Within hours of polls closing in Venezuela, the US began to circulate claims that incumbent President Maduro had stolen the election. There was just one problem—these claims emanated from outside the country before election results were even announced. The absence of evidence didn’t stop corporate media outlets from running with the story. The accounts of more than 800 international election observers on the ground, however, paint a very different picture. While there is certainly political division within Venezuela, opposition to Maduro and the Bolivarian Revolution does not constitute an overwhelming majority. To understand why, it’s crucial to examine the sides of the story left out in the corporate media narrative: the impact of US sanctions, the multiple US-backed coup attempts in Venezuela in the past 20 years, and the political and economic factors driving both support for and opposition to the Bolivarian Revolution.
In this exclusive interview, The Real News speaks with three election monitors and journalists who were present on the ground in Venezuela during the election and its aftermath: Manolo de los Santos, Executive Director of The People’s Forum; Zoe Alexandra, Editor of People’s Dispatch; and journalist Andreína Chavez, a staff writer for Venezuelanalysis.
Studio Production: Dave Hebden, Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Ju-Hyun Park:
Welcome to The Real News Podcast. This is Ju-Hyun Park, engagement editor at The Real News.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I’m Maximilian Alvarez, editor in chief at The Real News Network.
Ju-Hyun Park:
Today, we’re discussing the recent elections in Venezuela and the fallout from them.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Now, before we begin, we’d like to extend our gratitude on behalf of The Real News team to you, our listeners, and our supporters. We are beyond proud to be a nonprofit newsroom that tells the stories corporate media won’t. And as part of that commitment, we don’t take ad money or corporate donations, period. We depend on listeners like you to make our work possible. So please consider becoming a sustainer of The Real News today by going to therealnews.com/donate. It really makes a difference.
Ju-Hyun Park:
Venezuela is back in the spotlight. After the recent presidential elections held on July 28th, just hours after the polls closed, the United States began to doubt the validity of the elections, even though the results had not been released yet. When the official tally pronounced a win for incumbent President Maduro and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, with over 51% of the vote, cries of fraud began to emerge, followed by rioting across the country.
Maximillian Alvarez:
As the Associated Press reports, quote, “The Biden administration has thrown its support firmly behind the opposition,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken released a statement Thursday citing, quote, “Overwhelming evidence that opposition leader Maria Corina Machado and her handpicked presidential candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, were the victor and discrediting the National Electoral Council’s official results.” End quote. In response, Reuters reports, quote, “Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Yvan Gil said on Friday that the United States is, quote, ‘At the forefront of a coup attempt against the South American country amid a dispute over presidential election results that sparked protest.'” End quote.
So what’s going on? What do we know for sure and who should we believe? Today, we are joined by Manolo De Los Santos, executive director of The People’s Forum. Zoe Alexandra, editor in chief of Peoples Dispatch. And Andreina Chavez, a writer for Venezuelanalysis. Welcome you all to The Real News Network. Thank you so much for joining us today.
All right. So as you can imagine, and as I’m sure your readers are also bombarding you with these very same questions, we here in the United States are getting overwhelmingly in our current corporate media ecosystem, a lopsided narrative about the Venezuela elections and how people should understand the results of them and what they should expect next. And so we wanted to get y’all on a call today and help our listeners and viewers sort of navigate this scene right now. And so we want them to benefit from your firsthand experience in Venezuela observing the election, reporting on the election, being on the ground there in a way that so many here have not.
And so, Andreina, I want to start with you and just kind of launch into the accusations of election fraud that, as Ju-Hyun mentioned, began with an hours of the polls closing. So this is a really fast pace for the US and other doubters of the election results to draw that conclusion. It usually takes days, if not weeks, to determine whether or not an election has been stolen as it is accused of being stolen. So where do the claims of election fraud come from and are they credible?
Andreína Chávez Alava:
Thank you so much for having me. And I mean, first of all, I think I do need to say that it is without a question, Venezuela is right now facing a coup attempt and it is being led by the US Government. And we know this because immediately after we have the first results of the election, what we saw was the United States Government immediately backing the opposition, backing these claims that they won the election, given this announcement that they were going to recognize the opposition candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, as the winner. So all of these things happened so quickly, so fast, and we’ve seen this movie before. We know the script from years behind. So we know that this is a very meticulous plan, a meticulous strategy to create a condition for a coup in Venezuela. So that is what is going on right now.
