Bravo for Biden for recognizing Venezuela’s opposition win

Andres Oppenheimer

Mexico, Brazil and Colombia will pay a heavy price for their wavering stands on Venezuela’s July 28 electoral fraud: in the absence of a regionally-brokered solution to Venezuela’s political crisis, millions more of hopeless Venezuelans will flee to countries across the Americas.

This is not just speculation. More than 7.7 million Venezuelans have already left the country since dictator Nicolás Maduro took office in 2013, according to United Nations data. A July poll by the Venezuelan firm Consultores ORC showed that 18% of adult Venezuelans, or more than 4 million people, said they would consider leaving if Maduro stayed in power.

An April poll by Venezuela’s Meganálisis had put the figure of those considering migrating at a staggering 44.6% of Venezuela’s 25 million adults. That amounts to more than 11 million people.

Shamefully, the democratically-elected leftist governments of Mexico, Brazil and Colombia failed to support an Organization of American States July 31 proposed resolution that would have asked the Maduro regime to show a detailed voting count.

That caused the proposed OAS resolution to fail, because it did not reach the 17 country votes it needed to pass. Later, the three countries put out a separate, weaker joint statement calling on Maduro to show evidence of this victory claim.

The Maduro-controlled National Electoral Council had claimed on election night against all evidence that Maduro had won with 51% of the vote, but refused to show the voting tallies, as Venezuela’s law requires. Maduro later made the bizarre claim that he couldn’t show the voting records because the election’s computer system had suffered an opposition-directed cyber attack launched — I’m not making this up — from “Northern Macedonia.”

But the opposition made public receipts of more than 80% of voting machines showing that its candidate Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia won by 67% of the vote, to Maduro’s 30%. In addition, exit polls by the respected U.S. polling firm Edison Research and others showed that the opposition had won by a landslide.

Barring any outside pressure that gives the Venezuelan people some hope for the future, a new Venezuelan migration wave will start soon.

The first to leave will be the young, because they won’t see any future for themselves. Also, many exiles will try to get their parents and grandparents out of Venezuela because of fears that they won’t get access to essential medicine if there is a new cycle of mass protests, government repression, and worsening economic crisis.

Maduro may not have an easy time staying in power, however.

John Magdaleno, a professor of political science at Venezuela’s UCAB University, told me that he has counted at least 11 cases in recent decades in which autocrats were forced to resign after rigging elections. Among them was Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 and Bolivia’s Evo Morales in 2019.

“Often, there are mass demonstrations, followed by a rupture within the ruling elite,” Magdaleno told me. “I’m not ruling this out in Venezuela’s case.”

President Joe Biden, to his credit, called Brazil’s president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a Maduro friend, and convinced him to ask the Venezuelan dictator to release the detailed voting data. And Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday put out a statement saying that there is “overwhelming evidence” that González Urrutia had won the election.

But Biden should do more. He should raise the profile of Venezuela’s political crisis by speaking out personally about it, rather than leaving that job to underlings. In addition to escalating sanctions on Venezuela’s dictatorship, Biden should get on the phone and ask Latin American leaders to recognize Gonzalez Urrutia.

Unlike what happened in Venezuela’s 2018 elections, where the opposition didn’t participate and therefore didn’t have voting records to prove a victory, this time there are Gonzalez Urrutia’s voting tallies to prove his win.

Biden should tell Mexico’s president, for instance, that it’s in his own interest to press Maduro to provide a vote count, or otherwise seek a negotiated transition to democracy. Citing recent U.S. border control measures that have drastically reduced border crossings, Biden should warn him, “The United States will not take the new wave of Venezuelan migrants: they will be stuck in Mexico.”

Biden can do it. He created a strong international diplomatic coalition to apply sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, and he could do something similar to punish Maduro for his grotesque electoral fraud. If that doesn’t happen, there will be a new mass migration of Venezuelans, and a worsening humanitarian and economic crisis across the Americas.