The ‘Anthropological Change’ Happening in Venezuela
8 min read
Late last year, Venezuela’s democratic opposition set out to choose, jointly, someone who could challenge Nicolás Maduro, the country’s autocratic president, in an election that was sure to be violent and unfair. Hundreds of thousands of participants from different political parties voted in a primary held across Venezuela and in exile communities abroad. Although they risked harassment and arrest, people donated space in private homes and offices to make the vote possible. Others stood in line for hours, in parks and plazas, to choose the victor, María Corina Machado. Machado’s career began when she founded an election-monitoring group more than two decades ago, and she has since then served as a member of the National Assembly, as a party leader, and as a persistent voice in favor of international sanctions on the regime. The Venezuelan leadership responded, over many years, by repeatedly accusing her of conspiracy, treason, and fraud, even banning her from leaving the country.
After Machado won the primary, Maduro’s regime also barred her from running for president, and then blocked a substitute candidate; finally it allowed the opposition to nominate a retired diplomat, Edmundo González. Instead of weakening, the civic movement gathered speed. Having pulled off the feat of the primary, Machado and her colleagues trained more than 1 million volunteers to protect the election itself, which was scheduled for July 28. At thousands of workshops held all over the country, they prepared to monitor the polling stations, report irregularities using a secure app, collect the tally sheets produced by each voting machine, upload them to a secure website—and do all this in locations with generators, to ensure they could not be stopped by deliberate power cuts.
The result: The opposition won with about two-thirds of the vote. More to the point, González’s supporters could prove they had won, thanks to the tally sheets that were posted online. A few days after that vote, I talked with opposition leaders who thought the voting results were so definitive that Maduro would have to concede.
He did not. Five months have passed. González is living in exile in Spain. Machado is still in Venezuela, but in hiding. I spoke with her twice in recent days by Zoom, once as part of an online event organized by the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University (where I am a senior fellow) and once alone. I don’t know her location.
In my own location—sometimes in Europe, sometimes in the U.S.—I am in the center of what feels like a tidal wave of pessimism about liberal democracy. The threats of Russian-military and Chinese-surveillance technology; the loss of faith in political institutions, scientific institutions, authorities of all kinds; the sense that social media is drowning all of us in nonsense; the rise of Elon Musk, an unaccountable oligarch whose money can influence political outcomes in the U.S. and maybe elsewhere—all of that means that we are ending 2024 at a moment when many of the inhabitants of what remain the planet’s freest, most prosperous societies don’t feel much optimism.
Machado, by contrast, lives in a brutalized country. Thanks to the regime’s misrule, Venezuela, once the richest country in South America, is now the poorest. Its citizens are malnourished and impoverished; more refugees have left Venezuela than Syria or Ukraine. And yet, Machado is optimistic. Not just “optimistic given the circumstances,” but truly optimistic.
During both of our conversations, Machado sat in front of a blank wall, with no other backdrop. Both times she was also calm, assured, even elegant. She didn’t look tired or stressed, or whatever a person who hadn’t seen her family or friends since July should look like. She wore makeup and simple jewelry. She sounded determined, positive. This is because, Machado told me, she believes that the campaign and its aftermath altered Venezuela forever, bringing about what she describes as “anthropological change.”
By this, she means that the grassroots political movement she and her colleagues created has transformed attitudes and forged new connections between people. The carefully organized primaries brought together old opposition competitors. Volunteer training gave hundreds of thousands of people a real experience not just of voting but of building institutions from scratch. Those efforts didn’t end with last summer’s election. “The 28th of July was not just an event,” Machado told me. “It’s a process that has brought our country together. And regardless how many days it takes, Venezuela has changed forever and for the good.” Her team, with its leaders across the country, built not just a movement for one candidate or election, but a movement for permanent change. The scale of their achievement—the number of people involved, and their geographic and socioeconomic range—would be notable in a liberal democracy. In an authoritarian state, this project is remarkable.
