The Berlin Wall Moment in Venezuela – The Atlantic

Last week in Venezuela began with a moment that combined the spontaneity of the Berlin Wall with a French revolutionary spirit. Late on the evening of Sunday, July 28, the government refused to recognize the opposition’s victory in that day’s elections and declared incumbent President Nicolás Maduro the winner. The next day, protests broke out almost everywhere; one think tank counted more than 200. In Coro, a small coastal city, a protester climbed atop a statue of Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s late predecessor and mentor, and hammered on his trademark military beret as others cheered. When he came down, the crowd tied ropes around the statue and celebrated as it collapsed. What they wanted, in the words of one Venezuelan commentator, was to see Chávez’s head “dragged through the dirt.”

Also last Monday, a man waving a Venezuelan flag rode a horse onto a highway outside the city of Maracay, leading a caravan of motorists and shouting, “Venezuela free.” In Punto Fijo, in the west of the country, a police officer burst into tears, took off her uniform and joined the demonstrators she was supposed to intimidate. Some of her colleagues on the ground followed her example. Elsewhere in the country, police did follow orders: nearly 750 anti-government protesters were arrested that day. Six were killed.

Read: Venezuela Passed the Torch, Even Though Maduro Didn’t

Not long ago, Venezuela’s greatest lover of grand, revolutionary gestures was Chávez himself. Chávez was the one who embraced the image of a freedom-loving horseman: the independence hero Simón Bolívar, whose name Chávez added to everything he wanted to control: the Bolivarian national bank, the Bolivarian army, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Chávez delighted in toppling the monuments of the ruling class, although the ruling class he was rebelling against was not the type to build statues. Instead, he expropriated jewelry stores and shopping malls in the name of the socialist revolution.

Chávez understood the power of symbols. He held on to the presidency not only because the oil boom of the 2000s allowed him to lavish subsidies on the poor, but also because he was an exceptionally gifted populist. That’s not to say that Chávez had a problem with violence. He closed down opposition channels, jailed less-than-submissive judges, and played dictator when necessary. But he preferred to win elections because he could. In 2012, the year before his death, he spent more on his reelection campaign and short-lived social programs than any other president in Venezuela’s history. With public money, he bought the popular support that would ensure the continuity of his legacy through his heir, Maduro.

More than a decade later, a humanitarian crisis has driven a quarter of Venezuela’s population into exile, and Maduro seems to have decided that popular support is a luxury he can do without. To stay in power, he must have concluded some time before the election, repression would have to suffice. His charisma certainly wouldn’t get him the votes he needed. And with the country’s oil industry in disrepair, Maduro could hardly afford the grand presidential campaigns of his predecessor, or the lavish food parcels that were only distributed during election years. He opted for the cheaper option: scare activists, opposition leaders, and ordinary people into voting a certain way by showing them that those who don’t could end up in jail.

Distant observers of Venezuelan politics might have thought it obvious that Maduro would never recognize the election results. But some Venezuelan academics and political leaders I interviewed before the vote were confident, or perhaps hopeful, that Maduro would acquiesce if the opposition won a landslide. Even dictatorships require some degree of popular support, they argued. Perhaps military leaders would see the results and calculate that Maduro’s collapse was imminent. Perhaps they would be willing to cut a deal with the opposition, leaving the regime vulnerable.

The victory of the opposition was overwhelming. In the hours following the election, opposition leader María Corina Machado coordinated more than 600,000 volunteer poll watchers in an effort to obtain vote counts from polling stations across the country. On Monday afternoon, after the crowd toppled the statue of Chávez and the man on horseback waved the Venezuelan flag, Machado confirmed what everyone already knew. In a press conference, she announced that, having obtained counts from 80 percent of the polling stations, she could say with certainty that opposition presidential candidate Edmundo González, the man Machado had replaced on the ticket when Maduro barred her from running, had won by an overwhelming margin, with 67 percent of the vote. González had won in every state, despite the fact that just a few months earlier no one knew his name.

The opposition was jubilant; Monday felt like the beginning of a revolution. But Maduro, undeterred, quickly cracked down. Almost immediately, the internet began to crash more than usual. On the Thursday after election day, the government had suspended most flights out of the country. Low-profile protesters began to be arrested in what government officials informally called Operation Knock-Knock. (“It’s called knock-knock because that’s the banging on the door you get in the early morning hours,” one activist told Reuters.) The organization Foro Penal has verified that more than 1,200 people have been arrested in protests since the election, including about 100 teenagers. Maduro announced that two new maximum-security prisons would be built to house “the gangs involved in the criminal attacks in recent days” — meaning the protesters.

From the December 2021 issue: The Bad Guys Win

Maduro has few friends left in the region. The only country in South America to recognize his election victory was Bolivia. Argentina, Ecuador, Peru, Panama and the United States have all recognized Edmundo González as president-elect. Brazil, Mexico and Colombia are in a difficult position because they are governed by leftist leaders, but even they have asked Maduro to provide detailed, tabulated results of the election, which Maduro has failed to do. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva, a longtime friend of Chávez, expressed outrage at Maduro’s threats of a “bloodbath” against those who challenge him, but has so far avoided using words like “fraud.”

Nothing more can be asked of the opposition leadership; Machado and González have achieved something extraordinary. During the campaign, they faced every conceivable difficulty: their collaborators were thrown in jail; state media refused them airtime; gas stations and hotels were closed for providing services to them. Yet the two managed to mobilize people in the most remote corners of the country, places that only Chávez had managed to mobilize before. When Maduro banned Machado from running for president, the opposition could have been derailed by intrigues and succession battles; instead, it rallied behind González, a career diplomat who comes across not as a power-hungry schemer but as someone who is happy to help.

Over the past 25 years, the opposition has used three distinct tactics to challenge Chávez and Maduro: elections, protests, and international support. Never before have all three strategies gained so much momentum, or been so effective all at once. Just a week ago, when so many conditions seemed to have finally come together to end the dictatorship, the moment seemed full of hope. But if the Venezuelan opposition does not prevail with all that serendipity, Maduro may be proven right that the dictatorship can be sustained indefinitely with repression alone.