Like most of Venezuela’s official institutions, its supreme court is an assemblage of pro-government loyalists. Three weeks ago, the tribunal’s president announced its “unequivocal” support for President Nicolás Maduro’s questionable claim of victory in the July 28th Presidential election, bringing an end to the idea that negotiations might somehow resolve the country’s political crisis. On September 2nd, an arrest warrant was issued for the opposition candidate, Edmundo González, whom Maduro claims to have defeated. Last Saturday, González flew to Spain, on a Spanish Air Force plane, and he has been guaranteed political asylum there.
The latest iteration of Venezuela’s long-running crisis began after the head of the National Electoral Council, a Maduro apparatchik, declared him the victor on July 29th, with fifty-one per cent of the vote to forty-four per cent for González. Maduro has been Venezuela’s President since the death in office of his mentor, the strongman Hugo Chávez, in 2013. Maduro’s latest “win” will give him an additional six years in office when his current term ends, in January. Maduro’s claims are widely regarded as specious, not least because neither he nor Venezuela’s electoral council have produced any evidence to support them—namely the vote tallies. Meanwhile, the opposition has published the tallies of more than eighty per cent of the voting machines which suggest that González won by a factor of more than two. Maduro’s government denounced the documents as “forged,” part of an “unprecedented and barbaric fraud.”
The impasse has created new political divisions that are already beginning to play out through the hemisphere. Election monitors from the United Nations and the Carter Center denounced the lack of transparency and integrity; a group of countries including the European Union nations, the United States, and thirteen of its allies in the Americas—Argentina, Chile, and Costa Rica among them—has demanded “the immediate publication of all original records and the impartial and independent verification of those results.” But a grab bag of authoritarian regimes around the world (notably Russia, China, and Iran) and rhetorically leftist regimes in the region (Nicaragua, Honduras, Cuba, and Bolivia) have applauded Maduro’s reconsecration in power. This handful of Latin American governments is the most performatively militant in the region, decrying U.S. support for Israel, the economic embargo against Cuba, and the more recent sanctions against Venezuela, as well as drug-trafficking charges filed in 2020 against Maduro, as “interventionist” and “imperialistic,” while celebrating Vladimir Putin’s actions, such as his invasion of Ukraine. (Maduro denied the charges, calling Trump officials “racist cowboys.”)
In a sign of the changing times, however, the left-of-center leaders of the Latin American nations that are more economically and politically relevant to the rest of the world—Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, and Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—tempered their statements, trying to de-escalate the crisis and create the conditions for a compromise with the opposition. Petro and Lula also urged Maduro to produce the vote tallies, while López Obrador pleaded patience.
Lula, who is now seventy-eight, previously served two terms as President, and since returning to office last year, he has reëmerged as the region’s leader. Whether as the custodian of Latin America’s largest economy and of the biggest piece of the Amazon rain forest, or as a key mover in BRICS, an alliance of nations that includes the major developing countries, Lula is in his own league as a global player. A wily pragmatist, he has sought to maintain good relations with U.S. adversaries, including Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, while maintaining his democratic credentials with the Biden Administration by narrowly beating Jair Bolsonaro, an ally of Donald Trump’s, in the 2022 Presidential election. In a sideshow to the drama in Venezuela, Lula’s government and Brazil’s supreme court have been engaged in a battle of wills with Trump’s champion Elon Musk, who has used his X platform to intervene in the country’s political divisions on behalf of Bolsonaro. After Musk refused to obey a judicial order to block some X accounts in Brazil for spreading disinformation and “hate speech,” the entire platform was blocked across the country, setting off another debate about corporate responsibility and free speech. Lula said in an interview, “The Brazilian justice system may have given an important signal that the world is not obliged to put up with Musk’s extreme-right-wing anything-goes just because he is rich.”
