Venezuela’s presidential elections on 28 July offered the electorate a simple choice: to vote for the proxy candidate of a right-wing opposition backed to the hilt by US imperialism – or Nicolas Maduro, leader of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), whose progressive government continues to defend the gains of the Bolivarian Revolution in the most difficult of conditions. President Maduro’s victory has been denounced by the opposition as a fraud; the United States and its allies have refused to recognise the result. The opposition has fomented violent uprisings and at the time of writing, the defeated candidate of the opposition United Democratic Platform (PUD), Edmundo Gonzalez, had declared himself president and called – unsuccessfully on the armed forces to support him.
Neither the opposition nor its US backers were ever going to accept anything less than victory. They had seen this election as their last best chance to overthrow the PSUV and restore Venezuela to imperialist control. In the months leading up to the election they prepared the ground with a sustained campaign of misinformation and the threat of destabilisation. Through highly questionable and unsubstantiated polls and gushing coverage in the capitalist mainstream media of the supposed popularity of the opposition’s figurehead Maria Corinna Machado, a false narrative was peddled that Maduro could only win the election through fraud. The imperialist world was primed for the rejection of results that saw Maduro win 51% of the votes, a lead of nearly 9% over Gonzalez. Faced with what was in practice a binary choice – despite a plethora of candidates from smaller parties – the majority of Venezuelans voted to defend the Bolivarian Revolution, which since 1999 has created social projects and participatory structures to empower the working class and poor. It was a clear recognition that a vote for Gonzalez was a vote for US-backed violence, privatisation and reaction that would have rolled back the gains of the last 25 years.
Far-right orchestrates violence
Far from ‘spontaneous’, the street violence subsequently unleashed by the far-right was deliberately orchestrated and coordinated with a global campaign of misinformation. Gangs of opposition thugs set fire to hospitals, electoral commission buildings, subsidised food distribution centres and pharmacies and targeted socialist politicians and supporters. At least one police officer has been killed, with unconfirmed reports of around 20 other deaths on both sides. Masked youths under the influence of narcotics confessed to receiving $150 per day for their efforts after being arrested. Tens of thousands of bot-generated identical social media messages declared the election fraudulent. Billionaire Elon Musk dedicated days on X to reposting fake news, claiming old videos of people looting air conditioning units were ‘armed communist gangs’ stealing ballot boxes. Videos of protests in 2017 and 2019 were re-purposed to appear to show uprisings all around the country. Footage of opposition protesters attempting to shut voting centres was captioned as government forces preventing people from voting, whilst a staged assassination of a protester was debunked by photos showing the apparent victim being driven away on the back of a motorbike. Footage from Turkey in 2016 of armed forces shooting from a helicopter circulated as ‘proof’ of violent state repression in Venezuela; clips from the Netflix programme Simon were reposted claiming to be evidence of torture. The lies and distortions have been uncritically regurgitated by the press in the imperialist west.
Cyber-attack hits electoral commission
A mysterious major cyber-attack on the CNE electoral commission proved grist to the opposition’s mill when it caused massive delays in publishing full results. On election night the CNE released results showing an ‘irreversible’ trend for Maduro with 80% of data transmitted before being knocked offline, due to a DOS (denial of service) incident. This allowed the PUD to release its own ‘results’ on a parallel website created the day before the election in the US. These ‘results’ apparently show a 70% landslide for Gonzalez, although on closer inspection the data is based on only 30% of the election tallies and appears to be peppered with inaccuracies including duplicate signatures, missing data and voters who are deceased. However, the 70% figure is conveniently in line with the predictions of the much-quoted US-based Edison firm, which carried out an illegal exit poll, interviewing just 8,221 voters.
Maduro has filed a writ demanding the Supreme Court conduct a judicial review of the election. Venezuela’s election system is automated, using fingerprint recognition and touchscreens to cast votes in secret whilst a paper receipt signed by the voter and deposited in a ballot box ensures verification and corroboration of the results. All parties have witnesses at polling stations who oversee audits and sign off on the final tallies. Printouts from each of the 30,000 voting centres were available to participating parties meaning that the results can be fully audited. On 2 August the court began its investigation in the presence of all Presidential candidates except Gonzalez who refused to attend or submit the PUD ‘evidence’.
Opposition candidates from other parties such as Primero Justicia and Accion Democratica have recognised the official results; Luis Vicente Leon of Datanalisis, an opposition-associated polling organisation, has stated they correspond fairly accurately to the PSUV’s support base, given an abstention rate of 40%. In addition the election was monitored by 700 international electoral observers from 95 countries including delegations from the UN, the Carter Centre, the African Union and the Latin American Council of Electoral Experts. The US-based National Lawyers Guild praised the ‘fairness and transparency of Venezuelan election process’, with its delegates reporting a ‘transparent, fair voting process with scrupulous attention to legitimacy, access to the polls, and pluralism’. Of these, only the Washington-based Carter Centre has refused to recognise the vote as democratic.