So now to explain what happened during the elections and the electoral results. Well, first of all, on Sunday on July 28 when we held the elections, the process was completely peaceful, completely normal. I was going to electoral centers all across Caracas. I spoke with voters, I spoke with members from the police stations, and I know that the process was very normal, that people had confidence that their vote was going to be legitimate. And what we saw that day at midnight on Sunday is that the National Electoral President, Elvis Amoroso, gave the first results of the election and he proclaimed Maduro as the winner. Minutes before that, almost immediately after that, the Venezuelan opposition led by Maria Corina Machado said that they were going to accept these results and that they actually said that they had won based entirely on these electoral records that they collected on their own, but that nobody can actually verify to be true.
And you have to remember that the opposition said even weeks before the election happened, even months before the election happened, that they were never going to recognize the results. So we knew from the beginning that they were never going to accept anything that Venezuela’s National Electoral Council said on the day of the election. So of course, we were expecting that we were going to reject this electoral results, and we were expecting that we’re going to immediately call for violence. And that’s what they did. They rejected the electoral results, they immediately called for violent protests in the streets. We have seen really terrible fascist actions happening in Venezuela all these days. In fact, two Chavista popular organizers in Aragua and Bolivar states were murdered, were assassinated these past few days by these fascist opposition groups. So we have seen this very planned violence in the streets.
And of course, the opposition has now created this new narrative that they have these electoral records, and they published three different websites where people can allegedly consult these electoral records that they collected. The problem is that just by doing a superficial analysis of these electoral records that they published, you can tell that there are so many inconsistencies that you can already know that most of these evidence, it was forged, it is prevalent in many ways. Not to mention the fact that President Nicolas Maduro went to the Supreme Court of Venezuela demanding that the Supreme Court intervenes in this process and certifies and verifies and reduce the electoral results in order to be completely sure that these results are legitimate. And the Venezuelan opposition, even though they claim they have overwhelming evidence that Edmundo Gonzalez won, they decided not to show up to the Supreme Court. So all of this tells you that there is not a drop of innocence in these actions that they’re carrying right now.
And just to clarify, it is true that the National Electoral Council of Venezuela hasn’t published the detailed results voting center by voting center in Venezuela. They haven’t done that, and they have claimed that there’s been a cyber attack going on against the electoral transmission, against the electoral system. So they haven’t been able to publish the entire results. Nonetheless, they have given two electoral reports where they confirmed that Maduro won. And not only that, but this electoral results actually give Edmundo Gonzalez quite an amount of votes. So you can tell that the results are quite true. They really represent the reality of Venezuela, that there is a sort of polarized context with a lot of people who in recent years have begun voting for the opposition. So we know that this electoral result actually truly reflect the reality on the ground in Venezuela, which is completely different to the one the opposition is claiming in which they say that Edmundo won with more than 70% of the votes.
And only by looking at the Chavista March, the Chavista rallies, all this data having happened in Venezuela, you can tell that there is an absolutely absurd representation of reality in the country. So I hope that clarifies a little bit about this whole issue with the electoral results.
Ju-Hyun Park:
Thank you so much for that explanation, Andreina. Manolo, and Zoe, we want to turn to you because you were recently in Venezuela during the electoral process, where you joined some 800 other people who were acting as international election monitors. Can you describe the election process as you observed them? And what did you see from your perspective on the ground in the aftermath that people who were following the story from overseas might’ve missed?
Zoe Alexandra:
Great. Well, yeah, I was on the ground in Venezuela as a journalist covering the elections. It was really interesting to be there, to be seeing what was happening, to be in dialogue with those who were monitoring the elections, the over 800 international election monitors, to be seeing the different polling stations, to be talking to people on the streets, and then be receiving New York Times notifications on my phone that allegedly the electoral process, which I had just seen happen, which I had spoken to people about, which had been developing in front of my eyes, was apparently something else. And so we saw, as Andreina mentioned, as soon as polls closed, we see these accusations start to fly. We saw that the New York Times, I think just after polls closed, published an article calling into question whether or not the electoral process had gone through smoothly, talking about long lines that people were subjected to, talking about some isolated incidents, which saying that people were unable to vote.
And this is clearly, as Andreina also mentioned, these are clearly narratives that had already been in place and they were just waiting to unleash them. They didn’t have any correlation to what had happened on the ground. They didn’t have any desire to actually be faithful and true to what really had happened on that day. I visited various polling stations seen in the morning, there had been longer lines, there had been a call for people to vote early. I think this is a normal thing that happens in countries where you have voting on a Sunday, on a day where you don’t have to go to work, people like to get voting over with. And in the afternoon largely a lot of the polling stations were pretty empty, a couple people coming in here and there, but a lot of tranquility, easy, peaceful. Again, the Venezuelan voting system is electronic, so it is a process takes less than a minute to actually complete. I saw several people vote and was astonished by the ease in which this happens.
