It’s not just the United States that is concerned about the clearly falsified official results in this week’s Venezuelan presidential election.
U.S. views would be discounted anyway by many in Latin America, an attitude that, given our history of meddling and kingmaking there — not to mention political assassination and military intervention — is not without reason.
No, the good news is that several neighbors and allies who share the (nominally) leftist politics of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro are complaining about the sham election, too.
It’s good news because they might actually have some influence over the authoritarian leader who has ruined his once-rich nation’s economy and caused through his policies about 7 million Venezuelans to flee their home country — to the peril of other nations in the Americas, including our own.
“It’s important to clear up any doubts about the results,” Colombia’s foreign minister, Luis Gilberto Murillo, wrote on X. Such sober skepticism is most welcome, in that leftist Colombian President Gustavo Petro has made closer ties to neighboring Venezuela a priority.
In Brazil, firebrand leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva notably did not congratulate Maduro on his supposed re-election. Rather, his government merely released a statement praising “the peaceful nature” of the election and then calling for “the impartial verification of results,” plus the release of detailed results from polling stations, which by law keep irrefutable paper records.
Of course Latin American and international allies who also run sham democracies praised the Venezuelan government’s questionable results. Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega congratulated Maduro. And Cuba’s leader, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, said Mr. Maduro had “defeated the pro-imperialist opposition.” Vladimir Putin weighed in: “Russian-Venezuelan relations have the character of a strategic partnership.” And China and Iran sent their best wishes.
But everyone knows the fix was in. Again, United States influence is limited here. Our boycott of Venezuelan oil, which was partly lifted by the Biden administration in an effort to be supportive of the promise of a fair election, has been ineffectual, given other nations’ moves to get around it. And the nation’s ruined economy only contributes — along with its government oppression — to the millions of its citizens fleeing elsewhere in the Americas.
That’s why the pronounced skepticism of other nations than our own is the key to Venezuela being empowered to move on from its current sham government. “The Maduro regime must understand that the results they publish are difficult to believe,” Chile’s leftist leader, Gabriel Boric, wrote after the election, for instance.
Venezuela on Monday ousted all diplomats from Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Peru, Panama, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay. That’s because of a massive show of pro-democracy unity in the Americas that Maduro will not be able to ignore forever.
The government there can almost automatically reject U.S. government claims about the election, given our fraught history. But it cannot as easily deny the denouncement of the private Carter Center, whose election observers it invited into Venezuela, and who — once they had safely left the country — called the vote a fraud.
The people of Venezuela have suffered the consequences of socialist tyranny. We are hopeful that sometime, soon, they are able to free themselves from the grip of Maduro and leftism.
