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91������̳’s Federico Fuentes spoke to Antonio González Plessmann from Venezuelan left-wing human rights collective to break down the country’s July 28 presidential election.

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What is your assessment of the July 28 presidential election?

Since 2016, the political class — which includes both the opposition and pro-Maduro sector — has resorted to operating outside the constitution and democratic framework. This has occurred amid the United States’ unilateral coercive measures that have wreaked chaos on the economy and fuelled a political crisis.

These elections failed to offer full political rights for parties, candidates or voters. The government restricted electoral options by using the courts to intervene into right-wing opposition parties and former left-wing allies. As a result, no left-wing party was able to stand a candidate in the elections.

Despite these obstacles, people felt an enormous need to vote.

The official turnout was 59%, but this does not take into account that more than 4 million voting-age Venezuelans live outside the country and were prevented from voting. If we only count those that could vote, the turnout was more than 70%.

The majority of the population voted against Maduro. This majority did not vote in favour of the opposition’s program, but to punish Maduro.

One argument in support of this thesis is that three weeks prior to the election, a national poll asked people whether they would vote for [former President Hugo] Chávez on July 28 if he was still alive: more than 50% answered “yes”.

For almost a decade now, Maduro has been forging a program and class alliance different from Chávez's — one that has severely impacted people’s lives. That is what the population voted against.

Why do you think the National Electoral Council (CNE) and the government have so far refused to release a breakdown of the vote and corresponding tally sheets?

The reason is simple: the results show Maduro lost. They are manoeuvring to keep those results hidden.

The big problem they face is that the automated system is very good: it has numerous backups and controls that make it practically impossible to falsify tally sheets.

Every machine at every polling station produces a tally sheet with a unique encrypted code. This tally sheet is then signed by party observers and polling station authorities. The CNE, the Armed Forces, observers and voters who participated in the tallying process are all given a copy.

Also, all the data is transmitted to the national tallying centre and stored in the machine’s memory, with a digital copy handed to party observers on a USB.

To carry out fraud, they have had to keep the tally sheets hidden and bypass audits required by law.

What is your opinion of the Supreme Court (TSJ) ruling confirming the CNE’s announced results?

The ruling by the TSJ’s Electoral Chamber is part of their strategy to cover up the vote.

Contrary to its own jurisprudence, the TSJ has delivered a ruling on an electoral result, thereby usurping the CNE’s own functions.

Meanwhile, the CNE has failed to comply with its own legal obligations that include: tallying all the data in the presence of party observers; carrying out a telecommunications audit, a citizen audit of 1% of ballot boxes and an audit of the electoral data (fingerprint database); publishing the booth-by-booth results; and accepting administrative appeals lodged by candidates challenging partial or total results.

Instead of forcing the CNE to fulfill its legal obligations, the TSJ claims to have done the CNE’s job for it. It claims to have carried out an audit and found that the tally sheets correspond to the results announced by the CNE.

But no experts or witnesses from political parties participated in this audit, as required by law. In other words, Maduro has still not proven he won.

This ruling has only convinced those who were already convinced, or those who have economic or geopolitical interests in Maduro staying in government.

What can you tell us about the protests after the results were announced?

These protests mainly took place in working-class and poor areas. They largely represented a spontaneous reaction of indignation, given many people felt that their lived experience at the polling booth did not correspond with the CNE’s announcement.

Maduro lost in areas that have historically been Chavista. There is no doubt that a very important segment of Chavistas, or people who used to be Chavista, voted against Maduro. Indignation was greatest in those areas.

One Venezuelan organisation counted over just two days, July 29‒30. The vast majority were peaceful, though some were violent, including attempts to lynch government party activists.

As Surgentes, we condemned this political violence against PSUV [United Socialist Party of Venezuela] activists and have demanded these crimes be investigated and those responsible punished.

But this violence does not represent the majority who mobilised over July 29‒30. There are hundreds of videos on social media showing the mostly peaceful nature of the protests.

Those few violent protests have served as an alibi for the government to criminalise en bloc the protests of the majority.

Since July 29, the government has initiated a process of arbitrary selective arrests targeting opposition politicians, dissidents, critics, journalists, members of social organisations, officials who refused to repress protests and even religious figures.

There has also been a process of arbitrary mass arrests. Maduro says that 2229 demonstrators — he publicly labelled them “terrorists” — have been jailed.

Of these, at least 126 are adolescents, 185 are women, 14 are indigenous people and 17 are people with disabilities.

Those jailed are being held incommunicado, have been prevented from accessing a lawyer of their choice, and are being charged collectively, rather than having the facts of their cases and judgments dealt with individually.

How would you describe the current situation then?

We can describe the situation as an autogolpe en proceso [self-coup in process], in that we are transitioning from a constitutional government to a de facto government.

I say “in process” because although the elections were held on July 28, the presidential inauguration will not take place until January 10. For now, Maduro remains a president who was democratically elected in 2018.

Things could change between now and January, but if the current course continues, then we are experiencing the birth pangs of a dictatorship.

How did we get into this situation?

To survive the impacts of US sanctions and his own economic incompetence that led to the collapse of the economy, Maduro implemented a neoliberal adjustment.

This included: privatising state enterprises and assets; radically deregulating labour relations, resulting in the lowest minimum wage in Latin America (US$3 a month); mass indirect layoffs in the public sector; tax exemptions for investments and imports; price liberalisation; de facto dollarisation of the economy; and an open and public political-economic alliance with business owners.

To circumvent the sanctions, Maduro used economic operators that covertly bought and sold goods on the international market. This led to a corrupt capitalist sector emerging that has amassed huge fortunes by “providing a service to the homeland”.

All this resulted in a rise in inequality, social rights violations and class conflict in Venezuela.

Faced with this, the government began restricting democratic spaces, both in terms of representative and participatory democracy, the latter including communal councils, communes and other direct expressions of popular sovereignty.

What we have witnessed is a radical mutation away from Chavismo, which was characterised by its national, popular, radically democratic and post-capitalist vocation. In its place has emerged something new: Madurismo, an authoritarian and right-wing government that can hardly be labelled Chavista, even if it continues to use symbols associated with it.

[Read the full interview at .]