And so at first, seeing these reports from Western media outlets that allegedly there had been all of these different obstacles to people exercising their right to vote and that already creating this climate of fraud. Fraud because they weren’t able to vote, fraud because the counting was suspicious, fraud because the witnesses weren’t able to enter the polling stations for the count. All of these different lines of suspicion and doubt that they started to breed. And what’s so nefarious about this is that these aren’t empty words, but actually they served as a justification for all of the violence that we saw unfold on Monday. And so you see an extremely peaceful, orderly voting process on Sunday. And starting on Monday morning, acts of horrific far-right, racist, fascist violence unfolding all on the basis that what all of the millions of Venezuelans had participated in the day before was fraudulent, was fake, was corrupted. And these are narratives that, of course, the Venezuelan right wing had been installing in the media for months, but was fomented by Western media.
And so when we saw, for example, that offices of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela had been attacked, that there had been physical attacks to members of PSUV and the Great Patriotic Pole parties, when statues had been torn down, all of these active violence justified by this narrative of fraud. So it was a really bizarre experience to actually see how that reporting in many ways, what was it trying to serve? It obviously had a clear political intention, which is to serve these narratives that had been already concocted. If you read the reporting from New York Times, from Wall Street Journal, from the Washington Post, in months leading up to these elections, they’re almost using the same formulations. But then on Sunday, just kind of saying, “And see, everything we said happened.”
So I think that when we saw that happening in real time on Sunday and then on Monday, it was clear that there was a disconnect between what had happened and what they were saying and that we had to be very distrustful of these acts of violence that were in seeming perfect coordination happening all on Monday with clear political targets and with this desire to kind of upset political stability, economic stability, and the well-being of the people of Venezuela.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Please, Manolo, hop in and tell us a little more about what you yourself saw as well and anything else that you want to add to from the previous two questions.
Manolo De Los Santos:
Well, I think adding to what Andreina and Zoe have laid out, I think having observed, monitored, accompanied multiple elections throughout the Global South, Venezuela stands out above all in terms of transparency, in terms of easiness of voters being able to participate. I mean, from the fact that it’s on a Sunday, a day off where working people can actively be able to participate in the election process, to the fact that everything from just being able to get on a line, verify your identification, and easily vote on a digital machine that is not connected to the internet, meaning it cannot be hacked, there’s no fraud element that can be introduced, there’s no virus that can be introduced into the actual voting machine, your vote is actually respected, is remarkable.
And I intentionally on the day of the election, chose to go to voting centers in opposition-heavy areas because I was keen to ask and talk to people who were clearly voting for Edmundo Gonzalez. I mean, it’s interesting that while the opposition says there was fraud, the Chavistas are not saying that there wasn’t a large number of people who voted for the opposition. I mean, by all accounts, millions of people voted for the opposition. And in talking to many of them on voting day as after they had voted, most of them, I would say 99% of the people I talked to, and I talked to hundreds of people that day, clearly said they were happy with the election process. It was easy, it was quick. Most of them didn’t take that long. They said it was all fine and dandy. But clearly that was not the agenda that had been set, not just by Maria Corina or Edmundo Gonzalez, I think the agenda had really been set by Washington months before this election was even called for.
I mean, when we look back at the agreements that had been signed by the opposition and the Venezuelan Government ahead of time in Barbados, in Mexico City, in Qatar, all of these agreements literally point out to the fact that all the guarantees were being placed on the table. But every time the Venezuelan Government intended to fulfill these agreements, the opposition, always with the backing of the United States Government, always has an excuse for why they wouldn’t fulfill their part of the agreement. I mean, at this point, it’s clear that Blinken and the US Government have completely taken responsibility for the coup attempt, a coup attempt that in many ways has failed in those same ways that all previous coup attempts in Venezuela have failed, because they don’t actually have majority support. The only thing that the opposition continues to have in their favor is the overwhelming support of foreign governments led by the United States.
And I think we’re a dangerous sort of moment in history because having gone through years of sanctions, sanctions that have crippled the Venezuelan economy, after years of violence unleashed on the streets that have killed, and I like to remind listeners, have led to the lynching of Black people on the streets accused of being Chavistas, after all of this and a false presidency under Juan Guaido pushed by the US, the US Government goes again to this failed tactic. What is left for the US to do? Invade? Directly come in and topple the Venezuelan Government? Is that the only thing they have left in the arsenal essentially to ensure that so-called transition that they’re calling for to Edmundo Gonzalez? That is quite worrisome. And I think that should be ringing bells across the United States, particularly in Washington, as to is this really how US foreign policy is going to be behave in the 21st century?
