WOLA’s President Carolina Jimenez Sandoval is joined by Laura Cristina Dib, WOLA’s director for Venezuela to discuss the state of Venezuela since Nicolás Maduro’s self proclaimed and highly contested July 28 electoral victory. This is a continuation of WOLA’s July 30 podcast, “The Scrutiny Should Be Public to All Citizens:” the aftermath of Venezuela’s July election, with Laura Dib.
Carolina and Laura discuss events since Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) declared President Nicolás Maduro the winner by a 51 to 44 percent margin, denied publishing a breakdown of the vote, and suspended the auditing process. The Venezuelan opposition published most official voting tally sheets on an independent website showing opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia’s electoral victory with 67 percent of the vote (verified by independent media outlets).
Carolina and Laura explain the varying forms of resistance and outcry by Venezuelan citizens, the Venezuelan diaspora, and the international community, and the extreme forms of repression with which the government has responded, including over 1,500 detentions including 129 minors, 23 homicides, passport annulments, social media bans, and a new NGO restriction law.
They highlight broad-based international support for Venezuela’s democracy, from governments of the right and left, including the 22 countries who signed an August 16 joint statement. They particularly note the actions of Brazil and Colombia, which though left-of-center governments have not recognized the government’s claim to victory. They also discuss the smaller group of countries that support Maduro’s claim and the role of the Venezuelan military.
Laura and Carolina underscore that in many ways, these elections and the ensuing resistance and repression, although familiar, are without precedent in Venezuela. They discuss new forms of civic resistance, including engagement from the Venezuelan diaspora, and activity among youth and among popular social media influencers.
These new forms of resistance, they state, have been met with a magnitude and speed of repression that are also unprecedented, with targeted repression of human rights defenders, lawyers, community leaders, labor union members, and those simply involved in searching for the detained. They discuss how unlike other periods of repression, the Maduro government is being very public about its crackdown even posting frightening videos of detentions paired with threatening music and effects.
Among the many repressive tactics Laura and Carolina mention are: a phone application previously used to provide public services now being used to denounce any activity linked to the opposition; the approval of a law criminalizing and obstructing civil society—a law WOLA and other civil society organizations denounced in the past; the blocking of Teams, X, and Signal; and rising passport annulments making it difficult to leave the country and seek safety.
Laura and Carolina stress that the Venezuelan crisis is not a domestic crisis; it has expelled 25 percent of its population— 8 million people— globally, with likely migration increases, and it could be an ominous precedent for democratic governance in the hemisphere. They remind listeners that the human rights cost of “Venezuela fatigue” is large, and urge the international community to continue to expose what is happening in Venezuela, especially as repression continues and access to information and partners is severed. They should continue to seek solutions that are accepted by, and ideally led by, the Venezuelan people.
Download this podcast episode’s .mp3 file here. Download an AI-generated transcript (PDF) here. Listen to WOLA’s Latin America Today podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. The main feed is here.