In any case, Maduro has doubled down on his story of an international plot hatched to destroy him and the vaunted “Bolivarian Revolution,” which is how the regime he inherited from Chávez describes itself. Since the election, and the protests that followed his victory announcement, he has dispatched security agents to arrest his critics and political opponents, holding them on charges that range from “incitement of hatred” to “terrorism.” According to the Venezuelan rights organization Foro Penal, more than sixteen hundred people have been detained for political reasons. Six opposition leaders are sheltering at the Argentinean Embassy, which—since Venezuela expelled Argentina’s diplomatic staff, after the election—has been overseen by Lula’s government. On Saturday, Caracas ended that arrangement, and security personnel have surrounded the building.
Edmundo González himself had been in hiding since the election and had taken refuge at the Dutch and Spanish diplomatic residences in Caracas. A seventy-five-year-old retired diplomat, he explained his reticence to appear before the authorities on the reasonable ground that Maduro, who called him a “coward,” offered no legal guarantees if he did; he was under investigation for “presumed usurpation of functions, forgery of a public document, instigation of legal disobedience, information technology crimes, association to commit crimes, and conspiracy.” (González denies the charges.) On August 27th, Maduro named Diosdado Cabello, a military officer and Chavista hard-liner, as his new minister of the interior, with control over Venezuela’s intelligence service. Following a nationwide power blackout on August 30th, the government blamed the opposition for “sabotage of the electricity system.” Three days later, the warrant was issued for González’s arrest—a move that the U.S. State Department immediately condemned. Later that day, Maduro made a typically grandiose announcement on his weekly television show: “This year, to honor you all, to thank you all, I am going to decree the beginning of Christmas on October 1st. Christmas arrived for everyone, in peace, happiness, and security!”
Beyond Venezuela’s borders, its crisis is altering the political landscape, opening a breach in the hitherto fraternal ranks of Latin America’s left, in ways that may prove to be significant. During the past few weeks, in effusive statements of solidarity with Maduro, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, the onetime leader of the Sandinista revolution—who has consolidated his own repressive tenure in recent years by imprisoning and expelling hundreds of critics, including former comrades—has blasted Lula as “un arrastrado,” a groveller, and a “wannabe lackey of the Yankees in Latin America.” Ortega went on to declare that Nicaragua’s diplomatic relations with Brazil were “broken.”
Lula’s main transgression, it seems, is to have gone public with his criticisms of Maduro. On August 16th, he gave an interview in which he described Maduro’s regime as “unpleasant,” even if, he hedged, it has an “authoritarian tendency but is not a dictatorship as we know it.” But he has also said that he won’t yet recognize the electoral results and that “Maduro knows he owes Brazilian society and the world an explanation.” This is a volte-face for Lula, after years of diplomatic rope-a-dope, when it comes to the transgressions of the regime next door. When I interviewed him in Brasília in March, Lula spoke scathingly about Washington and its allies for inaction regarding the killing of Palestinians in Gaza while focussing on the state of democracy in Venezuela. He made a plea for an expanded U.N. Security Council, one that would more fairly represent the world’s population—not just the main nuclear powers. The system was no longer fit for purpose, he said, because there are no brakes on the major powers, which do whatever they want. “Russia goes to Ukraine without consulting the U.N. Security Council. Bush goes to Iraq without consulting anyone . . . the Israeli Army is destroying the Palestinian people, and the U.S. doesn’t provide any U.N. resolution. And all of this seems to be normalized. And yet their main concern is with Venezuela, with Venezuela!”
Things have clearly moved on. Maduro’s latest actions pose potentially adverse consequences for all of Venezuela’s neighbors, not least the prospect of a new influx of desperate migrants. An estimated half a million Venezuelans have decamped to Brazil since 2014, and, if a new exodus is forthcoming, as seems likely, more will head to Brazil. And tensions have also been building owing to Maduro’s propensity to cause trouble. He has revived an old Venezuelan claim on a jungle region, the Essequibo, in the small neighboring country of Guyana, which is coincidentally undergoing an oil boom, and noisily reinforced Venezuela’s troops near the border, causing Lula to dispatch an Army detachment to bolster Brazil’s own frontier in the sensitive region. When we met, Lula also alluded to the presence of Venezuelan gold miners operating illegally inside Brazil’s Yanomami Indigenous territory.
