Venezuela between repression and resistance

Carolina Jiménez Sandoval, President of WOLA

Carolina Jiménez Sandoval

Carolina Jiménez Sandoval, President of WOLA

Carolina Jiménez Sandoval

President

Carolina Jiménez Sandoval is the President of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA). She holds over 20 years of...

Nicolás Maduro plans to take office for a third presidential term in Venezuela on January 10, 2025. Ignoring basic principles of democracy —such as transparency, just to name the most obvious—Maduro insists on assuming power without presenting any evidence of his self-declared electoral victory. Edmundo González Urrutia, the opposition’s democratic candidate who managed to make public the electoral records proving his victory, was forced into exile due to the criminal persecution unleashed against him.

The elections held on July 28, 2024, failed to meet the minimum standards required to be considered free and fair. This has been affirmed by various organizations, including the prestigious Carter Center and the United Nations Panel of Experts, both of which were invited by Maduro’s government itself to conduct electoral observation and monitoring within the country. What followed after July 28 has already made international headlines: one of the most brutal waves of systematic repression in the contemporary political history of the region. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has classified the events in Venezuela as “state terrorism,” which has included the arbitrary detention of at least 2,000 people, dozens of cases of enforced disappearance, torture, and other severe human rights violations.

What, then, does the future hold for the South American country in this grim political scenario? While it is impossible to predict outcomes in such a highly complex reality, the events of recent months point to the likely continuation of at least two dynamics: the repression wielded by Nicolás Maduro’s regime if he remains illegitimately in power, and the resistance of Venezuelan society, both within the country and abroad.

Regarding repression, reports documented by the IACHR, various international mechanisms, and human rights NGOs—along with a significant escalation in recent days due to the co-optation of all branches of government—indicate that repression has become the modus operandi of Maduro’s regime to maintain control of the state, regardless of the popular will expressed at the ballot box.

Despite this context, the Venezuelan population has undergone a decisive process of political re-engagement. This is evident in their civic organization for the opposition’s primary elections in October 2023, their participation in the July 28 elections despite numerous obstacles imposed by the government to hinder or restrict political participation, and the peaceful protests that followed the announcement of the results. To this day, both the population within the country and the diaspora—nearly eight million people who have left Venezuela over the past ten years—continue to demand respect for the results that the opposition managed to collect, publish, and disseminate using all available means: activism through the arts, social media, the efforts of social movements and NGOs, citizen protests, independent journalism, and, of course, the leadership of the opposition both inside and outside Venezuela.

How this tension between repression and resistance will unfold in the coming months remains to be seen. It is crucial to recognize that ongoing and increasing repression leads to further closure of civic space, reducing opportunities for organized resistance. Therefore, the international response, despite various diplomatic complexities, must focus on supporting the Venezuelan population and civil society, regardless of the ideological differences or alliances among regional political leaders. The defense of democracy is an imperative in this tumultuous 21st century, transcending the ideologies of the moment, and elections are a fundamental pillar of democracy. The Venezuelan crisis is, therefore, a hemispheric crisis: an inauguration that violates popular sovereignty undermines one of the core elements of democracy itself. Such is the magnitude of this threat to the history of all Latin America.

This article was originally published in El Universal in Mexico on January 12, 2025, and is part of the Observatory of Political Reforms in Latin America space in El Universal.

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