracy Now! “It’s a conflict between a repressive government and a whole spread of positions in Venezuelan society that go from far right to left, that includes social democrats, that includes progressives, that includes liberals. It includes a whole spread of people who want to recover democracy, who want to recover the Constitution in Venezuela, which is completely violated by this increasingly authoritarian government.”
At the same time, Lander — a longtime leftist and one of the initiators of the World Social Forum process — was quick to add that “We, from the left, reject U.S. intervention and insist on the fact that it’s not for the United States to decide who won the election.” But U.S. policy is not the issue at hand here. “If [Maduro’s claimed victory] is imposed on the Venezuelan society … that will be the end result of the authoritarian tendencies that have been going on for quite some time, and establish a truly authoritarian government,” Lander said.
Our story: hope betrayed
Like many longtime leftists, we hoped the Bolivarian process in Venezuela would bring something new, a socialism rooted in participatory democracy and internal endogenous development. Clif lived in Venezuela from 2005 to 2006, documenting the Bolivarian Revolution for his first feature film “Venezuela: Revolution from the Inside Out.” Marcy spent six weeks there with him, on leave from her union communications job, and we attended the 2006 World Social Forum in Caracas together.
We returned to Venezuela several times over the next few years to work on our book, “Until the Rulers Obey: Voices of Latin American Social Movements.” We saw how consejos comunales — the community councils proposed as sites of grassroots democracy — became clientelistic networks where “the goodies flowed,” as a Chávista friend in Mérida once described the system of patronage under Chávez. We watched the government nationalize businesses and co-opt civil society organizations, as it extended its control over the whole country. In 2012, left labor journalist Damián Prat, reporting from Venezuela’s industrial heartland, was already chronicling the destruction of basic industries in his book “El Milagro al Revés.”
Human Rights Watch found that by 2013, Hugo Chávez and his party had taken over the court system, restricted press freedom and repressed human rights organizing. When Clif went to Venezuela to report on the first election in which Maduro ran as Chávez’s handpicked successor, he was stunned and transformed by seeing what the corruption, mismanagement and neglect was doing to the national wealth. Years before U.S. sanctions were imposed, he wrote in Counterpunch that “the so-called ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ is bankrupt: morally, ideologically and economically” and detailed the vista of a bankrupt petro-state at a moment when oil prices were at their peak.
Thoughtful social movement leftists in Venezuela were repudiating Chávismo, a trend that grew over the coming years, as Clif and Venezuelan filmmaker J. Arturo Albarrán documented. “Contrary to the government propaganda, the greater part of the modern and democratic Venezuelan left — the immense majority — is in opposition to the government,” Damián Prat said in their film.
Three-quarters of Venezuela’s voters turned out for the National Assembly election in 2015. They gave a two-thirds majority to the opposition. In response, Maduro set about to neutralize the National Assembly; the Chávista-controlled Supreme Court declared the body’s actions “void” in early 2016, at which time Maduro effectively had control of all organs of the state. When the Supreme Court formally took over the duties of the National Assembly in 2017, months-long protests followed. Maduro then ran a sham election (with all viable opposition disqualified, of course) in 2018, and did the same thing this year.
Election protection, Venezuelan style
After signing the 2023 Barbados Agreement to hold fair and free elections in exchange for the U.S. easing sanctions, Maduro immediately violated it by banning opposition candidates. He came under criticism even from leftist Latin American leaders when he disqualified María Corina Machado from running against him after she won 93 percent of the votes in the UP primary. Maduro went on to have her substitute, Corina Yoris, disqualified, without reason. Then just before the deadline, the elderly and largely unknown Edmundo González Urrutia managed to get his name on the ballot as the UP candidate. Hundreds of thousands of people turned out for UP rallies during the campaign.
The government banned most international election observers. It closed the borders and made it hard for Venezuelans living abroad to vote — an act of wholesale voter suppression, given that one-quarter of the population now lives in exile. It put new restrictions on the poll watchers specifically permitted by the country’s excellent election laws, which also require that paper printouts of the digital results — “actas” — be shared with poll watchers before being transmitted to the National Electoral Council, or CNE.
