In a statement on Tuesday, March 26, Brazil’s Foreign Affairs Ministry expressed concern about the upcoming elections in Venezuela, scheduled for July 28, particularly after opposition candidates were disallowed from disputing the contest against President Nicolás Maduro — who has been in office now for more than eleven years.
Mr. Maduro dismissed the Brazilian statement, suggesting that it had been dictated by the U.S. State Department. But the leftist Brazilian government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva had always veered away from criticizing Mr. Maduro and his administration, with the latest statement showing an important change in stance, with the view that increasingly anti-democratic actions in Venezuela are now becoming impossible to defend.
And if even Lula’s government is criticizing Mr. Maduro, how bad must the situation be in Venezuela?
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In this episode:
- Ignácio Portes is based in Buenos Aires and is the Latin America editor of The Brazilian Report. He is involved in producing the Latin America Weekly newsletter, delivered to premium subscribers every Wednesday.
Background reading on Venezuela:
- After saying disqualified candidate Maria Corina Machado should “stop crying” and appoint someone else to run against President Nicolás Maduro, the Lula government in Brazil changed its tune on the Venezuela situation, saying it is “concerned” after the disqualification of Ms. Machado’s replacement.
- Ms. Machado waltzed to victory in Venezuela’s opposition primaries last October, with an overwhelming majority of votes.
- The primaries took place during a moment of quiet optimism about Venezuela, with the announcement of the election agreement leading Washington D.C. to reduce some sanctions on the country.
- We spoke about Venezuela in episode #273 of Explaining Brazil, covering Mr. Maduro’s desires to annex a large part of neighboring Guyana, which also led to strain on regional relationships.
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Transcript of this episode (with Cockatoo)
Euan Marshall: In a statement on Tuesday, March 26th, Brazil’s Foreign Affairs Ministry expressed concern about the upcoming elections in Venezuela, scheduled for July 28th, particularly after opposition candidates have been disallowed from disputing the contest against President Nicolás Maduro, who has been in office now for more than 11 years.
Maduro dismissed the Brazilian statement, suggesting that it had been dictated by the US State Department, but the leftist Lula government in Brazil has always veered away from criticizing Maduro and his administration, with the latest statement showing an important change in stance, with the view that increasingly anti-democratic actions of Venezuela are now becoming impossible to defend.
And if even Lula’s government is criticizing Maduro, how bad must the situation be in Venezuela? I’m Euan Marshall, Deputy Editor of the Brazilian Report, and this is Explaining Brazil.
And to get the latest on the situation in Venezuela, I’m delighted to welcome back Ignacio Portes, the Latin America editor for the Brazilian Report. Ignacio, lovely to have you on the show. Good to be here again, Elon. Ignacio, around this time last year when we were talking about Venezuela on the Brazilian Report, it almost looked as if Nicolás Maduro was going to be brought back into the international fold.
Venezuela was negotiating with the US and the internal opposition over the 2024 elections. Here in Brazil, President Lula looked to be cozying up to Maduro and getting involved in a few photo opportunities beside him, but none of that seems to be the case anymore. So what’s happened? Bring us up to date, if you will.
Ignacio Portes: Right. I think since 2022, maybe since the Ukraine invasion by Russia, there was started to be some rapprochement, which recovered extensively between the US and Venezuela. Because of pragmatic reasons, the US thought that they might need more potential access to Venezuela’s oil resources. So they started negotiating. There were a few deals to release prisoners from each side. In 2022, the Biden administration released two nephews of Maduro’s wife in exchange for a few Americans who were also detained.
Then there was another prisoner exchange, which included the release by the White House of Colombian businessman Alex Saab, who was an important businessman, very close to the Maduro administration, accused of all kinds of corruption, money laundering, and so on. Then we had a very important man in the Venezuelan regime, Tarik El Aysami, kicked off from the government.
He was very close to Iran, which is a US enemy. So, and you saw also US easing sanctions against Venezuelan companies. So, there were a lot of signs that Venezuela was starting to integrate with the West again, with the US especially, but also with the ones to some meetings. He took some photos with Macron. As you mentioned, also some rapprochement with Lula in Brazil, although Lula was always more, always comprehended more, always tried to listen to the government of Venezuela a bit more.
But this also raised some hopes amongst the Venezuelan opposition that the deal might include free elections. There were some promises of democratization included in the negotiations with the US. The US at one point said that having free elections would be part of the conditions to ease all the sanctions against Venezuela. So there was hope that unlike in 2018 when the elections were pretty dodgy with a lot of candidates banned, that we would see free elections but we started to see this falling off when the government said that
the winner of the opposition primary would not be allowed to participate and since then the situation has changed I think.
