Sunday, an estimated two-thirds of Venezuelans, according to exit polls, voted for the opposition candidate—a brave, if fanciful, thing to do in a country ruled by a 25-year-old regime that gave no indication it would honor the results. “To face a dictatorship with hope is a bit like facing a bullet with a flower,” an activist from Voto Joven, an organization that encourages young people to vote, told me on condition of anonymity out of concern about reprisals.
Sure enough, the government has declared a narrow victory for President Nicolás Maduro but will not release the detailed results, despite the calls of national and international election observers as well as foreign leaders. Maduro, a widely hated autocrat whose economic mismanagement has produced one of the world’s biggest refugee crises, appears to have secured less than half as many votes as his opponent but is to govern for a third term.
A moment during the campaign of María Corina Machado, the opposition leader, encapsulates both the hope and the repression that characterized this election cycle. María Corina, as Venezuelans call her, traveled in May to the llanos, a swampy green lowland that is home to wild buffalo and small farms. In a llanero state in the very center of Venezuela—the heartland, if you will—is a village of no political, historic, or economic importance called Corozo Pando. María Corina and her team made a quick stop there for breakfast, at a restaurant called Pancho Grill, where they ordered 14 meals, including a few empanadas.
This seemingly unremarkable transaction could not be ignored, either by Maduro’s regime or by observers on social media. That is because, the Venezuelan dictatorship being what it is, the meal implied multiple acts of defiance.
First was the defiance on the part of the empanada sellers. Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chávez have a long history of imprisoning and intimidating dissenters, but as Sunday’s election approached, not only political activists but anyone who interacted with María Corina could expect consequences. The hotels where she stayed were closed. A station that sold gas to her was shut down. A doctor was fired from a hospital for taking a selfie with her. On that day in May, Elys and Corina Hernández, the sisters who run Pancho Grill with their aunt Nazareth, must have known that selling empanadas to María Corina could put their business in jeopardy. They did so anyway, and the authorities showed up that very day to close their restaurant for 15 days for alleged tax evasion. According to one count, 22 establishments have been closed or inspected after providing services to María Corina and her entourage.
Then there was the defiance of María Corina. During the opposition primaries last year, she had no true rival and won more than 90 percent of the vote before setting out on a formidable campaign tour. A worried Maduro forbade her from running, going back on an agreement he’d negotiated with the opposition last year. That should have been the end for María Corina—but in April, she chose to endorse another candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, a career diplomat who had never harbored any presidential ambitions, making him the perfect stand-in. María Corina continued campaigning on behalf of Edmundo, who is also popularly called by his first name, and many Venezuelans rallied behind him. She was still the leader; he became the candidate.
Finally, the very location of the empanada breakfast suggested defiance. Los llanos is historically the territory of Chávez, who was born there and came to power promising a revolution that appealed to impoverished llaneros. María Corina, an impeccably jeweled Caracas aristocrat and self-described admirer of Margaret Thatcher, embodied the upper class that Chávez had always stood against. And yet, years after Chávez’s revolution brought down the country’s economy, María Corina is the one rallying crowds in los llanos and other rural chavista strongholds where opposition leaders once struggled. She is the face of a revolution against the new rapacious elites—Maduro’s oligarchs.
“The people supporting María Corina are probably not doing it for the reasons she would want,” Tomás Straka, a history professor at Andrés Bello Catholic University in Caracas, told me. She advocates privatization and a free-market agenda that much of her constituency doesn’t necessarily endorse. But voters see in María Corina the same possibility of change that Chávez once embodied. She started dressing down during this campaign and presented herself as a kind of matriarch for the dispossessed, hugging people and listening attentively to their plights. After the tax authorities shut down Pancho Grill in Corozo Pando, she went back to the restaurant to offer support to the Hernández sisters.
The restaurant owners laughed the whole thing off when they reopened. With the publicity María Corina’s social media posts brought, Pancho Grill was booming. Hundreds of people showed up to order empanadas de la libertad, as the star product was rebranded. Even The New York Times caught on to the news. The refusal of Pancho Grill’s owners to be scared out of serving María Corina reflected the hopeful mood in Venezuela in the months leading up to Sunday’s elections. “They have taken so much away from us that they have also taken away our fear”—so goes a slogan that the opposition has been using for years. It was finally beginning to ring true.