The González campaign and allies trained the more than 90,000 poll watchers to ensure the law was respected at the country’s 30,026 voting tables. Many of these witnesses faced threats and hostility. They had to get creative to get the actas out of the polling stations. “I stuffed the ticket into a copy of the Constitution and kept it in my crotch,” one woman told an independent media collaborative. The campaign command organized couriers to get the results from the poll watchers to a network of scanning stations, which digitized those results.
This coordinated effort allowed UP to gather more than 80 percent of the vote tallies, which they published on an open-data site that is searchable down to the individual voting card. Despite the tallies showing that Edmundo González won 67 percent to Maduro’s 30 percent, the CNE proclaimed Maduro president on July 29. This was unconstitutional, as José Ignacio Hernández points out, because the vote tally hadn’t yet been made public, nor had other legal procedures been followed.
Massive spontaneous demonstrations broke out across the country, many starting in low-income neighborhoods that had been Chávista strongholds. At least 1,505 people had been arrested by Aug. 19 — some for protesting the result and some for just being in the wrong place at the wrong time; at least 22 had been killed. The government has blocked Twitter and WhatsApp, while promoting the use of a “snitching app” to report critics of the election. With such escalating repression — especially against its former base in the countryside and barrios — Chávismo has lost its last shred of legitimacy.
Parallel tracks: learning from the movements
Turning the lens to the U.S., we see Trump Republicans moving along the same route as the United Socialist Party of Venezuela: from election denialism and disruption to court takeovers and concentration of power in the executive. Trump declared his desire to be a dictator only on “day one,” and Project 2025 endorses the “unitary executive” theory. Right-wing judicial control can be seen in this year’s crop of Supreme Court decisions that undercut the right to protest, grant presidential immunity and gut federal agencies’ regulatory power. We see the intimidation of election officials, election offices taken over by election deniers and Republicans honing a legal strategy to derail the election certification. These are all familiar moves taking place in authoritarian populist projects around the world as aspiring dictators destroy checks and balances and consolidate their control.
In 2012–13, as the transition from Chávez to Maduro unfolded, we were finishing “Until the Rulers Obey.” Most of the interviews in this book were done during the “Pink Tide,” when left-leaning governments came to power in Latin America on the wave of the commodities boom from 2008–12. Listening to these activists and organizers profoundly changed our thinking.
They jolted us out of our Lenin-influenced beliefs that social movements should identify a vanguard and subsume themselves in it to take state power. As we heard of their struggles with the progressive governments — especially over extractivism, land use and Indigenous sovereignty — we came to understand the vital role independent, critical social movements play in keeping democracy alive by exerting power on their government from the outside.
We’ve come to see that social and civic movements must defend the open space liberal democracy affords us and fight all projects, right and left, that attempt to close off those spaces. Like many in the ‘60s generation, we hadn’t adequately appreciated the value of liberal democracy as the essential precondition for social and civic movements to organize, strive and survive. What our interviewees taught us, the experience of Venezuela drives home.
Now we have a chance to defend liberal democracy in the U.S. in this November’s election, just as the Venezuelans tried so hard to do July 28. May we join this fight together — left and right — to defend the space in which we organize, so that we may continue our struggle for genuine freedom and democracy.
Clifton Ross has covered Latin American politics and culture for over forty years. He represented the U.S. in the Second World Poetry Festival of Venezuela in 2005. He has published a dozen or so books, among them his political memoir, Home from the Dark Side of Utopia, which details his break with the Chavistas (AK Press, 2016). He writes for Caracas Chronicles and blogs at www.cliftonross.com.
Marcy Rein has written about and participated in a wide range of social movements and organizational forums. With Clifton Ross, she co-edited Until the Rulers Obey: Voices From Latin American Social Movements (PM Press, 2014). With Mickey Ellinger and Vicki Legion, she wrote Free City!: The Fight for San Francisco’s City College and Education for All (PM Press, 2021).
This article was published on August 27, 2024 at wagingnonviolence.