Euan Marshall: And so tell us a bit more about this opposition figurehead, Maria Corina Machado, who won the primaries. Where did she come from and why did the Maduro government feel justified in disqualifying her from the election race this year?
Ignacio Portes: Right, well Machado is one of the more, let’s say hardline opposition to the Maduro regime. She’s a right winger, always very skeptical of negotiating with the government. Generally, there’s always a hard line and a soft line with the government. Some say that, well, we need to accept participating in elections and sometimes Machado said, no, we shouldn’t participate in these elections because these are rigged or stuff like that. But in this case, she decided to at least participate in the primary after, despite the fact that the government had already banned her once from running for the presidency in the past for collaborating with other opposition figures.
This time the ban was for collaborating with Guaidó. Remember this alternative president that Venezuelan opposition created after they said that the 2018 elections were rigged. So, they said that the leader of the assembly, which was the only validly elected member, would actually, should actually be the valid president and some foreign countries accepted it and so on.
Well, Machado was part of the people who supported Guaidó. So the government now banned Machado for this, but she had already been banned from a previous election. And she had been a figure known for both having ties with the U.S. She once met with George Bush, like a long time ago, right, when George Bush was president. president, her parties are generally the ones that received in some ways support from the US via NGOs or stuff like that.
And yeah, generally known for, well, when Chávez was still alive, she confronted him when he went to speak to Congress. So she was like one of the strongest, most well-known opposition figures. And when she ran in the opposition primary, she was by far the most well-known candidate.
And she got like 90% of the votes in that opposition primary, which was done informally, right outside of the government accepted structure to run a primary. They allowed it to happen, but they did not rubberstamp it as a state-sanctioned primary, and immediately after she was elected with, or yeah, chosen, with 90% of the, or more or less of the votes in the primary, the government started, the courts that respond to the government, because by this point all courts are basically more or less controlled by the Chavista regime, they said that, well, because of her role with Guaidó, she wouldn’t be allowed to run, and that’s where people started to realise that, ok, maybe we were too naive about having elections this year.
Euan Marshall: So yeah, from a Brazilian perspective, the Lula government had backed the decision to disqualify Machado, with the President himself saying that she should stop crying and appoint someone to run in her place, like Lula did with Fernando Haddad in 2018. But now the real outrage from Brazil and other countries seems to be that Machado’s stand-in has also been disqualified from the running. So what happened there Ignacio? What were the grounds for that candidate being disqualified as well?
Ignacio Portes: Well, that was more, even more overt, like, basically, when they delayed their announcement of the candidate until the last minute of Corina Jannes and a couple of days before the deadline to register a candidate, they announced her in public with Machado standing beside her, basically to show that, hey, this is my candidate, like Lula with Haddad or something like that. But basically, they delayed in order to prevent any bans from emerging against a newly elected candidate, right?
And they pick a pretty obscure figure, a philosopher from university with not a lot of activity in politics. But still, when they went to register the name, the system, the online system to register candidates wasn’t working suddenly. Then they went to register in person, and for some reason they didn’t accept her either.
So basically, they didn’t have a pretty good excuse to ban her, but they still banned her. Basically, not ban her, but they are saying, hey, she’s not in any register. She’s not a candidate. Because the system wasn’t working, and we don’t have a piece of paper that says she will run.
So by now, only Maduro is a registered candidate. And a few other, not only Maduro, but Maduro is the only really strong figure. And there’s also other figures that most of this relatively unified opposition front sees as, how do you call it, a fake figure accepted to pretend that we have a real election, but really controlled by the government in some way or other, some people that were at some point part of the opposition but now the government controls them with some court cases, threatening to put them in prison if they don’t do what they need, or some evangelical…
In the past they did the same with an evangelical pastor that was close to the government, they are allowed to run, and this kind of figures that are in the surface, not part of the government, but in some ways close to it that they can control and that they’re not very popular in the opposition, so that maybe they can still win the election.
Euan Marshall: And so if there were to be three elections in Venezuela this year, whether that be with Machado or a proxy, how would we rate the opposition’s chances?
Ignacio Portes: I think that we have a very, very real chance of winning because the last time we really had free elections in Venezuela to me was in 2015. There was a midterm election which really changed, I think, the dynamics of Venezuela. The opposition won a comfortable victory and they took almost two-thirds of the National Assembly, which allowed them to do pretty much anything.