Ahead of Sunday’s election, Venezuelans like me had begun to wonder whether the defiance of a campaign, a restaurant, and crowds of people in los llanos suggested that a democratic transition could indeed be approaching. But of course we also knew that much more than an electoral majority would be necessary to end Maduro’s dictatorship. Venezuela is, after all, a country where business owners are not allowed to sell empanadas to a candidate who’s not allowed to run.
Protests broke out in several Venezuelan cities on Monday after authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro was formally declared a winner by the county’s electoral authority in a presidential race marred by accusations of electoral fraud.
In the capital Caracas, security forces deployed tear gas to disperse a large crowd of protesters, while crowds of people were seen walking down a main road banging pots and pans as anger rose over Maduro’s victory on Sunday. PROVEA, a Venezuelan human rights organization, said pro-Maduro armed groups shot at peaceful demonstrators on Avenue Urdaneta.
Protests were also reported in other cities, including Maracay, where opposition activist Esthefania Natera told CNN that people were on the streets “to yell and demand to tell the truth because we know the real results.” In the coastal state of Falcón, demonstrators toppled a statue of Maduro, video on social media showed.
Analysts say there could be a new wave of unrest in the country if there are widespread protests against the regime. Street demonstrations in previous years were crushed by the country’s military, which has long supported Maduro and his predecessor, the late Hugo Chávez.
On Monday night, Maduro said his government “knows how to confront this situation and defeat those who are violent,” claiming without evidence that the majority of the protestors were hate-filled criminals – and that their plan was hatched in the United States.
Earlier that day, Maduro was formally declared winner at a ceremony by the National Electoral Council (CNE), which is stacked with Maduro allies, and which hasn’t yet issued final vote tallies from Sunday’s election.
“Venezuela has the best electoral system in the world!” CNE president Elvis Amoroso announced before proceeding with the formal announcement.
But the vote was riddled with claims of irregularities. The opposition said its witnesses were denied access to the National Electoral Council (CNE) headquarters as votes were being counted and alleged that the electoral authority had prevented more votes from being processed. The government has also been accused of rigging votes in the past, which it denied.
Maduro’s government controls almost all state institutions, including the CNE, which was accused in 2017 of manipulating turnout figures by a software company that provided the voting technology. The CNE previously denied the assertion.
The opposition coalition, headed by María Corina Machado, rejected Maduro’s win, with Machado and opposition candidate Edmundo González claiming their campaign had gathered enough vote tallies to prove González had won. On Monday, they said they had obtained more than 73% of the tally sheets showing more than 6 million votes for González and only 2.7 million for Maduro.
“I speak to you from a place of tranquility and truth. I want to tell you, responsibly, that we will respect the will expressed yesterday,” González said on Monday from his campaign headquarters in Caracas.
Machado said, “all the tallies were verified, totalized, scanned, digitalized, and then uploaded into a strong web portal,” adding that “several global leaders are checking the portal.”
Both called for more nationwide demonstrations on Tuesday.
In response, Jorge Rodriguez, the deputy of the National Assembly of Venezuela (a body loyal to Maduro), said the latest CNE results, with 80% of the tallies already counted, showed Maduro in the lead with 51.2% of the votes, followed by Edmundo with 44.2%.
Machado and González are part of a unified opposition movement that overcame their divisions to form a coalition known as the Democratic Unitary Platform. Its energized campaign, which enjoyed strong polling figures prior to Sunday’s vote, was seen as the biggest challenge to Maduro’s rule.
The United States is among regional leaders, including Peru and Chile, that have raised questions about the validity of the result.
The US on Monday joined Venezuelan civil society groups and the opposition by calling on Venezuela’s government to “immediately” release specific data on the presidential election, citing concerns about the credibility of Maduro’s victory.
Brazil, an important regional player, was softer in tone but said it was awaiting “the publication of official results from Venezuela’s presidential elections to make a formal statement.”
The future of Venezuela remains unclear. The mass emigration crisis is already one of the worst in the world, and unrest risks destabilizing the entire region.
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