The Bolivarian revolution has claimed a victory without any credibility, precisely when it no longer has popular support and when Nicolás Maduro is determined to remain in power until 2030, at the earliest. The people’s president called a referendum on Essequibo, a territory in dispute with neighboring Guyana, to awaken patriotic fervor and strengthen himself for next year’s presidential elections. The effect achieved is the opposite.
“An evident and overwhelming victory of the yes. The extraordinary, unprecedented participation of the voters, with a very important participation of 10,431,907 Venezuelans. So that there are no doubts and misinterpretations,” a stammering Elvis Amoroso, president of the National Electoral Council (CNE) and former comptroller of the Republic (highest fiscal control body), one of the most loyal officials to Maduro and who has viciously persecuted opposition leaders. Amoroso is responsible for the illegal and unconstitutional disqualification of the opposition leader, María Corina Machado.
In this way, the electoral referee backtracked, because on Sunday night he assured that there were 10.5 million votes, which would mean 2.1 million voters, since the consultation answered five questions about the Essequibo. He also did it with Vice President Delcy Rodríguez (“with more than 10 million votes, Venezuela exercises its sovereignty and tells the world that Essequibo belongs to us”), with the revolutionary leaders and with government propaganda, which played with a calculated ambiguity in the face of the evidence of what was experienced in the previous hours.
“An hour later and without any support, be it minutes, bulletins or publication of results, the CNE reports that they were voters and not votes, when that first information was consistent with what happened. The CNE crossed the red line in its first action, without “no type of qualms or care for forms. We are undoubtedly facing the greatest fraud of the revolution. And not only because of the manipulation of results,” electoral expert Jesús Castellanos confirmed to EL MUNDO, who for weeks has denounced an electoral campaign ” openly asymmetrical in favor of the yes, with use of public resources in favor of a partial referendum”.
“With the announcement of these hardly credible results, Maduro could not achieve the legitimization of his government,” said former military man Hebert García Plaza, former Chavista minister.
The loneliness of Chavismo was divined in the half-empty streets, without queues at the polling stations, without any popular enthusiasm and with desperate last-minute calls and pressure for social aid beneficiaries and public workers to go to the polls that were kept open. up to five hours longer than established, as Chávez’s son claimed.
Citizens, activists, opponents and independent journalists certified the disinterest of a country fed up with hundreds of graphic documents. Some situations seemed rather taken from the most humorous Tik Tok, such as the false lines that were repeated over and over again with the same people to add to the official evidence of a country dedicated to the cause.
And all this in comparison with the opposition primaries, “which did mobilize, a public fact, notorious and documented by the citizens themselves and which generated an atmosphere of electoral celebration,” Castellanos confirmed. In October, 2.5 million people voted in self-managed primaries, plagued by official obstacles.
Revolutionary history itself confirms the grotesque makeup applied by the government machinery. In the best times of Hugo Chávez, the 2012 presidential elections, the supreme commander added eight million votes at the polls. A year later, Maduro reached 7.5 million support, which was reduced to 6.2 million in 2018, in already tainted elections.
That Chávez who still reached the people thanks to his charisma coined a phrase, “Ten million for the buche!”, with which he imposed a goal that had never been achieved. Years later, with a diaspora of more than eight million people that has also reduced the electoral roll, the CNE has dropped a political bomb without any credibility, willing to assume the cost of its obvious lie.
Already in the elections to the Constituent Assembly of 2017, Chavismo broke its record in electoral tricks: more than a million stuffed votes at the polls, as denounced by the computer company Smartmatic.