The July 28 presidential elections saw Venezuela thrust once again into the global spotlight. Amid renewed political violence, street protests, media misinformation and especially ramped-up imperialist aggression, we return the focus to the big picture as Venezuelans brace themselves for even harder battles to come.
The question of democracy
Right off the bat, it is important to get something out of the way: the Venezuelan elections were not “free and fair.” There is no way for that to happen in a country under a brutal blockade, incessant economic terrorism that punishes a project that refused to bow to Washington’s neocolonial diktat. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Venezuelans went to the polls with a gun to their heads.
Fighting back against U.S.-led imperialism and its corporate media artillery begins by recognizing this vastly uneven playing field. Though the recent vote did leave questions to be answered, to zero in on the electoral controversy while ignoring or downplaying the context of U.S. hybrid warfare is an intellectually and politically dishonest exercise.
Secondly, the Bolivarian Revolution at its core is all about democracy. But a deeper, more substantive concept of democracy, one that extends way beyond casting votes for representatives at different levels every so often.
Instead, over the past 25 years, Venezuela has been home to a number of revolutionary experiments of grassroots, assembly-based democracy, with the commune being its most advanced expression. In Hugo Chávez’s conception, communes are the “unit cells” for the construction of socialism as self-governments in the territories.
Though popular power has faced plenty of challenges and setbacks in recent years, it has also showcased impressive advances and remains full of potential for the transformation of society.
Washington’s reaction
After the CNE declared Maduro as the winner, the reaction from the United States was all too familiar, with officials feeling entitled to speak on behalf of “the Venezuelan people.”
Once the hardline opposition proclaimed its own triumph, Secretary of State Antony Blinken could not help himself from recognizing far-right candidate Edmundo González as “president-elect,” recalling Juan Guaidó’s infamous “interim presidency.” Subsequent statements partially walked back the recognition, but nevertheless emphasized a “transition” and endorsed the regional mediation efforts from Brazil, Colombia and Mexico.
From overt coup attempts and economic sanctions to media disinformation and NGO financing, U.S. regime-change efforts have been a constant over the past 25 years, especially since the death of Hugo Chávez in 2013. In the run-up to the election, the corporate media had already declared González the victor while anonymous U.S. officials talked about “calibrating” sanctions depending on the outcome, a traditional euphemism for a policy of mass murder that has claimed tens of thousands of civilian deaths every year since 2017.
Nevertheless, with its attention focused on actively facilitating Israel’s genocidal war in West Asia in addition to prolonging its NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, Washington might prioritize energy market stability in the short term. Stemming Venezuelan migration, which has dramatically increased in recent years largely due to U.S. economic terrorism, will be another priority for the Biden administration in the run-up to November. As such, it appears that Washington is not in an optimal position to escalate its regime change campaign, at least before next year.
The road ahead
The Maduro government and the Chavista movement more broadly face no shortage of challenges in the times to come.
July 28 saw a very significant portion of the electorate vote for arguably the farthest-right presidential candidacy in Venezuelan democratic history. Though María Corina Machado was not on the ballot, she was openly pulling the strings of the actual candidate Edmundo González.
Machado needs no introduction. A faithful U.S. ally since the George W. Bush era, her rap sheet includes support for virtually every previous coup attempt of the past quarter of a century, enthusiastic endorsement of U.S.-led sanctions and even calls for a foreign invasion, for which she was only banned from holding public office.
Machado’s program is unfettered neoliberalism—including selling off strategic state enterprises like PDVSA—coupled with pledges to “eradicate socialism,” all but promising a dirty war against Chavismo. There is little doubt that Machado—and by extension, her proxy, González,—was the chosen candidate of the Biden administration, which consistently favored her over other opposition hopefuls more inclined to negotiate with the Maduro government such as Zulia Governor Manual Rosales.
Much like Argentina’s Milei and Brazil’s Bolsonaro, Machado must be viewed as the local Venezuelan manifestation of peripheral fascism, which has metastasized across the South amid the devastating social fallout of income deflation, sanctions, wars of encroachment, and other modalities of “accumulation by waste” pursued by an ever more rabid, if senile imperialism.
These forces, representing the most retrograde neocolonial classes and settler fractions, make no secret of their subservience to the democratic fascists ruling in Washington and other Western capitals and proudly wave the blood-stained banner of the genocidal Zionist colonial entity in Palestine. It is no wonder the Bolivarian grassroots movements are entrenching themselves against this existential threat.
At the same time, the Maduro government faces the prospect of ramped-up sanctions or even a return to “maximum pressure” should Trump return to the White House in November.
This means an increasingly difficult balancing act to promote economic growth in the wake of one of the world’s worst “peacetime” GDP contractions without further increasing poverty and inequality. The present liberalization strategy that extends benefits to capital, so as to attract badly needed investment, while asking for patience and sacrifice from the working majority, may prove increasingly untenable in the face of growing threats from inside and outside.
Furthermore, the election’s results have been surrounded by questions, even by people who have been sympathetic to the Bolivarian Revolution, as the National Electoral Council (CNE) has not published detailed tallies by voting center. In the past, these publicly available totals have dispelled all doubts about the process and exposed the absolute lack of evidence behind the opposition’s perennial “fraud” allegations. Instead, the CNE’s silence has allowed the opposition and its media backers to make victory claims based on a dubiously parallel results page.
International solidarity
What is nonetheless clear is that the liberal hand-wringing from outside Venezuela, above all from the global North, is consummate bad faith. Imperialist functionaries and their intellectual assets of all political stripes are in absolutely no position to speak in the name of “democracy.” Their hands and pens are thoroughly stained by the blood of not just Palestine’s Shuja’iyya and Tel al-Sultan but also Bolivia’s Senkata and Sacaba, among countless other heinous crimes against Third World sovereignty from Haiti and the Congo to Libya and Syria, perpetrated with the support of sections of the Western left.
The frequently overlooked reality is that Venezuela is a country besieged by U.S.-led imperialism, which shapes every aspect of the Bolivarian Revolution’s internal contradictions. This is as true the morning after the election as it was the day before.
Beyond the vast natural resources and strategic location, Venezuela will remain in Washington’s crosshairs because its revolution—notwithstanding the errors, setbacks, and deviations over the years —still represents a beacon of hope that racialized and immiserated working people of the global South can build a sovereign alternative to the Western imperialist order, founded on over 500 years of colonial and neocolonial barbarism. This radical potentiality was already apparent in the 1989 “Caracazo” popular insurrection and subsequently found its most mature expression in the Bolivarian movement led by Hugo Chávez, who played a leading role in establishing the emerging South-South alliances and resistance axes alongside China, Iran, and other major anti-systemic actors.
It is evident that Venezuela today represents one of the key battlefronts in the class war waged against the peoples of the global South. There is no middle ground.
As the rising tide of U.S.-sponsored fascism threatens working people not just in Venezuela but the world over, our internationalist solidarity with the Bolivarian Revolution must be as unconditional as ever.