Venezuela: Maduro Claims Victory, Accuses Opposition of Coup Attempt Following Disputed Election

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

Anti-government protests erupted Monday in Venezuela after the National Electoral Council declared President Nicolás Maduro to be the winner of Sunday’s presidential election, giving him a third term in office. According to the Electoral Council, early results show Maduro received about 51% of the vote, while opposition candidate Edmundo González received 44%. But the opposition is rejecting the official results and claims it has proof of election fraud. On Monday, Nicolás Maduro accused the right-wing opposition of attempting to stage a fascist coup.

PRESIDENT NICOLÁS MADURO: [translated] It is not the first time we are facing what we are facing today. An attempt is being made to impose a coup d’état in Venezuela again, of a fascist and counterrevolutionary nature. I would call it a kind of Guaidó 2.0. History repeats itself, first as a tragedy and then as a comedy. It seems that Hegel said it, and then Marx popularized it. History presents itself as tragedy first and then repeats itself as comedy. We have already lived this. We saw this movie, the same movie but with a similar script. The protagonists are the same: on the one side, the people, who want peace, democracy, prosperity, progress, and on the other side, elites full of hate with a fascist counterrevolutionary project tied to the U.S. empire.

AMY GOODMAN: On Monday, Venezuela’s attorney general also accused the opposition of attempting to hack Venezuela’s election system, saying the alleged cyberattack delayed reporting on vote tallies. Venezuela opposition presidential candidate Edmundo González rejected the official results.

EDMUNDO GONZÁLEZ: [translated] What happened during today’s polling day was a violation of all rules, to the point that the majority of electoral registers have still not been handed over. Our message of reconciliation and peaceful change still stands. We are convinced most Venezuelans also want this. Our struggle continues, and we won’t rest until the will of the people of Venezuela is respected.

AMY GOODMAN: International response to the election in Venezuela has been mixed. China, Cuba, Russia, Iran, Honduras and Nicaragua congratulated Maduro on his reelection. Mexico also said it would recognize the election results.

Meanwhile, seven Latin American nations signed a joint letter calling for a complete review of the election results. Venezuela responded to the letter by pulling diplomatic staff from those countries: Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Peru, Panama, Dominican Republic and Uruguay. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. government had “serious concerns” about the results.

The elections come at a time when Venezuela is facing an economic crisis caused in part by U.S.-led sanctions. According to the U.N., more than 7 million Venezuelans have left the country since 2015. Protesters in Caracas decried the Maduro government.

PROTESTER: [translated] I came to the street. We want freedom. We are tired of this government. We want a change. We want to be free in Venezuela. We want our families to return here. We do not want them to leave anymore. We want to be free with our families.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined in New York by Alejandro Velasco, associate professor at NYU, where he’s a historian of modern Latin America, former executive editor of the NACLA Report on the Americas and the author of Barrio Rising: Urban Popular Politics and the Making of Modern Venezuela. He was born and raised in Venezuela. And in Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, we’re joined by Andreína Chávez, a reporter who writes for the news site Venezuelanalysis.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Let’s stay in Caracas for a moment. Andreína, if you can respond to the results and the attacks by other Latin American countries and the opposition?

ANDREÍNA CHÁVEZ: Yes. So, thank you so much for inviting me.

And I think I need to start by saying that Venezuela right now is facing a coup attempt. That is the reality on the ground today. So, we saw — we celebrated presidential elections on Sunday. And then, immediately after, when the National Electoral Council gave the results, as was expected, the hard-line oppositions didn’t recognize these results, and they immediately called for protest in the streets. So, that’s what we’ve been seeing. We’ve been seeing violent protest in the streets. We already saw many people getting caught. We already saw dozens of people arrested. And according to the general attorney, a lot of these people actually have criminal records. Some of them came back recently to Venezuela. So, we can see that this was something orchestrated, especially because a lot of these people have weapons. And everything indicates, everything points the finger that the extreme opposition, led by María Corina Machado and her political organization, Vente Venezuela, is behind this new coup attempt against the government of Nicolás Maduro, who was just reelected president of Venezuela for a third term.

