Venezuelan election 2024: A sad old movie with a different ending!

Along with 1,300 international journalists and 800 international observers, I attended the July 28 presidential election in Venezuela and witnessed firsthand the events surrounding the country’s 31st national election in 25 years.

This is undoubtedly the most important election for President Nicolas Maduro and the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), with the main US-backed opposition determined to prevent Maduro from being elected for a third consecutive time.

Maduro was nominated and backed by a coalition of 13 leftist parties, while the far-right opposition is made up of nine independent parties, posing a significant challenge to the only U.S.-backed candidate to replace Washington’s favorite, a younger but officially disbanded candidate.

The official opposition candidate, 71-year-old retired diplomat Edmundo Gonzales Urrutia, clearly lacks the stamina to handle a fast-paced campaign led throughout by 55-year-old Maria Corina Machado.

She was officially disqualified from the candidacy after she asked Washington to increase unilateral sanctions against her homeland and people, which now stand at 936.

As a representative of Venezuela’s most privileged class, which has historically considered itself “exceptional” and destined by birth to rule the country, she did not appeal directly to the millions of poor Venezuelans who are affected daily by U.S. sanctions against the Chavez and Maduro regimes.

Instead, she acknowledged that her utmost confidence in victory depended entirely on support from Washington and international pressure.

This scene has played out before in Venezuela: a weaker political force backed by the United States sought to overthrow the United Socialist Party of Venezuela and erase its 25-year legacy, but failed in 28 of 30 internationally observed elections since 1998.

Previous efforts to oust Maduro — in addition to hundreds of accumulated economic and political sanctions, failed military coups, armed violence and infrastructure destruction — have included five attempts to assassinate Maduro.

The 2024 election, like all 30 previous national presidential and legislative elections, is ideologically driven, but above all, it is seen as the last chance to remove Maduro, and it must succeed, by any means necessary.

Corina Machado is the undisputed mastermind behind González’s U.S.-backed proxy candidacy, which seeks to dismantle the popular Bolivarian social program implemented by the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), which has dramatically improved the lives of millions of Venezuela’s poor since Chávez was first elected in 1998.

González’s temporary electoral marriage of convenience to Machado is part of the ongoing war of elimination against the Venezuelan Unity Movement Party (PSUV) and has been blessed with the marriage politics of the Biden administration.

The originally peaceful campaign turned violent on July 29 after Corina Machado publicly rejected the election results and called on supporters to express their dissatisfaction.

Subsequently, the international media launched an unprecedented attack against Maduro and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela.

Elon Musk’s Starlink and “X” platform, Bloomberg, BBC, CNN (and others) all broke the same “breaking news” in favor of the opposition.

Musk personally changed Maduro’s status on the “X” and in a post cheered the removal of a statue of Chavez in Caracas on July 31, an image that reminded many of the removal of a similar statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad by U.S. forces after the final U.S. invasion of Iraq.

By July 31, it was clear that it was no longer a question of who won or lost the July 28 presidential election, but rather a question of supporting or opposing another US-backed coup against Maduro and the PSUV.

This is indeed a common but distinct “existential threat” for both sides — a decisive battle that only one side can win in the ongoing war over who owns and determines the present and future of Venezuela and its vast oil and gas reserves.

International media have widely reported that Maduro has vowed a “massacre” if his party wins, but no such recording has been produced.

Instead, what international observers and journalists saw and heard was the president warning that “there would be serious consequences” if his opponents resorted to violence after the election results were announced.

But as the plot unfolded, it became clear that the opposition had long been trying to sabotage the national power grid in order to affect the delivery of votes through Venezuela’s highly electronic voting and counting system.

On the eve of the vote, security forces publicly revealed that they had intercepted a bribed political plot to cause a series of power outages at specific times in eight states across the country in order to disrupt the transmission of election results.

The arrested plotters appeared on local television throughout the country and admitted that they were being paid “$150 a day” by the current main opposition political force (disclosed but unnamed).

But the announcement never made world news, with mainstream media instead focusing on fanning the flames of rejection of the findings and highlighting claims without evidence.

Before the election, opponents predicted that Maduro might not allow the election to be held; and when Maduro made it clear that he was determined to win a third term, opponents predicted that he would not accept defeat.

But the González-Machado provisional electoral coalition was determined to succeed at all costs and stated in advance that it would not recognize the official election results.

Instead, they will produce their own exit poll data with the support of an outside electronic agency hired by Maduro’s opponents in the United States.

Not surprisingly, those who accuse Maduro and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela of cheating have yet to produce evidence and are instead calling on Caracas to prove them wrong.

As the world watches Israel embark on a new wave of assassinations of Palestinian leaders, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urgently asks the U.S. Congress to provide his genocidal government with the remaining weapons “to complete the mission” – to eliminate Hamas and the Palestinian resistance.

Whether in Ukraine, Haiti, Kenya or Venezuela, the United States continues to wage proxy wars around the world despite the worsening economic, social and political situation in the West in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, disruptions to global supply chains, counterproductive sanctions against Russia, and the countless related crises and difficulties that have emerged in the aftermath of the Ukrainian crisis, especially in Europe.

As Western countries increase their military support for the war in Ukraine, large numbers of European citizens are facing daily income losses and increased food and fuel expenses, exacerbated by deteriorating conditions in health care, housing and other social services.

Venezuela’s plight today must be viewed in the context of the United States and its Western global partners’ perpetual insistence on retaining or regaining complete control over its unlimited energy resources.

Successive U.S. administrations, including President Trump and President Biden, have kept negotiating channels open to reach a deal that would allow American multinational oil company Chevron to return to Venezuela, where it once dominated the South American country’s rich oil and gas industry.

The United States is too dispersed around the world to conduct direct military intervention overseas, and instead outsources such responsibility, such as to Kenya and Haiti.

The United States has so far invaded 84 countries with which it has diplomatic relations; today, it has more than 750 military bases in at least 80 countries around the world (including in Latin America and the Caribbean), all of which are intended to protect and preserve ill-defined “American interests” in a rules-based world order defined by Washington and implemented by political allies such as the European Union and its military institution, NATO.

The US political establishment has never concealed its determination to replace Maduro and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela at all costs, and in this recent election, whether Maduro won or not was not important to his opponents, whose only concern was “Maduro must go!”

But if Maduro and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela are as the international media have reported, then it is foreseeable that Venezuela will resort to military means to prevent any externally supported internal security threats from undermining Venezuela’s political resolve to continue pursuing the Bolivarian Chavismo social and economic reforms that have begun to bear fruit over the past three years.

Unfortunately, the United States’ bellicosity on these issues has stoked fears in other countries—for example, the United States has called on Israel to condemn war crimes committed in Gaza—that they are not succumbing to the imperialist narrative on Venezuela.

Once again, the future of the world’s richest oil-rich country is finally seen as up for grabs — and within reach.

In the current global context, people should be as concerned about President Maduro’s safety as Corinna Machado, especially since she and González have remained silent on Maduro’s invitation for post-election dialogue.

In Venezuela, the stakes remain high, the bets continue to roll, and the likelihood of national security and defense mobilization has never been higher, not just to defend the election results.

Millions of people are being asked to give up everything they continue to own and instead bet blindly on an uncertain future at the mercy of forces interested only in regime change and not in the impact of their promise to end the mass social programs that have helped so many in an oil-rich country that has been hobbled by sanctions and unable to develop its resources or plan for its future as a sovereign state.

This is yet another retelling of a sad old movie, but this time I thought the ending was unpredictable.