However, the delay in the state’s ability to publish full voting details has provided space for the imperialists to proclaim their chosen victor. Within days the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, had recognised Gonzalez as president-elect. It’s clear the US has learned little from the fiasco of Juan Guaido, who was recognised by the US as ‘interim president’ in 2019 as part of a protracted coup attempt that collapsed farcically in 2022: unlike Guaido, Gonzalez at least has the merit of having run for office. Uruguay, Argentina and Peru’s Boluarte coup government have followed the US’s lead in declaring Gonzalez ‘President-elect’; Britain has expressed its ‘concern’ at ‘allegations of serious irregularities’. The US now has a pretext to impose a renewed round of sanctions against Venezuela’s progressive government.
‘A vote for Maduro was a vote for hope’
These manoeuvres are part of an imperialist war of attrition against the Bolivarian Revolution, which since the landslide election of Hugo Chavez in 1998 has ploughed the country’s oil wealth into poverty-slashing programmes including free healthcare, education, subsidised food and the construction of five million units of social housing. Backed by a massive social movement, Chavez drove forward popular participation of the working class and poor, convening a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution, creating communal councils and communes as parallel structures of grass-roots democracy and passing progressive land and labour laws. Breaking out of centuries of colonial, then neocolonial, under-development is no easy task and this process has not been without contradiction: the PSUV is a cross-class electoral machine containing red-clad capitalists looking for juicy state contracts alongside communal activists and trade unionists fighting for working class interests. However, it has created the space for the working class to organise on a massive scale in its own interests: it is this explosion of popular participation that has allowed the Bolivarian Revolution to face down repeated coup attempts, sanctions and imperialist intervention. Since Chavez’s death in 2013, the PSUV, led by Maduro, has steered Venezuela through a brutal economic war, with the imposition of 930 US-led sanctions which resulted in shortages and hyperinflation, decimating public services and slashing oil production. Over 40,000 Venezuelans died as medicines and other imports were blocked. The PUD leader Machado and her cronies have repeatedly championed the use of sanctions whilst orchestrating the theft and embezzlement of Venezuelan resources and assets including $1.4bn worth of gold in the Bank of England, US-based oil subsidiary CITGO and the Colombia-based chemical plant Monomeros.
Yet the unity of the Venezuelan working class, small farmers and communal producers has so far defied this economic war, increasing food production to reduce import dependency, organising community distribution networks and creating the ‘workers’ productive army’ to restart and repair refineries and factories. As a result, the Venezuelan economy has weathered the storm; while many privations remain, inflation was down to just 1% in June; GDP growth is predicted at between 5-8% and oil production is up.
This explains the mass ‘Chavista’ rallies across all 24 states of Venezuela in 250 towns and cities in the run-up to election day. The closing rally in Caracas on 26 July dwarfed the corresponding PUD event. Avenida Bolivar, a large boulevard often used for political marches and rallies, overflowed. Roger Jimenez, President of the National Bolivarian Postal Workers Union told FRFI:
‘A vote for Maduro was a vote for hope, to elect a worker President, to defend our homeland of Bolivar and Chavez, to defend the history of a people repressed for more than 500 years. It was a vote for one more defeat of the US empire in Venezuela, our refusal to kneel, because that is what they seek, to bring the people to their knees.’
The Communard Union, representing sections of the communal movement, declared:
‘We celebrate as ours the triumph of the President Nicolas Maduro, knowing that his victory is a new defeat against imperialism, against Zionism, against those who continue in their efforts to dominate our people and plunder our resources. The communal people have the immense challenge of continuing to revolutionise the Bolivarian process, pulling it lower [amongst the people] and towards the left.’
This is why the working class and poor have marched down in their thousands from the barrios to defend the Miraflores presidential palace in the days since the election: this is the revolution that won’t be televised by the imperialist media.
Machado – imperialism’s ‘last hope’
The puppet-master of the PUD is Maria Corina Machado, who has been hell-bent on destabilising the election since the US declared her the opposition’s ‘official candidate’ in March. This was despite her 15-year disqualification from holding political office after acting as ‘alternate ambassador’ of Panama to the Organisation of American States (OAS) in 2014 to call for sanctions and intervention, whilst still sitting as a deputy in Venezuela’s National Assembly. She unilaterally appointed little-known Gonzalez as the PUD’s place-holder candidate, on a platform promising to privatise oil, gas and public assets; abolish the labour law; introduce insurance-based healthcare; and privatise pensions and education. Gonzalez was forced to retire as ambassador to Argentina in 2002 after publicly backing the failed coup against Hugo Chavez. Due to ailing health, Gonzalez hardly attended any election rallies and Machado had to resort to carrying a huge poster with his face on it to ensure opposition voters knew what he looked like.