So, as we are seeing right now, there are some right-wing governments and right-wing foreign actors who are not recognizing the Venezuelan elections. This is not new. This is something that we’ve seen time and time again. The same thing happened in 2018. When we had elections that year and Maduro was also reelected, we saw the exact same thing happen. We saw right-wing governments from the region, and we saw right-wing actors from the region, we saw the U.S. government not recognize the government of Venezuela. And then, the next year, in 2019, we saw them support an interim government led by Juan Guaidó, who didn’t win any elections, simply proclaimed himself president of Venezuela. And that is basically what is happening now. We haven’t seen yet anyone self-proclaiming themself president. However, María Corina Machado has already said that Edmundo González, the candidate that she chose to belong in the presidency in the presidential election for her, she already said that he won. And she has said that he won by an overwhelming majority. And this is something that they have said many times before in past elections. However, up to this point, she said that she was going to present evidence of the so-called fraud, and she was going to present evidence of Edmundo having the majority of votes, and so far she hasn’t presented evidence, which is something also typical from the opposition. In past elections, they have also said they have evidence that they won, and they never actually show any proof.

So, yeah, this is basically a reedition of the same thing that’s happened in Venezuela in many years in the past. And all I can say is that we have practically been living a coup attempt since 2002. I believe that Venezuela has never actually escaped the coup attempt. We have been living several types of initiatives, several types of confrontations, violent attempts, violent street protests, people proclaiming themselves president, attempts at foreign invasion, assassination attempts against President Maduro. So, this is an ongoing coup that has been going on for many years now.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Andreína, I wanted to ask you — first of all, there has not been a lot of attention in the United States media to the claims of the Venezuelan government that there was a massive hacking attack against the electoral system, and that was announced Sunday night. Could you talk about that and what impact, if it’s true, that might have had on the release of the detailed results?

ANDREÍNA CHÁVEZ: Yes. So, the National Electoral Council President Elvis Amoroso, when he was given the electoral results from Sunday at midnight, he said that there was a hacking attack against the transmission system which delayed the counting process and delayed being able to give a report about the electoral results. He didn’t give any specific details about what happened exactly and how the system was hacked. However, he ordered an investigation, and Venezuela’s general attorney has already said that they are investigating who did this hacking attempt, where it came from, what were the consequences. All we know so far is that the attempt wasn’t successful, that it delayed the process, but they didn’t actually manage to hack the system. And that’s why, at the end of the day, they were able to pronounce what were the electoral results. So, we will have more details about that as the days follow and the general attorney gives more information about it.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Also, the U.S. media also has not reported very much that there were actually 10 candidates for president in the Venezuelan election. That’s far greater choice than the American people get in your normal presidential elections. What has been the response of the other minor candidates who ran for president to the election results?

ANDREÍNA CHÁVEZ: So, again, that is actually quite interesting, because Venezuela had 10 presidential candidates. Nine of them were opposition to the Maduro government. And, of course, Edmundo González, who was the far-right opposition candidate, was Maduro’s main rival. But that doesn’t mean that the other candidates should be dismissed. Some of them actually were presidential candidates in 2018, and they managed to get a quite significant amount of votes. So they have quite following. They have some supporters. Some of them have actually been very open saying that they trust the Venezuelan voting system, that they trust that the electoral results are going to be fair, are going to be correct. And many of them have already said that they trust the Venezuelan authority and the results that were given on Sunday. Some of them haven’t said anything yet. And, of course, there are some presidential candidates who didn’t receive a significant amount of voting, and they have sort of just remained in the background at the moment.

But, yes, we already have not only presidential candidates saying that they trust the electoral result, but we also have many international observers that came to Venezuela, more than 900 international observers that came from over 95 countries. They came here to observe the election. We already have some reports of some of these international observers, like the National Lawyers Guild, saying that they saw a transparent, fair process, that they saw a peaceful voting process, that they didn’t see any incidents, and that nothing indicates that the electoral result could have been tampered or manipulated in any way. So, yes, that is basically it.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: OK, Andreína, I’d like to bring in, if possible — Andreína, I’d like to bring in professor Alejandro Velasco, associate professor at NYU, historian of modern Latin America. Professor, your response to what is going on in Venezuela post the election?

