Elections in Venezuela are not possible without the sole candidate from the opposition

(Interamerican Institute for Democracy) In Venezuela, the hypothesis that it is possible to depart from a 21st Century Socialism’s dictatorship through elections controlled by a transnational organized crime’s system, is once again being put to the test. Along these lines, the result from the democratic opposition’s primary elections has produced a SOLE CANDIDATE with a 92.5% backing and she is Maria Corina Machado, without whose participation elections are not possible.

Dictatorships, existing in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua, that had also controlled Ecuador for over 10 years, are not national or domestic endeavors, they are the expansion of Cuba’s dictatorship in the 21st century originated by Hugo Chavez who in 1999 salvaged the Castroist dictatorship from its “Special Period.” Cuba, with the opportune death of the Venezuelan dictator, became the head of a transnational organized crime’s system called “21st Century Socialism” or “Castrochavism.”

Dictatorships are a distortion; they are an expression of crime that violates international standards in the Americas. The Interamerican Democratic Charter that is a constitutive treaty, mandates in its Article 1 “The peoples of the Americas have the right to democracy and their governments the obligation to promote and defend it. Democracy is essential for the social, political, and economic development of the peoples from the Americas.”

Countries without democracy are an anomaly and are abnormal, they represent the repulsive practice of the systemic; violation of human rights as a way to indefinitely wield power, perpetration and sustainment of crimes involving narcotics’ and human trafficking, international terrorism, and all types of crime sheltered by the legal empowerment of the States they control. Democracies and their heads of State and heads of government not only have the need -for reasons involving their own security and survival- to end dictatorships but they have the legal obligation to do so and they come way short of meeting this obligation.

In this context, there is not any precedent of 21st Century Socialism’s dictatorships to have left the government through elections. It has been tried in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua with the results of greater numbers of crime that enables them to stay in power. Ecuador has recovered its democracy by the historic decision of President Lenin Moreno who, having been elected to the government as a 21st Century Socialism’s candidate, led in the restitution of Ecuador’s popular sovereignty, the rule of law, and ended the narco-State.

In Venezuela, the dictator has lost elections but has not left the government, the opposition has won the majority of the Legislative Branch, and there has been a legitimate government recognized by more than 60 countries, but the dictator has continued usurping power through State-terrorism. Anytime there was greater rejection and popular upheaval for dictator Nicolas Maduro to leave, the response has always been orchestrated and repeated from Cuba, greater persecution, more political prisoners, more torture, more exile, and greater use of the “functional opposition.” The exact formula that is used by Castrochavism in Nicaragua and Bolivia.

Twenty-First Century Socialism’s dictatorships hold elections with which it supplants the condition of democracy. People vote in Cuba! and Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua! They have created a “vote-catching” dictatorial system that I have defined as “the situation in which people vote but do not elect.” Some of the features of vote-catching dictatorships’ elections are; holding elections that are neither free nor fair, that do not respect universal suffrage concepts of secrecy, that have political prisoners and exiles, that use counterfeited voters’ registries, that have manipulated judges at their service, that have a functional opposition, that lack the rule of law, and that can disqualify those opposition’s candidates that can win.

María Corina Machado after winning the opposition’s primary elections with a 92.5% of votes, resoundingly defeated the dictatorship as well as the “functional” opposition. She defeated the dictatorship because she made it very clear that she would win the presidential elections and would remove the dictator from power. She also defeated the functional opposition because she simply annihilated it and left it without the capacity to continue existing as the dictatorship’s disguise.

In these conditions, the dictatorial strategy is to prevent -at any cost- for Maria Corina Machado to be a candidate and to rehabilitate its functional opposition to continue playing the façade of democracy and counterfeit the results for the vote-catching dictatorship.

The disqualification of Machado is unacceptable as it represents the end of the electoral process. This is but the repeated mechanism to falsify elections, preventing the participation of a candidate with popular support that would win the election. Up to now, the disqualification of Machado is a dictatorial undertaking that we hope will not go beyond and lead to her imprisonment and exile as in Nicaragua and Bolivia, or to her assassination as in the case of Fernando Villavicencio in Ecuador.

In Venezuela in 2024, there are no possible presidential elections without the participation of Maria Corina Machado because she is the SOLE CANDIDATE FROM THE OPPOSITION that the dictatorship has turned into THE SOLE AND ONLY CANDIDATE OF THE VENEZUELAN PEOPLE who yearn for freedom and democracy.

*Attorney & Political Scientist. Director of the Interamerican Institute for Democracy.

Translation from Spanish by Edgar L. Terrazas