I mean, when we look at the fact that Ukraine refuses to call for elections, but it’s called a democracy. And then Venezuela holds elections in the middle of sanctions, in the middle of what you could essentially call a war climate, and is considered a dictatorship. Something is wrong with US politics. The politics of imperialism is quite sick, it’s quite delusional. And the American people need to actually break public opinion, need to break with the consensus that has been imposed.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I want to pick up on that particular point here, and I want to pose this question to all three of you, and I apologize that the question may sound obtuse, but again, we’re trying to appeal to our listeners and viewers who are well-meaning, want to know how to navigate this environment, and want to know what to believe and what they can believe. But they are navigating an environment that is just so chock-full of propaganda, of doubt, of foreign interests that they may not be getting the full scope of. But as Manolo just touched on, I mean none of this is happening in a vacuum. I mean, we practically lost count of the times that the US has tried to institute a coup in Venezuela. There was one under the Trump administration for which the Green Beret that tried to organize it was just arrested, a coup attempt that was described by one Navy SEAL as, quote, “So mind-bogglingly dumb as to bear disbelief.”
But you mentioned Juan Guaido declaring himself the interim president of Venezuela with the immediate backing of the United States. And so that of course is in the back of people’s minds, but I think the question here to ask is why? I mean, so I wanted to ask if we could go back around the table and just remind folks about the ongoing and long historical effort by the United States especially, to institute governmental change in Venezuela over and over again through different means. How should viewers and listeners understand the current narrative about the elections within that historical context? And what is your answer to them about why the US especially, but also trusted mainstream media outlets that people want to believe, are pushing this narrative that the election was clearly fraudulent and that people here should support the opposition taking power? So, Andreina, why don’t we start back with you and then we’ll go back around to Zoe and Manolo.
Andreína Chávez Alava:
Yes. So I would like to add something about what Manolo said that I think is so important, the fact that Venezuela celebrated elections while we’re still under US sanctions, while our economy is still being crushed by US sanctions. And if you ask me, in order to have free elections, the most important thing will be not to be suffocated by a military economic power, foreign power, that is trying to destroy your government, that is trying to create the conditions for regime change, and that is trying to suffocate the people of Venezuela so they don’t vote for the government that they want, so that they feel sort of blackmail to do the opposite. Because for example, one of the things that you need to consider is that when people went to vote for President Nicolas Maduro, they also voted knowing that US sanctions were going to continue oppressing Venezuela, they also voted knowing that most likely the US was going to impose more sanctions against Venezuela.
So in no way you can call this free elections when you take into consideration that we have the most powerful country in the world oppressing our economy. And that said, I do think it’s important to remind people that Venezuela has been facing a coup attempt since the beginning of the Bolivarian Revolution. We saw a coup attempt against Hugo Chavez in 2002. It was actually a successful coup attempt, although it didn’t last very long. It lasted for 48 hours, and then the Venezuelan people sort of rescued Chavez and rescued the democracy. And after that, which has several violent attempts to overthrow the government, we saw it in 2004, we saw it in 2014 when we had really violent protests across Venezuela and more than 40 people die. We saw it in 2017 when we also have these massive violent fascist actions going on across Venezuela. And this is when we saw one of the most horrifying events that Venezuela has seen in its recent history, which was a young Black man that was burn alive and he died because of those injuries.
After that, in 2019, we saw Juan Guaido, who was a completely unknown figure in Venezuela, we saw him proclaim himself interim president of Venezuela, and we saw the United States and many right-wing governments across the region support Guaido. So it’s amazing that for countries that are always alleging that they are worried about Venezuelan democracy, that they are worried about Venezuela having free and fair elections, they have absolutely no problem proclaiming president a guy who didn’t go to any election, nobody voted for him, and they were completely fine with that, and they thought that was the pinnacle of democracy. But on the other hand, we have President Maduro, who goes to elections, and he wins the elections and he wins with a majority of votes. That is true. Well, he actually wins with a normal majority of vote. By that I mean that he got around 6.4 million votes and Edmundo Gonzalez got 5.2 million million votes. So you can tell that this is something that is completely… It reflects very well Venezuelan society.
