On Friday, 19 October, the Lisbon Parliament voted on several motions regarding Venezuela and the post-electoral situation in that country after the 28 July presidential elections, the results of which arouse the greatest suspicion among the opposition and most international observers.
There were motions from various parties: from the national-popular Chega and the libertarian Liberal Initiative, to the ruling PSD, and beyond to the Leftists and communists. In short, everyone, with the exception of the Portuguese Communist Party, recognised the electoral fraud of the Caracas government; everyone rejected the recognition of Maduro. But only the two parties of the Right and centre-right, Chega and IL, voted to recognise Edmundo González as president of Venezuela, even though there was unanimous rejection (excluding the PCP) of Maduro’s election.
History and oil
In the second half of the 20th century, Venezuela was an exception in Latin America, where historically ‘caudillos,’ ‘strongmen,’ and ‘providenciales’ from the tradition of the 19th century proliferated. Marcos Evangelista Pérez Jiménez was the last dictator there, chosen as president by a military junta in December 1952. He succeeded Carlos Delgado Chalbaud (his colleague in the military junta and his brother-in-law) and Germán Suárez Flamerich, a civilian and diplomat. The latter was called in by the junta to replace Chalbaud, who had been kidnapped and murdered by leftist guerrillas led by Rafael Urbina López.
The time of Pérez Jiménez’s government was also one of high oil prices; Venezuelan production had made a huge leap, from 164,000 barrels per day in 1946 to around 2,800,000 in 1957; the price had also risen from $1.26 dollars per barrel to $2.65. Oil had been discovered over a century earlier in Maracaibo in 1922 by Royal Dutch Shell geologists and, by the end of the 1970s, accounted for 90% of exports.
We might say that Venezuela’s history thenceforward was dictated by the country’s political evolution and struggle; but it also has, like other oil-producing countries, a close connection to the fluctuations in the price of crude oil. Not least because Venezuela has the largest reserves of black gold in the world.
In 1958, the military regime of Pérez Jiménez fell, and a period of democratic government began under the presidency of Rómulo Bettencourt, accompanied by the division of oil revenues between the political parties. The so-called Punto Fijo Pact (named after the small town where it was signed) was an agreement between Rómulo Bettencourt’s AD (Acción Democrática), Rafael Caldera’s COPEI (Comité de Organizatión Política Electoral Independiente), and Jóvito Villalba’s URD (Unión Republicana Democrática), which ensured stability for 40 years. Also around this time, in 1960, the Caracas government was one of the driving forces behind OPEC (Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries). And in the autumn of 1973, with the crisis in the Middle East, the price of a barrel of oil quadrupled.
In Venezuela, it was the eve of the first presidency of Carlos Andrés Pérez (1974-1979) who, also in the euphoria of new resources, launched a project—‘La Gran Venezuela’—which, under the slogan ‘sow the oil,’ aimed to eradicate poverty and diversify the country’s economy by replacing imports.
During the 1970s, Venezuela became the country with the highest per capita income in Latin America and the fourth highest in the world, after the United States, Switzerland, and New Zealand. But it is also true that this prosperity was accompanied by the famous ‘Dutch disease’ and other ailments of the petro-economies or petro-states.
But the democratic regime held out until 1999 and the election of Hugo Chávez. Chávez—who had already attempted a military coup d’état—came with that promise that always excites the people of liberal democracies who have freedom: the promotion of social justice and equality. It’s the old dilemma, identified by Tocqueville, of the compatibility of Liberty with Equality, a dilemma that in the United States was also symbolised in the polemic of two Founding Fathers: Jefferson and Hamilton.
In the 1970s, when oil prices were high, the cake was for everyone—rich, poor, and well-off. And immigrants came to the new El Dorado from all over the world, including Portugal. During those years, with ups and downs, the Punto Fijo Pact was respected, under which all parties were obliged to work in a democratic way, respecting elections and the results of elections.
