Caracas Chronicles

Roughly an hour after the opposition said that they only had access to 30% of the official voting tallies -a key document to audit the election results- because Venezuela’s election authority (CNE) had blocked the transmission of the results to the totaling center, the President of the CNE, Maduro hardliner Elvis Amoroso, announced these results: with 80% of the transmitted votes and with a participation of 59%, Nicolás Maduro won with 5,150,092 votes (51.20%); landing Edmundo González Urrutia in second place with 4,445,978 votes (44.2 %).

Also, Amoroso apologized for the delay. Although Venezuela’s elections system is quite efficient, the CNE still waited until midnight to give the results. Amoroso said the delay was due to some sort of sabotage and asked Maduro’s prosecutor general to open an investigation. Prosecutor Tarek William Saab had said before that he would be holding a press conference the next morning at 11 am.

I’ll go first…

One hour after message, María Corina Machado and González Urrutia talked to the press. “I’ll go first,” said Machado, “Venezuela has a new president elect in Edmundo González Urrutia. It was an overwhelming win… We won.”

“It was historic,” she continued, “four quick counts gave the same results as exit polls, and right now we have more than 40% of the official voting tallies that confirm it. Edmundo González Urrutia won with 70% of the vote against Maduro’s 30%. It’s the presidential election with the largest victory margin in Venezuelan history.”

Machado went on to say that “the whole international community knows what happened, but most importantly Venezuelans know… The members of Plan República, the military citizens, also know…”

Machado asked people to pressure until all official tallies have been printed and that they should stand behind the polling station witnesses.

González Urrutia concurred, and said that “their fight continues until the will of the Venezuelan people is respected.” When asked if they were calling people to the streets he said they weren’t, that this was a movement of peace.

Some international reactions: Anthony Blinken gave a message immediately after the results were made public and asked for a recount. Chile’s Gabriel Boric questioned the results and the Government of Costa Rica was very frontal in saying that what happened in Venezuela was a fraud. On the axis; Nicaragua, Cuba and Bolivia congratulated Maduro.

From the day I arrived in Caracas two weeks ago, the consensus of folks in the business community and the diplomatic corps was that regardless of the elections results Venezuela would not go back to the dark days of 2017-2019. “The country has changed.” And I agree that the country has changed, as well as the international community’s disposition toward it. But the only way that Venezuela could navigate calmly (or even keep on navigating calmly) through these relationships that have allowed for a relative peace and a relative improvement of the economy depends on keeping political violence at bay—which depended on a recognized González Urrutia win or an unlikely legitimate win by Maduro. And while Chavismo may count on past political violence to keep people at bay, the truth is that the voters rallied by Machado and González Urrutia may be more unpredictable than what the government thought.

The Maduro administration, which in the past has been disciplined and assertive in its strategies to hold on to power, has been increasingly clumsy at dealing with the opposition’s presidential campaign. It wouldn’t be too crazy to think it will be the same in its aftermath.

From the beginning of our coverage of this campaign we knew that the day of the presidential election wouldn’t be the end, but that it would set the tone for the day after. Well, the tone is set. And so it begins.

Stay tuned.