We know that there are many people, many opposition supporters who don’t necessarily like Edmundo Gonzales or Maria Corina Machado, but voted for them. This is very representative of Venezuelan society of how a country continues to function after 25 years of revolution. So yeah, I think that if you take all this into consideration, all these coup attempts that we’ve been living through for many years and US sanctions against the country, and so many calls for foreign intervention, so many calls for invading Venezuela because we’ve seen this before. We also saw in 2020 when a group of mercenaries tried to invade Venezuela, and of course they failed in this attempt. So this isn’t new for us. We know that the possibility that a coup was going to happen immediately after the elections was very real. We were expecting it, and we were more or less on guard waiting to see what was going to happen. And right now, nothing is surprising us. Everything we’ve seen, we’ve seen it before. So we know exactly that they’re following the exactly same script that they’ve done in 2014, 2017, 2019, 2020, and now today.
Zoe Alexandra:
Yeah, I think that what Andreina said that this is something that we’ve seen before is so important to keep in mind. And especially when thinking about the kind of installation or preparing for what may be a parallel government of Edmundo Gonzales, what were the US and its allies able to achieve by essentially a name only parallel government of Juan Guaido. Well, they were able to seize billions of dollars in Venezuelan assets, they were able to essentially force Venezuela into a very compromised position for them then to negotiate about restarting oil trade. The function of proclaiming Edmundo Gonzalez as president isn’t just because… And it isn’t because the US thinks that he’ll actually be able to control the institutions of Venezuela. They know that Nicolas Maduro is president, they know that actually he’s the one who has the majority of support of the people, they know that Edmundo Gonzalez, there’s no way that he’s actually going to be able to take control over these institutions.
And actually yesterday, The New York Times published an article essentially saying the only way for this to happen, for Maduro to be taken down and actually legitimately out of power, is if the military turned on him, aka a military coup. So that’s what the New York Times is calling for. But essentially recognizing that the US declaring Edmundo Gonzalez as president does not mean that he’s president. But it does give the United States once again, as we saw before, another reason to increase sanctions to essentially bully other countries for doing business with Venezuela, to continue seizing the billions of dollars in Venezuelan assets in different banks across the world, the gold that’s held in the Bank of England and the many other assets that are of the Venezuelan people that have been seized by foreign powers. This essentially gives them the justification to do all of that.
We saw that after the war in Ukraine broke out, the US was sort of forced to actually recognize that in fact, Juan Guaido isn’t president. He does not control the institutions of Venezuela, and he will not be able to negotiate with the US about selling oil to the US in this time of an energy crisis. So how long will they hang onto this narrative? How far will they actually go? Will it just be recognizing Edmundo Gonzalez won the elections? Are they going to actually go further and say that he is the rightful president? Are they going to, once again, in some countries, as we saw that happened in the US, which still haven’t been recovered, are the embassies going to be under attack? Are different governments going to try to hand them over to the opposition? I mean, we’ll see how far they’ll go in this ridiculous sort of parallel reality. But in essence, it is in order to maintain control over Venezuelan assets and pressure Venezuela into conceding different things.
It’s also very important to point out when we say why is the US interested in regime change in Venezuela? It’s very simple, Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the entire world. So any way that the US can weaken the position of the Bolivarian Revolution to get its hands on those oil reserves, it will do. Under Hugo Chavez, these oil reserves were nationalized. These US-based companies were no longer able to loot the oil as they pleased. And essentially, they’ve been trying for the past 25 years to get back in the position where they can control these reserves, where they can control the gold reserves and all the other precious minerals that Venezuela has. But as The New York Times recognized, unless they’re able to actually topple the infrastructure, the institutions of the Venezuelan state, which they would need the support of the military in order to do, in essence, this is not going to happen.
So the devastating thing is that in all of these efforts, the people that they’re hurting most are the Venezuelan people and they continue to resist, they continue to say no to imperialism, they continue to defend the revolution. But of course, the siege is meant to weaken morale, it’s meant to devastate people, it’s meant to make life difficult, and it has been able to do that. But as we’ve seen in the past couple of years, there has been recovery when they’re threatening sanctions now it’s not 2017, they’ve been through it. They’ve actually built pathways to overcome these sanctions, there are international partnerships that didn’t exist back in 2017, and the Venezuelan people and the Venezuelan Government are in a much better place to actually withstand the US siege than they were five years ago.
Manolo De Los Santos:
Maximilian, I think you raised, it’s not an obtuse question, it’s actually the most important question, why? Why is it that the United States Government has essentially invested for over 20 years millions of dollars, not just in financial and economic resources, but in human resources, in order to overthrow this one government in South America? And there are many factors and things that we can bring to light here like Zoe and Andreina have raised already. There’s the largest oil reserves, over 300 billion barrels, there’s the vast mineral resources. But in this battle, which ultimately is not really between Maduro and the far-right opposition, in this battle that’s really between the US and Washington, both Republican and Democratic administrations, one after another. From Bush all the way to Biden now, and who knows, possibly Trump in a few months. What has been clear is that Venezuela is a counter-hegemonic force that has in many ways prevented the US from fully achieving its foreign policy objectives in the region.