This changed when, with the fall in the price of crude oil, the cake began to shrink. Violence began again in the streets, such as the so-called ‘Caracazo,’ a wave of riots in the capital caused by the rise in the price of transport that degenerated into a large-scale riot. And then, in 1992, a young official, Hugo Chávez, attempted a coup against President Carlos Andrés Pérez, who was then in his second term.
The Chavismo movement
In 1982, on the 200th anniversary of the birth of Simon Bolívar, the caudillo liberator of the Americas, Chávez founded the MBR-200, the acronym for the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement. The coup failed and Chávez spent some time in prison, but in 1998 he was elected democratically after clamouring against the petro-state, the oligarchy, and corruption. And he was elected by a majority, with 56% of the vote.
Chávez appeared as an armed prophet, invoking a kind of strange new Trinity: Christ, Marx, and Simon Bolivar! Christ, because the Christian ideals in the Sermon on the Mount were important to the Catholic people; Marx, who was the father of Socialism; and Bolivar, the caudillo of Latin American independence.
All of this reached a people who had known the euphoria of the ‘Gran Venezuela’ of expensive oil and now lived with the imminence of misery. But oil rose again and Chávez survived, increasingly having to resort to the powers of the state over citizens and the corresponding repression, on the pretext of defending the public good and fighting reaction.
Chavez died in 2013, and his successor was Nicolas Maduro—another military man and Chavez’s vice-president. And if Chavismo had kept some shades of democracy, even one that resembled the Eastern European ‘people’s democracies,’ with Maduro those veils fell, especially as oil prices also fell from 2014 onwards, bringing inflation, famine, and food shortages, with the United States imposing sanctions on a country that was moving closer to alignment with Cuba. And then came the scandals, because the Left preaches equality and justice, but it has its corrupt people; here, the most famous was businessman Alex Saab, a Colombian, who was Maduro’s advisor and financial counsellor, an expert in evading international sanctions accused of having pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars.
And so, as the economic and social situation of the population worsened, ‘chavismo’—the Maduro version—hardened its authoritarianism and repression, while around eight million Venezuelans (a quarter of the population) voted with their feet, leaving the country. Venezuela soon rivalled Syria at the forefront of political population diasporas.
The opposition: what to do?
The most recent act of this tragedy was the presidential elections on 28 July, elections to choose a president whose six-year term is due to begin on 10 January 2025. The candidates were the incumbent (Maduro, leader of the Unified Socialist Party of Venezuela), the candidate of the united opposition (Edmundo González, representative of the Democratic Unity Platform), and a few others of little note. The choice of González, a diplomat, came from the fact that the main opposition figure, Maria Corina Machado, was banned from running in June 2023 in yet another arbitrary move by the Maduro regime.
And arbitrariness dominated the election, both in its course and, above all, in the tabulation of results. Through a parallel counting process—and according to all expectations—Gonzaléz won, but it was Maduro who was proclaimed the winner and had the result ratified by an electoral court of political choice. This, of course, provoked popular protests not only in the capital, Caracas, but in other cities across the country—demonstrations that were brutally repressed, with 20 dead, hundreds injured, and more than 1,200 arrests. Maduro claimed that the arrested demonstrators were ‘drugged and armed’ and that 85% of those arrested were foreigners.
National and international pressure for Maduro to accept the reality of the votes and leave power is being exerted via international public opinion. But Maduro is a communist, and communists in power usually look for ways to stay there. The hope of the opposition and millions of Venezuelans inside and outside the country is that, faced with pressure from the United States and the countries of Europe and the Americas, the dictator of the neo-communist Left (who has since been criticised by Venezuela’s own communist party) will take advantage of a graceful exit to exile himself from the country.
It won’t be easy. The communist regime, with its associated authoritarianism and corruption, and its complicity with drug trafficking and its continental mafias, is too afraid to give up power, because it is power and its strength that protects it and its supporters from the consequences. And at the moment, despite having international sympathy, the cause of the Venezuelan opposition needs to be understood and supported on the American continent. And there, with left-wing regimes in Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia, and with the United States on the eve of elections, advancing this cause will not be easy. But the Venezuelan patriots must not give up, and neither must those who already understand and support them.