Machado acknowledges that the price has been high. “Even though this has been a miracle in terms of what we have achieved, it has been very painful, and dangerous as well,” she told me. Like so many dictators who know they are hated by their own people—the recently deposed Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad comes to mind here—Maduro has become more brutal, more cruel, and more vindictive over time. Security forces have marked the homes of González supporters with an X and encouraged the public to report and harass them. The regime has shot and killed demonstrators and imprisoned more than 2,000 people, including the mayor of the second-largest city, Maracaibo; several regional opposition leaders; and more than 100 children. Arrest warrants were issued for several other campaign leaders—including González’s national campaign manager—who sought asylum at the Argentine ambassador’s residence in Caracas. They remain there as well, although the regime has cut off electricity and water, and arrested one of the embassy’s local employees, creating a diplomatic as well as a humanitarian crisis.
Maduro has blustered about Machado herself being a “terrorist,” which is why she is in hiding. But she remains firm in her belief that support for Maduro is much weaker than it might seem. Many of the votes for González came from Venezuelan neighborhoods that once supported Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, and until recently still supported Maduro himself. Quietly, local regime officials helped some volunteer election monitors during the election. And not only officials: “We wouldn’t have been able to get the tally sheets if it wasn’t for the cooperation of the military,” Machado said. “They got orders to take our election monitors out of the polling centers, and they didn’t follow those orders.” Election night brought more surprises. “There are hundreds of videos in which the military are watching as the results were read in, in real time, and [soldiers] were cheering, and laughing, and singing, and screaming.” Machado said. “So they saw it. They were witnesses of how the people came together.”
This, of course, is exactly what happened in Syria, where the regime’s supporters melted away. And no wonder: Police, security operatives, and soldiers in Venezuela also have relatives who have been brutalized by the regime. They are also tired of the profound corruption. They have also lived through 25 years of economic mismanagement. Their families have also been impoverished by a regime whose leaders have been sanctioned by the U.S. and others for narco-terrorism, corruption, and drug smuggling. Machado predicts that “Assad leaving the country and leaving behind some people who supported him, his closest allies” will create “enormous concern in some of those who support Maduro now.”
But the final, crucial change has still not come: Maduro has not left power. Machado’s message, which she delivers to anyone who will listen, is that outsiders can help. The next president of Venezuela is due to be inaugurated on January 10. González has said he plans to return to the country and take the oath of office. Venezuela’s interior minister appeared on television with a set of handcuffs he says he will use to arrest González. Machado believes that the U.S., along with Brazil, Colombia, Spain, and the rest of the European Union, can put pressure not just on Maduro but the people around him, by making clear that they will cut any remaining ties with Venezuela if Maduro breaks the law and has himself sworn in after losing the vote. They can announce a new roster of individual sanctions and cut off any remaining contracts, including for oil—Venezuela’s primary export. She also thinks that the U.S. and other nations could and should reveal what they know about the regime’s criminal activities: “drug trafficking, money laundering, gold smuggling, and even women and human trafficking.” There is still time for the Biden administration to speak up, she believes, and the incoming Trump administration will have many opportunities to do the same.
Venezuelans are not the only ones who will benefit. Venezuela’s refugees show up across the surrounding region and at the U.S. border. A ghoulish array of allies—not just Venezuela’s longtime partner Cuba but also Russia, China, and Iran—keep Maduro in power and also pump instability and crime into the whole Western Hemisphere, even though the country has an articulate, alternative set of politicians, with deep ties to communities across the country.
Machado says the opposition groups have a plan, if they win, to “transform completely—completely—the relationship we had between citizens and the state. We’ve only known the state deciding for us. Now it’s going to be the other way around. We’re going to have the society in power and making their own decisions, and the state at its service.”
That’s a vision that would feel utopian even in many democracies, but Machado believes it, and thinks a majority of Venezuelans do too. “I went around the country saying, ‘I have nothing to offer but work. I have nothing to offer you but [the possibility] that we’re going to get together, and we’re going to put this country back on our feet. So we’re going to do this right.’ And people cried and prayed.” This is the opposite of populism: Instead of giving people easy solutions, Machado talks about complex problems that won’t be solved for a long time. And some people, at least, have listened.
