March 2022

By Calvin Tucker

If I had to select one image from the three elections I have monitored in Venezuela that best encapsulates the media war on truth, it would be the confusion that washed across the faces of my fellow international observers as they read on their mobile phones that there were no international observers in Venezuela. As far as the Western media - conservative or liberal - was concerned, we officially didn’t exist. Our erasure, presumably, was a matter of editorial policy. In that darkly humorous moment a few days before the 2018 presidential election, we were at one with the millions of ordinary supporters of the Venezuelan revolution, who, alongside their trade unions, social movements, and political parties, also did not exist.

Acknowledging the huge base of support for the revolution and ‘Chavismo’ as a political movement rooted for over two decades in working class barrios across the country, would puncture the media narrative of an oppressed population struggling for democracy against a vote-rigging dictatorship. It would also lead to a more nuanced debate about the many achievements of the revolution in health, housing, education, and political rights, and the extent to which US sanctions and destabilisation are responsible for the current economic crisis and collapse in living standards.

OBSERVERS GO UNOBSERVED

In similar vein, the existence of the international election observer mission was more than a minor inconvenience. Our findings, if properly reported in the Western media, would have blown a hole in the perennial but unevidenced claims of electoral fraud that serve to justify US and EU sanctions, coup attempts, and the recognition of the Juan Guaidó, a made-in-Washington colour-revolutionary who self-identifies as president but has never actually stood for the position.

Things were little better back in Britain. At the London Labour Party conference in 2019, the then shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry, who was demanding fresh presidential elections, admitted to me that she had no idea that observers had been present throughout the country.

Thus, our official non-existence continued until 26 March 2020 when, for reasons that are still unclear, we suddenly burst into life. The BBC website reported retrospectively that “He [Nicolás Maduro] was elected to a second term in May 2018 in an election seen as flawed by international observers.” It was nice of the BBC to finally acknowledge our existence. But we had never said or implied anything of the sort! I know, because I was in the meeting that drew up and approved the final observers’ report certifying the presidential election was free and fair and had met international standards. The BBC story was a complete invention.

Drawn from 86 countries, the observer mission included former prime ministers and presidents from Spain, Ecuador, and Honduras, delegations from the African Union and the Caribbean nations, the Latin American Council of Electoral Experts, the South African electoral commission, and parliamentarians and city mayors from around the world. The 200 international observers spent over a week in Venezuela, visiting polling stations and political rallies, auditing the count, and meeting with ordinary voters as well as with the President, politicians, and campaign chiefs of the main political parties. Notable by their absence were the official representatives of the USA and the EU, who declared in advance of the vote that the result would be fraudulent, and from the outset sought to delegitimise and discredit the process with a near daily barrage of evidence-free claims and allegations.

Yet Venezuelan elections are amongst the most secure and robust on the planet. Jimmy Carter, who observed the 2004 presidential recall referendum, described the voting system as the best in the world. The fully automated touch-screen voting system uses thumbprint recognition technology and prints off a receipt which is put into a ballot box and counted in front of opposition witnesses who then sign the tally sheets. The triple-lock of the computer printout, the tally sheets, and the results for each machine posted on the website of the CNE electoral commission, guarantees the integrity of the result. If the numbers don’t match, fraud is self-evident. (1)

The night before the 2018 presidential elections, I put these points to the campaign chief of the main opposition candidate, Henri Falcón. “Are you able to give a categorical guarantee you will respect the result of the election?” I asked in a taped Q&A session. “Yes, we are going this way tomorrow,” he replied. (2)  But his assurances proved worthless. Just as the results were about to be announced on live TV, Falcón, who had come under pressure from other opposition leaders for breaking the electoral boycott, tweeted that Maduro’s win was illegitimate.

ELECTORAL VICTORY

By 2021, it was clear that Juan Guaidó’s ludicrous but highly profitable slush-funded “presidency” was in a death spiral and the two main opposition groupings agreed to re-enter the electoral process following talks with the government in Mexico. However, they failed to create an electoral pact to contest November’s regional elections, and the governing Socialist Party (PSUV) took full advantage of opposition disunity and chalked up wins in 20 of the 23 state governorships with about 45% of the popular vote.

Meanwhile, despite a slow economic recovery and new Chinese, Russian, and Iranian investment in the beleaguered oil industry, the Washington DC-based Centre for Economic and Policy Research estimates that sanctions and asset seizures (the British government has confiscated over a billion dollars of Venezuela’s gold reserves) have caused the deaths of 40,000 Venezuelans, with another 300,000 at risk due to a lack of access to medicines 

The Venezuelan revolution has proved considerably more resilient that its critics expected. Bolstered by an inept and divided opposition and hitherto empty US military threats, the government is likely safe for the next few years. In the longer term, the survival of the revolution will depend on its ability to deliver tangible improvements under the cosh of what may well turn out to be a permanent Cuba-style economic embargo, and critically to follow through on Maduro’s promise to reconnect with and re-energise a social base grown weary of seemingly endless privations.    

Calvin Tucker - official observer during Venezuelan elections in his capacity as Campaigns Manager at the Morning Star

(1) This can be viewed at: https://www.facebook.com/VenSolidarity/videos/1945747852104575

(2) This can be viewed at: https://skwawkbox.org/2019/01/29/video-venezuela-may-2018-opposition-campaign-chief-accepts-presidential-election-result/

Nicolás Maduro answers questions on television Photo by Eneas de Troya