Weeks before the election Machado made it clear the PUD would not recognise the results, rejecting an agreement signed by eight of the other candidates to refrain from violence and respect the electoral commission. She has a long history of seditiously orchestrating destabilisation:
- 2002: Signed the ‘Carmona decree’ dissolving Venezuela’s elected parliament and constitution during the failed coup.
- 2013: Signed the leaked ‘Strategic Venezuelan Plan’ which sought to create shortages of basic goods, amplify social discontent, causing death and injuries ‘wherever possible’.
- 2014: Headed ‘la Salida’ campaign which left 43 dead as opposition gangs set up ‘guarimba’ roadblocks hanging steel wire traps and using snipers.
- 2017: Backed a further ‘guarimba’ campaign which left 58 dead including Orlando Figuera, a black Chavista who was burned alive.
- 2019: Backed the coup attempted launched by ‘interim President’ Juan Guaido.
Unsurprisingly, her NGO ‘Sumate’ has received millions in funding from USAID.
Pseudo-left in bed with imperialism
Shamefully, given the stakes, the Venezuelan Communist Party (PCV) chose to back a ‘centrist’ opposition candidate, Enrique Marquez, in the election. Marquez is a former deputy from the ‘Nuevo Tiempo’ party founded to oppose Chavez. Whilst the PCV never dissolved into the PSUV when the latter was founded in 2006, it supported the electoral coalitions of the Bolivarian Revolution until 2020 when it helped found the Popular Revolutionary Alternative platform to run against the PSUV in elections. The 2022 PCV congress formalised this decision to break with the PSUV, accusing Maduro’s government of a neo-liberal turn. This caused controversy within the PCV and in 2023 a pro-PSUV faction of the PCV gained leadership and was ratified by the Supreme Court amidst claims of foul play. ‘Marxist-Leninist’ Communist parties around the world signed a ‘declaration of solidarity’ with the former PCV leadership and withdrew their support for the PSUV and Maduro. Demonstrating its complete capitulation to reaction, this section of the PCV has joined the chorus crying fraud and depicting orchestrated opposition violence as ‘popular mobilisations’! Marquez garnered less than 0.2% of the vote.
The stance taken by the PCV has given affiliated ‘communist’ organisations around the world the excuse to side, in practice, with the far-right and bolster imperialist interventionist manoeuvres. The International Marxist Tendency (now the Revolutionary Communist International)’s Jorge Martín declares that the working class will ‘lose if Maduro’s bosses’ government remains in power’. The IMT, through its British-based organisation Socialist Appeal (now the Revolutionary Communist Party, or RCP) used to run the ‘Hands Off Venezuela’ campaign, taking principled action alongside FRFI to defend Venezuela against previous coup attempts. The RCP’s abandonment of this position is another shameful capitulation to imperialism.
The ‘liberal’ press: accomplices of reaction
The international imperialist press has been nothing other than a mouthpiece for reaction. On 1 August, the New York Times published an op-ed by Machado, where she claimed to be in hiding, ‘fearing for her life’. However on 3 August she called a ‘mass’ protest in the affluent Las Mercedes neighbourhood of Caracas. Despite the march being touted as ‘huge’, aerial drone footage showed her supporters barely filled the street as she addressed the crowd. The Guardian has played its customary role. Tom Phillips, the paper’s hack in Caracas, reported on 3 August that ‘Maduro has lost the streets’. This was the same day that huge Chavista protests flooded Caracas, Barquisimeto, Orinoco city, Cumana, Cojedes and other cities. Phillips claims Maduro ‘has refused to release proof of his supposed victory’ despite the fact that Maduro petitioned the Supreme Court to review all evidence whilst Gonzalez has refused to engage with the process. Phillips, of course, has form, having supported Guaido’s US-backed coup attempt in 2019, with the claim that ‘He inspired a huge wave of protests inside Venezuela with a message of peaceful change, and won widespread international support’. Phillips has been key over the years in pushing the line that Venezuela’s economic problems were the result of mismanagement by Maduro, completely dismissing the devastating impact of US sanctions. The self-styled ‘impartial’ BBC has been rooting for Machado from day one. Their steady drip of toxic disinformation plays a crucial role in imperialism’s war against the Bolivarian Revolution.
The Bolivarian Revolution demands our solidarity!
All true socialists understand that at this moment, it is crucial to stand against the imperialist attack on Venezuela’s progressive PSUV government. The alternative is a triumph for unbridled reaction, the destruction of all the gains of the Venezuelan working class and poor, and complete submission to the dictates of US imperialism.
Imperialist hands off Venezuela! End the sanctions! Return the Venezuelan gold from the Bank of England’s vaults!
