Pedro González
Journalist
Nicolás Maduro was not finally seen in Brasilia at the inauguration ceremony of President Lula da Silva. He declined to attend at the last minute, even though his services had said he would be there to seal the reopening of relations between Brazil and Venezuela, which had been broken during the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro. Despite his physical absence, Maduro was the other major protagonist of the day. He had just emerged as the absolute winner in the unequal battle he has been waging since 2015 against the Venezuelan opposition, whose leaders and leaders struggle to survive in exile, like the six million citizens who have spilled out into the world, mainly in neighbouring Latin American countries.
As the year drew to a close, three of the ten parties that make up the persecuted and largely outlawed opposition decided to oust Juan Guaidó, who in January 2019 had proclaimed himself Venezuela’s president-in-charge. Acción Democrática (AD), Un Nuevo Tiempo (UNT) and Primero Justicia (PJ) had come to the conclusion that Guaidó had not only failed to achieve the main part of his charge, removing Nicolás Maduro from power, but had also lost the backing of the countries that initially supported him in the task of dislodging chavismo.
In fact, Guaidó was almost exclusively built on the recognition of the then president of the United States, Donald Trump, a support that obviously moved four dozen other countries, including the most important EU countries, to follow in the wake imposed by the American friend. This support gave Guaidó access to a large part of Venezuela’s assets abroad, especially those of Citgo, the subsidiary of Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) in the United States, and control over the $2 billion in gold deposited in the Bank of England in the name of the Central Bank of Venezuela.
Strengthened by this support, Guaidó appointed 35 ambassadors in as many countries, which led to a corresponding conflict, both with the host states, which had to choose between the ambassadors appointed by Maduro and those appointed by the interim president, or adopt solutions of diplomatic tolerance. Now, those 35 ambassadors have been removed from their functions, and the only alternative is to seek their lives around the world, since if they were to return to Venezuela they would go straight to prison, accused of the full range of crimes that come with the usurpation of a public office of foreign representation.
The relentless persecution of dissidents
The Chavista regime cracked down with extraordinary harshness on all the citizen protests that Guaidó and his allies in the opposition pushed for to overthrow Maduro. Thousands of arrests, followed by cruel torture and not a few extrajudicial executions, ended up extinguishing the resistance of those who understood that they had only two paths: fleeing the country in search of shelter and the hope of a better horizon, or active compliance with chavismo-madurismo, whose social assistance for subsistence always requires the counterpart of gratitude in the form of support and collaboration in demonstrations and actions that reaffirm the regime.
The energy crisis unleashed by Vladimir Putin in Ukraine substantially changed the position of the United States, whose President Joe Biden turned Maduro “from global pariah to Washington’s furtive interlocutor”. In the European Union itself, French President Emmanuel Macron gave Maduro a big thumbs-up with the effusive greeting in the corridors of COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh. This was the starting signal for the other EU partners who had recognised Guaidó to rush to re-establish political-diplomatic normality with the Bolivarian dictatorship.
The re-establishment of relations with neighbouring Colombia, following Gustavo Petro’s assumption of power, and the setting up of a dialogue table, now interrupted, in Mexico between the Chavista regime and the opposition, have finally strengthened Nicolás Maduro and made Guaidó, whom he has promised to put in jail sooner rather than later, absolutely irrelevant.
The Venezuelan president is therefore at the zenith of his power, which he obviously shares with the military, whose commanders are well placed or integrated in all the country’s economic sectors. Maduro, whom many of the governments that recognised Guaidó have described as an “illegitimate president”, will once again stand for re-election. The opposition, which has always found it extremely difficult to find a single candidate, is preparing primaries for this. It aspires to find such a consensus electoral leader and for the elections to be supervised by international observers to ensure that they are fair.
Even if this were to happen, much would have to change in the international context for Chavismo to relinquish power. Maduro reigns over a country with a gigantic 90% poverty rate. He will be even stronger if he manages to take over foreign assets and get US Chevron and other foreign multinationals to reinvest in Venezuela and modernise its ailing oil industry and obsolete production systems. As for the electoral process, the experts and theoreticians of the Bolivarian doctrine already know how to make it impossible for an opposition candidate to sit in the Miraflores Palace in Caracas.
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