Caracas Chronicles

This essay was originally published in Spanish on Seúl.

Last Monday, I woke up certain that I wasn’t the only one who wanted everything to stop. Outside, silence, until the calls started: “I can’t leave my place, the street’s empty,” and “let’s reschedule our meeting for another day, it’s not a good day to be out and about” or “I’ve heard rumors around my area, I don’t like going out like this.” 

The previous night hadn’t been exactly quiet. Millions of Venezuelans had screamed, outraged, from their homes when they heard the results issued by the National Electoral Council, CNE: Nicolás Maduro would again be, according to the government, president of Venezuela from 2025 to 2031, with 51.2% of the votes. While some people screamed, others heard the pots and pans, others sat down to see the fireworks lighting up the skies from government buildings, a celebration for very few Venezuelan citizens. 

On Monday, after that quiet morning, people in low income communities started walking, denouncing the fraud and removing posters and billboards of Maduro’s presidential campaign that showed a smiling candidate with a lost, almost removed, gaze. Despite the count not being nearly finished, the day became a parade of popular protests in all states of Venezuela, and social media platforms were devoted to sharing videos of Hugo Chávez’s statues being toppled by protesters, colectivos repressing in many cities and the strength of protesters who, while they walked, added more participants to their marches. 

According to Maduro’s government, there were over 700 detentions on the streets that day, and since then, the organization Foro Penal, that offers private defense to political prisoners, has underscored that the people detained for protesting the fraud aren’t allowed visitors or to choose private council and NGOs as defense. 

Vente, Maria Corina Machado’s political party, has also been a target of persecution since the day of the presidential election, after three weeks of a presidential campaign during which the party denounced that 135 people that worked the national tour had been arrested. This time, opposition leaders shared images that we hadn’t seen since the protests and the presidential crisis of 2019: unidentified armed officers in SUVs kidnapping political actors of the opposition. Human rights defenders are also targeted; four have been detained, and it’s very likely that they might be processed as the protesters: terrorism and treason. 

Torches in the dark 

As in every tunnel, however, there are torches lighting the utmost darkness. That same Monday, Maria Corina Machado and Edmundo González Urrutia announced they had in their hands the evidence to prove the electoral fraud thanks to efforts to collect the tallies of every voting station. Today, the website, available to all citizens, holds over 84% of the voting tallies, and not only did this become a historic move to prove the general rejection of Maduro’s government, but this strategy brought on a new civic approach to electoral processes in the country. 

The last time Venezuela had public access to the voting tallies was in the legislative elections of 2015, the opposition’s last victory after the constitutional referendum of 2007.

To collect the tallies, Machado’s and the Gran Alianza Venezuela’s teams coordinated 600,000 volunteers all across the nation, who received workshops on electoral rights, patterns of electoral irregularities and their roles as witnesses or observers. The result was almost a miracle of civil organization: “We didn’t trust the CNE to be transparent, so we organized among ourselves to provide us with the transparency we want and which is our right,” said the lead coordinator of these comanditos in Caracas, who preferred their identity remain secret. 

Meanwhile, the international community puts pressure: Cristina Kirchner, who had said that there’s no Rule of Law in Venezuela, asked Maduro to show the tallies; the governments of Chile, Mexico, Colombia and Brasil claim for the tallies and ask for impartial observers. The Carter Center published an exhaustive, lapidary communique, with the many reasons why the Venezuelan government hadn’t guaranteed, in any way, a democratic process. The U.S. strongly rejected the results and pushed for a public verification of the tallies, as stated in Venezuelan Law.

The last time Venezuela had public access to the voting tallies was in the legislative elections of 2015, the opposition’s last victory after the constitutional referendum of 2007. In both cases, the government found the way to step over the results and establish parallel and unconstitutional processes that didn’t include the opposition. However, this time, hiding 70% rejection of Maduro’s regime isn’t that easy to hide, mostly thanks to the evidence that the citizens were able to collect. 

Sports, entertainment and culture 

Persecution of media has also been rampant during the week, after four hundred outlets, including print media, radio, TV networks and digital platforms in Venezuela, were shut down by the government in the last 20 years, according to NGO Espacio Público. 

Since the day of the elections, Conatel, the institution that governs and oversees the media in Venezuela, started contacting radio producers and coordinators to let them know that no type of political programming would be allowed, and that the only content that could be broadcast was sports, entertainment and culture. This regulation doesn’t respond to any law that had passed, or a clause of regulation in times of political or social crises: it’s a WhatsApp message, that also includes threats to media outlets that don’t abide by this new instruction. Noticias Calabozo Radio, newscast from Calabozo, a city in Guárico state, was shut down the day of the elections. Conatel’s threat was that they would shut down the entire network if they didn’t cut those programs. They couldn’t even say goodbye to their audience. In total, nine journalists have been arrested, according to the journalists’ union and 15 deportations. 

In this context, panic buying has been the main, daily errand of Venezuelans. In cities full of silence and closed fronts, the few stores that are open are those that provide essential services and shelves have been emptied for the first time since 2019, when the severe food and medicine shortages had been partly solved. “Shopping for the basics and looking over lists of detained citizens is my new day to day,” says a friend who’s a doctor in Merida. “It’s weird, one day you’re asking yourself what’s going to happen with the elections and the next day you just know that what will happen is that they’ll silence us.” 

We’ve been talking about the end of Venezuelan democracy for 20 years.

Meanwhile, crowds, popular assemblies and protests have kept happening in the country, less violent and with less fear, while threats and systematic detentions by Maduro’s government escalate. When there are doubts about how Maduro’s government will react to something, there will always be an escalation of persecution, criminalization, excessive use of force and delirious threats that sometimes border the surreal. 

Two days ago, Maduro announced in a mandatory broadcast that he’ll create two new maximum-security prisons for all those that have been detained after the elections: “There will be no forgiveness nor mercy.” According to Maduro, the prisons would become productivity facilities: “As they used to do back then, they were put to work on building roads, there are many roads to build, have them do that.” He meant the prisons in the time of Marcos Pérez Jiménez’s dictatorship, who was known for building infrastructure and a bloody political leader that drove his people to desperation. 

We’ve been talking about the end of Venezuelan democracy for 20 years. However, it’s very likely that, despite two decades of authoritarianism, institutional takeover, violence, censorship and persecution, and after eleven years of a complex humanitarian emergency that’s a consequence of public policies implemented by Maduro, Venezuela has never seen a dictatorship like this one. 

For now, it feels like the beginning of the end of Maduro, something that perhaps two years ago might have been unthinkable. There’s a common understanding that yes, there’s evidence of electoral fraud. The epic feat of collecting the tallies has been a reflection of the hope that has awakened in towns, cities and thousands of communities.