I was among 1,300 international journalists and 800 international observers in Venezuela for the July 28 presidential election, witnessing events unfold leading to and after the country’s 31st national election in 25 years.
Undoubtedly, this was the most crucial elections for President Nicolas Maduro and the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), with the major US-backed opposition force hell-bent on preventing Maduro from winning a third consecutive term.
Maduro was nominated and supported by an alliance of 13 left parties, against an ultra-right-wing opposition of nine separate parties, the only major challenge from a US-backed candidate standing-in as a substitute for Washington’s favourite, a younger but officially-disbanded nominee.
The official opposition candidate, Edmundo Gonzales Urrutia, a 71-year-old retired diplomat, clearly lacked the stamina for the fast-paced campaign, which was all-the-way led by 55-year-old Maria Corina Machado.
She was officially disbanded from candidacy after inviting Washington to increase its punishing unilateral sanctions – already numbering 936 – against her homeland and its people.
Representing a class of the-most-highly-privileged Venezuelans who’ve historically considered themselves ‘exceptional’ and born-to-rule, she didn’t directly appeal to the millions of poor Venezuelans already daily affected by the US sanctions imposed against the Chavez and Maduro regimes.
She admitted instead that her supreme confidence of victory depended completely on Washington’s support – and international pressure.
This movie has played-out in Venezuela before: a weaker US-backed political force trying to remove the PSUV and erase its 25-year legacy, only to fail at 28 of the 30 internationally-observed elections since 1998.
Previous efforts to remove Maduro – apart from hundreds of accumulated economic and political sanctions, failed military coup attempts, armed violence and infrastructural sabotage – included five attempts on his life.
As with all 30 previous national presidential and legislative elections, 2024’s was also ideologically-driven, but most-of-all seen as a very-last chance to remove Maduro, that simply had to be successful, by the proverbial hook or crook.
Corina Machado is the face behind Gonzales, the proxy candidate’s undisputed back-seat driver in the latest US-backed bid to dismantle the popular Bolivarian social programs undertaken by the PSUV and which significantly improved the lives of millions of poorer Venezuelans since Chavez was first elected in 1998.
The Gonzales-Machado electoral marriage of temporary convenience is part of the ongoing war of extermination against the PSUV and already has the matrimonial political blessings of the Biden administration.
What was an overwhelmingly peaceful campaign only started getting violent after Corina Machado publicly rejected the results on July 29 and called on supporters to show their displeasure.
Immediately thereafter, an international media campaign of unprecedented proportions was unleashed against Maduro and the PSUV.
Elon Musk’s Starlink and ‘X’ platforms, Bloomberg, BBC, CNN (and others) together broke the same ‘Breaking News’ favourable to the opposition.
Musk personally changed Maduro’s status on ‘X’ – and plumed a post cheered the pulling-down of a Chavez statue in Caracas on July 31, the image recalling to many how US troops pulled-down a similar Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad after the ultimate US invasion of Iraq.
By July 31, it was clear this was no longer a matter of who won or lost the July 28 presidential poll, but one of support for or against another unfolding US-backed coup against Maduro and the PSUV.
For both sides, this was truly a common but different ‘existential threat’ – only one could win this decisive battle in an ongoing war over who owns and decides the present and future of Venezuela and its vast oil and gas reserves.
The international media widely-reported that Maduro had promised “a bloodbath” if the PSUV won, but none presented any such recording.
Instead, what the international observers and journalists saw and heard was the President warning that “there will be serious consequences” if his opponents resorted to violence after the results were announced.
But as the plot thickened, it became quite clear the opposition had much-earlier set out to create disruptions to the national electricity grid to affect the flow of communicating results in Venezuela’s highly-electronic voting and counting system.
Just ahead of a poll, security forces publicly revealed they’d intercepted a paid political plot to cause series of electricity blackouts in eight states across the country, at precise times, to sabotage transmission of results.
The arrested plotters, paraded on local TV nationally, confessed they were paid “US $150 per day” by (revealed but unnamed) major current opposition political forces.
But that revelation never made the world news, the mainstream international media instead focusing on fanning flames of rejection of the results and highlighting claims without evidence.
Before the election, opponents predicted Maduro might not allow it to take place; and when it was clear he was determined to win a third term at the polls, they predicted he would not accept defeat.
But the temporary Gonzales-Machado electoral alliance was determined to succeed by all means necessary, stating in advance they wouldn’t recognize the official results.
They would instead generate their own exit polls, with the support of external electronic agencies in the pay of Maduro’s US-based opponents.
Unsurprisingly, those accusing Maduro and the PSUV of cheating have yet to provide proof, instead calling on Caracas to prove them wrong.
The wider world was witnessing the beginning of the latest round of assassinations of Palestinian leaders by Israel, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urgently pleading to the US Congress to give his genocidal administration the rest of the arms “to finish the job” – of obliterating Hamas and the Palestinian resistance.
Whether in Ukraine, Haiti, Kenya or Venezuela, the US keeps pursuing global proxy wars despite the growing economic, social and political decline in the Western nations following COVID, the global Supply Chain disruptions, backfiring sanctions on Russia and myriads of related post-Ukraine crises and difficulties, especially across Europe.
Increased Western military support for a losing war in Ukraine has resulted in large numbers of European citizens facing the daily effects of loss-of-income and increasing expenditure for food and fuel, also fuelled by declining conditions in provision of health, housing and other social services.
Venezuela’s troubles today must be seen within the context of the eternal insistence of the US and its global Western partners to retain and/or regain full control over its infinite energy resources.
Successive US administrations kept negotiating channels open – including under Presidents Trump and Biden – for a deal to allow the return to Venezuela of the US-based multinational oil company Chevron, that previously dominated the South American nation’s abundant oil and gas industry.
The US is too-thinly-spread across the globe to undertake direct military interventions abroad, instead outsourcing such responsibilities, like to Kenya for Haiti.
The US has so-far invaded 84 nations with it has diplomatic ties; and today it has over-750 military bases in at least 80 countries worldwide – including Latin America and the Caribbean – all aimed at protecting and preserving undefined ‘US interests’ in a rules-based world order defined by Washington and implemented by the likes of political allies the European Union (EU) and its military arm NATO.
The US political establishment has never hidden its preparedness to go to any extra lengths to replace Maduro and the PSUV and in this latest case it matters less to his opponents whether Maduro won or lost the poll, only that ‘Maduro has to go!’
But if Maduro and the PSUV are anything near what they’ve been made-out to look-like by the international media, it can be expected that military means will necessarily be engaged to prevent any externally-backed internal security threat to its political determination to continue the Bolivarian Chavista social and economic reforms that started paying dividends in the past three years.
Unfortunately, US belligerence in such matters instills fear among other nations – as with efforts to call-out Israel for its war crimes in Gaza – of being accused of not dancing to the imperial narrative on Venezuela.
Once again, the future of the world’s most oil-rich nation ends-up being treated like being up for grabs – and within reach.
In the current global context, there should be as-much concern about President Maduro’s security as being generated around Corina Machado, especially as she and Gonzales have remained absolutely silent on Maduro’s invitation for post-election dialogue.
The stakes remain high and the dices continue rolling in Venezuela, where the possibility of national security and defence mobilization has never been higher, in defence of more than just an election result.
Millions are being asked to simply give-up on what they continue to have and instead blindly bet on an uncertain future under forces solely interested in regime change and caring nothing about the effects of their promised ending of the popular social programs that have helped so-many in an oil-rich nation strangled by sanctions and prevented from developing its resources or planning its own future as a sovereign nation.
It’s yet-another replay of a sad old movie, but this time I don’t think the end is predictable.