The objectives of imposing far-right and neoliberal presidents like they did in Brazil with Bolsonaro, with Milei in Argentina. In a sense, I would say that Venezuela is the bulwark against fascism and neoliberalism in the region. And for as long as the Venezuelan Government continues to stand in the region as an independent, sovereign force, that it not only defends its own democratic process, but actively encourages, and we could even admit supports in many ways the democratic efforts of other countries and movements around the region, the US will now be able to fully achieve its highly sought political, economic, and financial hegemony in Latin America. In many ways, Venezuela is a bigger threat to the United States politically than Cuba ever was in the last 60 years, because Venezuela as a country does not only present democratic values and ideals, but Venezuela actually has had over time the financial resources to support the rise of democratic figures like Evo Morales in Bolivia, of Fernando Lugo in Paraguay, and so many other countless stories of democratic renewal across the region.
So at the end of the day, the why is really about Washington’s unending goals of completely dominating Latin America at all costs. And at this point, there’s a little rock called Venezuela that stands in its way.
Ju-Hyun Park:
Beautifully put. To bring this conversation back to some prior discussions we’ve had about similar contexts in other places, I’m thinking particularly, Manolo, when you’ve been on in the past to discuss Cuba, the US is also very, very clear about its intention behind sanctions and blockades. We can look to the Mallory letter, which is a State Department memo circulated in 1960 at the start of the Cuban blockade, which clearly states that the intention of that is to, quote, “Bring about hunger, desperation, and overthrow of government.” End quote. And I think we can safely assume that this is a playbook that is being intentionally repeated throughout the region and really around the world.
Now, to round out our conversation, I’d like to return again to a point, Manolo, that you raised earlier. If we take the official numbers, we can clearly see that there is an obvious polarization occurring within the Venezuelan body politic. Close to 52% of voters cast their ballot for Maduro and the PSUV, and about 44% cast their ballots for Gonzalez, the opposition. So there is a clear outcome here, but there is also clear and very sharp disagreement. So having just been on the ground, and this is a question for everyone, what is your take on the issues that are driving this polarization? Who is supporting the opposition and why? And why does the majority still stand by the current Government of Venezuela? Maybe we can do a little reversal of the order we just went in. So, Manolo, I would invite you to go first, followed by Zoe, and then Andreina.
Manolo De Los Santos:
There’s definitely a high level of polarization among voters, but I would not say that that’s the complete story of the population in Venezuela. My sense from talking to people across social segments, sectors of society, I would say that the majority of people want to just live in peace. I think the majority of people want to build their lives again, I think the majority of people want to be able to start their businesses again, I think the majority of people want to be able to send their kids to school without worrying about what they’re going to feed them at lunch. I think that the majority of people honestly want to move beyond these years of constant strife. I think majority of people are sick and tired of dealing with US intervention, whether they consider themselves on the left or not.
And I think this is an interesting moment in Venezuelan history. I think the challenges that Maduro faces as incoming re-elected president are high because he will have to speak to this population that wants to see a rise in quality of life, that wants to see better standards of living, that wants to be able to, again, see their country developed. And in a sense, we already saw a glimpse of that in the last couple of years. I mean, despite sanctions, besides how difficult things have been, there’s been a steady improvement in life. We already saw that of the millions of Venezuelans who were migrating abroad to the United States, to Europe, to other parts of Latin America, hundreds of thousands already starting to come back, not just because they want to go back home, but because now things are beginning to stabilize enough for them to be able to rebuild a life in Venezuela. I think that’s telling of the reality that’s coming.
Again, sadly, we will have to contend with the fact that it is not up to the Venezuelan people to decide for themselves, sadly. Sadly, the United States continues to intervene in this process and it will continue to financially and politically sponsor a far-right opposition. And I say far-right very intentionally because even if these folks sound liberal in many ways, Maria Corina, Edmundo, all come from a dark past in the far-right and are key players in the far-right networks across Latin America and Europe. I mean, these are the people who when they come to the US, they come speak at CPAC conferences, and they meet with the most ultra right-wing figures of even beyond the Republican Party in the United States. So they will continue to be sponsored financially by the United States, they will continue to be sponsored politically. And these groups in a sense, despite having failed multiple times, still seem to have not learned the lesson and seem to want to continue going against the wind, against the grain, against their own people’s interests.
