Electoral scandal and escalation of violence shake region

The political opposition not only rejects the electoral results that perpetuate autocrat Nicolás Maduro for the third consecutive term with 51.2% of the votes. It also denounces an institutional coup against the candidate Edmundo González, to whom the National Electoral Council (CNE), a body disciplined by the regime, attributed 44.2% of the votes after a count full of opacities, with the suspension of the sending of the minutes, which the Chavista autocracy attributes to hackers.

The gravity of the scenario increased on Monday morning, the day after the election, when opposition leader María Corina Machado stated that, according to her data, they won with 70% of the votes. And with this conviction she demanded that the Armed Forces comply with the popular decision. In other words, to overthrow the Chavista regime and defend the position of former diplomat González as president. It’s difficult for that to happen.

The former liberal deputy also called on all Venezuelans to fight for their rights by mobilizing and repudiating the populist regime’s insinuations that any criticism of the result could be considered an expression of violence. “Violence is denying the truth,” she said.

The translation of this climate is that the situation is far from over and threatens to escalate. Much of the international community announced that it would not immediately recognize the results. Brazil, the region’s largest economy, which moved closer to the authoritarian regime in Caracas after the election of Luiz Inácio Lula Silva, demands an independent review of the results.

The conviction of the Venezuelan opposition that it had won became clear on Sunday, after the voting ended, based on the reports sent by the inspectors that they had managed to place in most polling stations.

As Machado revealed, they had 40% of the minutes, which was enough to consider that they had won the election. They did not expect a maneuver due to the distance of around 30 points which, they claimed, separated them from the government. Only a major fraud could break this result.

There was clearly naivety. But it was clear that, in the internal autocracy, the toughest sector had prevailed, far from any concession. A defeat for Chavismo would have been practically by points, not a landslide victory, despite the differences in voting. The regime was in an unparalleled position of power, with simultaneous control of the majority of state governments, the Parliament, which will only hold elections at the end of next year, the Supreme Court, whose members cannot be changed by the Executive without a specific reason , in addition to the loyalty of the leadership of the Armed Forces, the Police and parapolice groups.

Already faced with this reality, anti-Chavista leaders multiplied messages that there would be no legal proceedings either in the field of human rights violations or widespread corruption, a warning to military leaders.

The electoral fraud, denounced by the opposition, is, in any case, consistent with the government’s betrayal of the Barbados agreements, which allowed the lifting of the main sanctions by the United States in October last year. This decision paved the way for international mining and oil corporations targeting Venezuela’s misused wealth.

From now on, these oil and mining businesses will enter an inevitable eclipse due to the predictable growth of sanctions and a general state of chaos that has already begun to creep in with the attacks by the Chavista political police against opposition activists several months ago.

In the tumultuous dawn of this Monday, warnings of a massive operation against the dissident leadership and its bases multiplied, with methods that the regime copied in detail from the civil-military dictatorships that devastated the region in the 1970s. Because chavismo is that.