When you have two-thirds of an assembly, you can rewrite a constitution. You can do a lot of things. And this was, I mean, the government expected maybe that they, it might be a close election, but they lost by more than they thought, and it really got complicated for So first they started to question the election of just a couple of lawmakers, just to make sure that they couldn’t reach the two-thirds. They say that that particular election in a remote province was rigged in some way because they gave some money to people to go vote for the candidates. It was a bit of a dodgy case that they opened against these lawmakers.
But that stopped them or stopped them from at least question the two-thirds majority. And then they created a parallel assembly with a constitutional reform process in 2017. They basically, by decree of the executive, the Maduro administration said, OK, we’re going to reform the constitution we are going to create an assembly from scratch basically with whose representatives are going to be picked regionally but really picked by the government ultimately.
So they created this parallel assembly, constitutional assembly they called it, which stripped the original assembly of its powers. And so they couldn’t accept losing the legislative branch of government. And this was all happening simultaneously with the worst moment of economic crisis in Venezuela. 2017 is the moment of catastrophic hyperinflation, brutal hunger, the worst economic crisis that the continent has seen in a lot of time, the peak of exiles, the peak of malnutrition, people losing 20, 30 pounds of weight because they had no food. So imagine, you don’t have a lot of chance of winning an election in that context.
So this is why they rigged the 2018 elections. They only allowed two candidates, Alvaro Maduro and there were these kind of control candidates that we’re talking about. Since then, there was a bit of an economic recovery.
The government did some, we call them in the way the website some kind of things, helping reforms, some like still having a political control over the country by the Socialist United Party of Venezuela, but more pragmatic economic reforms, allowing again all production to improve, local more normal regulations for local food market and so on.
Euan Marshall: So, the country recovered a little bit, I mean compared from rock, rock bottom, but still is that enough for people to forget all these years of suffering and vote for the, unquestionably vote for the Maduro government and re-elect him very happily?
Ignacio Portes: I don’t think so. I mean maybe, maybe they would have a small, small chance of winning, but it would be far from granted. And the government fears losing power, like a government that has so many corruption accusations, so many, such a horrible past of economic crisis, they fear revenge. They fear going to jail. They fear getting killed. They fear all kinds of what happens when these big powerful governments lose power.
So, and they’re not gonna give that up easily. They’re gonna, they’re decided to not give it up at all. So, I think they have a real feeling that they will lose or they have a big chance of losing and that’s why they’re not accepting elections in the last eight or nine years.
Euan Marshall: So what’s next then? How do we expect the opposition to react? And you know we mentioned the US at the start of the show, so how do we expect the US to react?
Ignacio Portes: Well the US has already condemned Venezuela, you’ve seen multiple state department press releases saying that first we’re worried about these questions over the Machado candidacy, then we were strongly condemned, and so on and so forth. The negotiations are broken, I think, clearly. We’ve also seen some escalating incidents, just in the same way that you saw some signs of goodwill in 2022, 23. Now you’re seeing some signs of bad will.
Like this, I mean, you cannot prove it, but this guy that was killed in Chile, this member of the opposition to the Maduro government that was kidnapped, he was exiled in Chile, right? A former military guy. And he was kidnapped and dismembered and just a gruesome murder in Chile by Venezuelans, apparently, which you still cannot fully prove that it was connected to the Maduro regime, but it looks likely. This happened a couple of months ago, less, one month ago.
And stuff like that, it makes you feel like the Maduro government has no hopes in signing any kind of agreement with the US anymore. And the US government has already escalated sanctions once again against Venezuelan mining companies, against Venezuelan oil companies. I think the oil companies are not in effect yet, but they’re moving in that direction. And also if Trump wins, which is a pretty realistic possibility at this point, the Maduro government I think expects even more escalation, even less of a soft line, a dovish, let’s see what we can negotiate with the socialist government in Venezuela.
Euan Marshall: So I think both sides see that this is not going to work out, that this is a divorce, not even a divorce, because they weren’t really allies at any point, they were just talking again, right?
Ignacio Portes: This is where non-speaking terms again, let’s say. Neighbors that never liked each other much, then they say, okay, let’s talk. And now I don’t think they’re going to talk anymore. And as a reference at the top of the show, for Maduro’s government to face criticism from leftist allies in Brazil and Colombia, I mean, something must have gone pretty badly wrong. I mean, you mentioned the elections in 2015, but if you could just circle back a bit further, maybe, and tell us how Venezuela has taken this path towards anti-democratic rule. Yeah, I think you’ve got to go back to the Chavez years, right?
The question of democracy in Venezuela went back and forth many times, and I think history helps understand it a bit. Of course, Hugo Chavez was the big political figure, right? Predecessor of Nicolás Maduro, really more charismatic, like your typical populist, popular leader who speaks the language of the people and promises redistribution of goods and more even participation in political society and in economic society and so on.