Zoe Alexandra:
Yeah. And I mean, I would add that I think that what people want is an end to sanctions, whether they’re voting for the opposition, the far-right opposition, or whether they’re voting for the Great Patriotic Pole Alliance, as Manolo said, people want an improvement in quality of life, they want an end to the strife. I mean, what the sanctions have been able to do really, I mean since they intensified in 2017, completely changed the quality of life of the people of Venezuela, the migrants that were forced to leave. These are all because of these sanctions, the drop in the GDP because of the sanctions. People want a return to the way things were in the 2000s. There was not the same wave of migration from Venezuela in the 2000s when there was a much less… Of course, there were still attacks in the Bolivarian Revolution, but nowhere near the same number of unilateral coercive measures against the Venezuelan economy.
So when people say they want… We’ve seen this in many cases, people vote for what they think is going to change their situation. And so if the opposition is promising a better quality of life, it’s not necessarily that they’re voting for the political project of the opposition, which actually includes privatization, which would actually make a lot of the rights that people had won under the Bolivarian Revolution out of access, out of reach for a lot of people. Oftentimes, this is just expressing the desire for change. And what the US has done is made it so it’s not really about two political projects, but it’s about forcing people into such difficult conditions that they’re just trying to vote for a change. Of course, we know that voting for the Maria Corina Machado project is like voting for Milei. This is not going to cause a betterment in quality of life of the people. Even if it promises change, change does not always mean that it’s going to cause an improvement.
And so I think these are really crucial questions to keep on the table. And as Manolo said, Venezuela went to elections and the middle of a war, an economic war with many attempts of political destabilization, of military invasions, of many different attempts of not only the economic war, but also attempts at magnicide and other assassination attempts. And so going to elections in the middle of a war means that the terrain is not like a country at peace. It’s not that you’re making these two deliberations based on, “Okay, do I like these political proposals better? Do I like these political proposals better?” So it’s very difficult to also understand where the people are at right now, because again, they’re in a state of war. I think that if the sanctions were not suffocating the Venezuelan economy, were they able to carry out all of the different social programs in the way that they had been carrying out for the past decade before the sanctions, I think we’d be looking at a very different scenario, one where there had been possibility of dialogue with different political sectors.
Even throughout this period of economic war, Maduro and the Bolivarian Government has attempted to engage in different rounds of dialogue with the far right in order to bring down this very tense, as you said, polarization that exists in the country. This has been possible with some sectors of the opposition. There is harmony. I think that a lot of times there’s this narrative and dialogue that Venezuela is a country that’s in very high political tension, a lot of violence, but for the most part, there are very genuine attempts to actually resolve political differences through dialogue and maintaining peace. So I think underscoring the fact that people do want peace, they want an end to the sanctions, and they want change, it’s impossible to say that over the past seven years since these sanctions that things have been easy in Venezuela.
Of course, they’re getting better right now, but I think that people want to continue on this path of improvement of economic growth and of actually just being free of the chains and the boot of imperialism on the economic growth of their country. This is something that people across the world, over 30 countries across the Global South are under the boot of US sanctions. It means that your country cannot develop in peace with the same conditions that a country that does not have sanctions can do. So in the US I think it remains critically important as we’re looking at Venezuela to continue to demand an end to these completely unilateral measures that are levied against the Venezuelan people. This is no way for a country to actually exist in peace and to thrive if they have these measures just sitting on top of them.
Andreína Chávez Alava:
I agree completely with everything Zoe was talking about. From a personal point of view, I just want to add that these past seven, eight years have been in many ways very traumatizing for the Venezuelan people because we’ve come from this internal war and the fascist right wing imposed against us in which they were hiding food, they were doing things to destabilize the Venezuelan Bolivar, the Venezuelan national monetary. Then we had US sanctions, and then we saw these enormous crises happening in the country. We saw family members, friends from our childhood go away, migrate to other countries.
And for example, in 2021, I traveled to Ecuador to visit with my family and half thinking that I might stay there, half thinking that I’m going to come back. A year later, I decided to come back and I cannot tell you the actual fear that I had, thinking that I’m going back to a war zone, I’m going back to a place where the reality can change from one day to the other one. That today I might be okay, the next one might not have food. The economy might destabilize even more. Maybe the Bolivar is going to be even less power for them it was yesterday. So you have to live in this sort of constant fear that everything’s going to change, that you have to be prepared for a warlike scenario any other day. So that is a constant fear that we’ve been living for many years now.