ALEJANDRO VELASCO: Yeah. Well, first, thanks very much for having me.

Some of what we’re seeing in Venezuela, as Andreína was commenting on, seems to adhere to moments that we’ve had about electoral contests and disputes in the past. There are some really important differences here. I think the primary claim that the Venezuelan government is leading or is feeding into allegations of fraud is that it’s yet to release the vote by vote of machine — by machine tallies, that it has done in previous elections in much shorter time frame than it has at this stage. You know, hacking allegations aside, the question of whether or not it can match the actual returns from each machine to what has been reported as the electoral victory of Maduro remains a big question. And it’s something that we have seen from not just right-wing governments in the region, but also left and center-left governments. The Brazilian Foreign Ministry, the Colombian government under Petro, the Mexican government, as well, all of them issued recently a declaration or a statement asking the Venezuelan electoral authorities to release this data in order to make sure that there is trust in the outcome.

So, on the other hand, of course, you have the opposition, which, as Andreína well mentioned, certainly led by María Corina Machado, has in the past made allegations of fraud that have been unsubstantiated. The difference now is that in the press conference yesterday, they released what was a very significant body of these electoral returns, that people can go and check online, and they can match with what the witnesses at the various precincts actually had at the end of their — at the end of the voting night on Sunday. So, right now the real struggle, the real battle, in terms of thinking, you know, what happened on Sunday, is — lays at the feet of the National Electoral Council, and to the extent that they can dispel doubts, dispel criticism about the actual returns by releasing this evidence, we’ll have greater clarity.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Professor Velasco, if you can talk about the effect of the sanctions and the role of the U.S. government, that you suspect now or that has been proven? The Washington Post ran a very interesting piece on sanctions, actually U.S. sanctions around the world. And they quote in that piece Thomas Shannon, who served as undersecretary for political affairs at the State Department under President Trump, who said, “This is the point I made at the time: I said the sanctions were going to grind the Venezuelan economy into dust and have huge human consequences, one of which would be out-migration,” said Thomas Shannon. And migration is a major issue, with millions of people leaving Venezuela since 2015. Can you talk about that and where you see the U.S. role today?

ALEJANDRO VELASCO: Yeah, absolutely. The vast academic literature, both in the case of Venezuela and more broadly around the world, has proven that sanctions have negative intended political outcomes than those that they seek. In most cases, the significant effects are felt not by governments in power, but by the population at large. We have to remember that when Trump came into office, he instituted what he himself called a maximum pressure campaign against Venezuela, which Marco Rubio called the harshest set of sanctions since the Cuban embargo of the 1960s and, of course, until today. It’s unquestionable that that has had a massive impact on the Venezuelan economy and certainly led to so many people leaving, millions over the course of the last 10 years.

However, it’s also true that it has shifted the policy agenda of the Venezuelan government towards dollarization, towards reducing some of the social programs that it had championed under the presidency of Hugo Chávez, which has in turn led to discontent on the part of the population. Some of what you showed in the clip — right? — people saying, “My family have left. I want them to return. I can’t get by if I don’t have access to dollars,” that certainly is feeding some of the discontent that we’re seeing on the streets and also reflected in the polls.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to continue this discussion, actually, in Spanish and post it on our website at democracynow.org, en español. You can just check that out. Alejandro Velasco is associate professor of NYU, an historian of modern Latin America, born and raised in Venezuela, former executive editor of the NACLA Report on the Americas, author of Barrio Rising: Urban Popular Politics and the Making of Modern Venezuela. And thank you so much to Andreína Chávez — Venezuelanalysis is her group — speaking to us from Caracas.

That does it for our show. Democracy Now! is currently accepting applications for a director of development to lead our fundraising team. You can learn more and apply at democracynow.org.

Democracy Now! is produced with Renée Feltz, Mike Burke, Deena Guzder, Messiah Rhodes, Nermeen Shaikh, María Taracena, Tami Woronoff. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, for Democracy Now!