Chavez was really a kind of a larger than life figure who in his career, his first big public appearance in the political scene was in 1992 with a coup attempt in Venezuela when during the Caracazo, which was a massive protest against these neoliberal reforms in the early 90s in Venezuela to try to stabilize the economy, to balance the books, balance public your typical IMF supported reforms in a very destabilized macroeconomic landscape, very strong austerity with a lot of protests.
And the protests were met with brutal, brutal violence in the streets by the police and by the state regime forces. There were like hundreds of deaths in the streets. So Chavez responded to this. He was part of the Venezuelan military, right? A rebellious group within the Venezuelan military by launching a coup attempt against a repressive government in 1992.
He went to jail for that, then he was amnestied. And in 1998, he came back with a proposal, okay, I’ll win democratically. I’m a popular figure, I’ll win. And he created, he was a popular figure, he was a rising popular figure, and he softened his profit a little bit, said that we don’t support Cuba. He had these ties to Fidel Castro, but he said in a famous TV election, no, we believe
Cuba is a dictatorship, we don’t want to be like Cuba. We don’t want to interfere in Cuba, of course, they are an independent country, we don’t like the blockades and so on, but we don’t want to be like Cuba. We’re different. We just want a more fair country. And in the first few years, he exposed all this land reforms, economic redistribution policies.
And this was immediately met by, obviously, resistance from local elites, but also and only a few years down the road by a coup backed mostly by the US and I mean by Venezuelan elites foremost, but also by the US during the Bush administration.
In 2001 or 2002, I don’t recall, I think 2001, they launched a brief coup with this guy Carmona, who was a business leader, against this proposal, opposing this constitutional reform proposal of the Maduro administration, of the Chavez administration. And for a couple of days, Chavez was exiled in a, internally jailed by the new forces.
Then there was a popular uprising that brought Chavez back to power. And basically at that point, Chavez was the democratic figure and the Venezuelan elites were the anti-democratic figures. So the landscape, this created a lot of goodwill, I think, in the Latin American left towards the Chavez administration and towards this left-wing government.
It was the most radical left-wing government of this pink wave that we saw in Latin America in the 2000s, right? But it was so strongly persecuted by the Latin American, by the country’s elites and by the US who also then supported all kinds of oil strikes and boycotts against the government, that it generated a lot of sympathy among many people in Latin America that said, we need to defend this government. But this slowly started to change, I think, 10 years after this 2001-2002, Coupa destabilization attempts by the right-wing in Venezuela, I think the good will last like 10 years more. But then the economy started to deteriorate a lot. Chavez died and the regime became more indefensible as time passed. The channels to oppose the government became more restricted. The public TV channels were either closed or forced to sell if they opposed the government too much.
We started to see these candidate bans, first with only some more radical figures like Leopoldo López, but then also with the centrists like Capriles, who was more of a social democrat, but anti-Chávez, but also he was banned from running in previous elections, and you started to see a more turning to an autocratic regime. As the economy started to look worse and worse, the government became more and more authoritarian. And I think within the military, which is the key power player in Venezuela, the government with the history of coups, they managed to purge all the military from people who would not be completely loyalist to the regime.
And this allowed them to control the country by force. Any sign of opposition, they could immediately put the military on it and say, hey, we have a coup attempt here, we have a potential. This guy is linked to a guy that was originally part of the 2002 coup in some way. And in this way, they started to push institutions from all signs of opposition, then they pushed the electoral authorities and then it was full control of the Maduro regime.
Even in the worst economic circumstances, they could start to rig the elections. And even though during the Chavez years, they even lost one election, since they lost this second election that I was talking in 2015, and they lost it by a huge margin, they said, we cannot risk this happening again.
And we’re going to keep the democratic veneer in some way, but we’re gonna go full Stalinist. Yeah, just control Stalin’s light, I mean, but just only the facade of democracy. And if we don’t like you, you’re just not gonna run. The system fell, I don’t know what happened, but you’re not allowed in here. And this is where we are right now, sadly. It’s been a pretty tragic history, Venezuela, over the last few years.
Euan Marshall: Ignacio, plenty for us to pore over there. Thanks a lot for joining us.
Ignacio Portes: Thanks, Euan. Pleasure to talk to you.
Euan Marshall: Ignacio Portes is the Brazilian Report’s Latin America editor, and premium subscribers can read up about all the latest goings-on in the region in our Latin America Weekly Newsletter, which is in your inbox every Wednesday afternoon. And go to brazilian.report to find out more.
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