So when you present yourself in these elections, when you go to elections, you’re not just voting for two political projects, just like Zoe was talking about. You are voting taking into consideration all these elements that might happen to you. For example, you vote for President Maduro and you know that you US sanctions are going to continue oppressing the economy, you know that it might get worse, you know that there might be threats of military intervention, you know that right-wing governments in the region are going to once again try to destabilize the country. So you know all these things, you’re not going to vote just for a political project. You’re voting thinking about the entire aggression that you’re going to face because of that sovereign decision that you’re making as a Venezuelan, as a voter.
And the same thing for people who vote for the opposition. When they go to vote for the opposition, they’re not voting for Edmundo Gonzalez or for Maria Corina Machado, they’re voting for them because they think that it might in some way improve their life, any kind of change to Venezuela. That being, getting rid of US sanctions or getting rid of all this aggression that we are always facing. So it’s not as simple as just voting for a political project. Venezuela is always facing the immense dilemma of what to do, how to create a future where we can live in peace? Because by the end of the day, working-class Venezuelans, whether they are Chavista or a opposition, they want the same thing. They just want a peaceful country, they just want a normal economy, they just want a normal country that nobody else is trying to interfere with, nobody else is trying to create damages to create destabilization just so they can put a US puppet as a president. So that’s basically what Venezuelans in the majority, no matter what political project they support, want, just peace and a normal economy.
You have to remember that Venezuela has an immense amount of oil, so we’re actually capable of being a country that can develop very well, that can have a really good life, really good life conditions. And we saw it in the first years of the Bolivarian Revolution with Hugo Chavez, we saw how many people learn how to read, many people went to school for the first time, they graduated. I mean, I have family members, my mother including, who was able to go to school for the first time because of the Bolivarian Revolution. So we know that this great country can happen. We know that it can happen with the ideas of the Bolivarian Revolution, we know that anything happen with this political project that we have now. But we also know that it’s going to always be blocked by these foreign powers that do not want a socialist alternative to thrive in Venezuela, because we know that that is a threat for the entire left in not only Latin America, but the entire world.
As you know, the Bolivarian Revolution, Hugo Chavez and President Nicolas Maduro, they support Palestine, they support the Palestine people’s fight for liberation. And that is something that a government like Venezuela, a country like Venezuela that is rich in all resources supporting social [inaudible 00:48:09] like Palestine, it’s an absolute threat for US imperialism. Maria Corina Machado is one of the biggest allies of fascist governments in the world, including the Israel Government. So as you can see, Venezuela, these elections are not just about who wins the election. It is about completely changing the path of a country who is right now on the path of sovereignty and what they want for us is to be on the path of being a US client state.
Ju-Hyun Park:
Thank you so much for those thoughtful answers and for this very productive conversation bringing to bear all your very important perspectives on Venezuela. As we close out, could we just do a quick go around and could you let our listeners know how they can keep in touch with you?
Andreína Chávez Alava:
Okay. So my name is Andreina Chavez. I am an independent journalist in Venezuela. I am based in Caracas, and right now I am a staff writer for Venezuelanalysis. Venezuelanalysis is an independent English media outlet that is on the ground in Venezuela. It has been here for more than 20 years, and you can find us on social media at venezuelanalysis.com.
Zoe Alexandra:
Great. Zoe Alexander, I’m the editor of Peoples Dispatch. You can find us on all social media platforms @PeoplesDispatch, and on our website, peoplesdispatch.org.
Manolo De Los Santos:
And you can find The People’s Forum on Twitter, Instagram, social media, website, peoplesforumnyc.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. Once again, we want to thank you for listening to The Real News Network Podcast. I am Maximillian Alvarez.
Ju-Hyun Park:
I’m Ju-Hyun Park. And our guests today, once again, were Manolo De Los Santos of The People’s Forum, Zoe Alexandra of Peoples Dispatch, and Andreina Chavez of Venezuelanalysis.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Before we go, we’d like to thank you, our listeners, one more time. And we also want to take a moment to recognize our incredible real news studio team, David Hebden, Cameron Granadino, Kayla Rivara, and the great Alina Nelich, who make all of our work possible. Thank you all so much behind the scenes. And a final reminder to all of you listening out there, you make our work possible by supporting it. So please tell your friends about us and go to therealnews.com/donate and become a supporter today if you aren’t already. And thank you so much to all of you who are.
Ju-Hyun Park:
Stay tuned for further updates from Venezuela and everywhere else that working people are on the front lines of struggle to fight for a better world. Stay hopeful, keep fighting. This is The Real News. Over and out.