The bitterly contested and disputed results of the Venezulan presidential election are drawing concerned comments from world leaders, including U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
Addressing reporters in Tokyo, Blinken said the U.S. is very concerned that the officially announced results naming Nicolas Maduro the winner over opposition candidate Edmundo González have not been backed up with evidence. Maduro, the alleged winner, is the current president of Venezuela. He is a socialist and has been described as an authoritarian ruler suspected of tampering with the election to stay in power. Maduro is known for having cozied up to dictators like Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Muammar al-Qaddafi of Libya.
Maduro was first elected president in 2013 when former Venezualan leader Hugo Chavez died.
Secretary Blinken said he doubted whether the announced election results accurately reflected the vote, or the wishes of the Venezuelan people. Election authorities need to publish the details of the results and all the vote tallies, he said. Every vote has to be counted “fairly and transparently,” and the only way to do that is for election officials to release the tabulation of the votes, Blinken said.
The “international community” is watching the South American nation, said Blinken, and will “respond accordingly.” He did not give any details on what such a response might look like.
The latest reports show that 80 percent of the votes have been counted, and incumbent Maduro supposedly took 51 percent of the votes. On the other side, election authorities are claiming the opposition candidate, Edmundo González of the Democratic Unitary Platform (PUD) took only 44 percent of the popular vote.
Venezuelans began to make noise about possible election tampering on Sunday, July 28. For example, they say volunteer observers from the opposition PUD party were denied the right to witness votes being tabulated. They also claim the national election authorities, controlled by Maduro and his party, stopped sending local vote counts into the central government, ostensibly to stop counting any more votes against the incumbent president.
Venezuela’s popular opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado, was prevented from even running by the ruling Maduro government. A former industrial engineer, she has traveled the country speaking to people crushed by the country’s out-of-control inflation sparked by former president Hugo Chavez’s socialist revolution.
Her popularity is clearly threatening to the Maduro regime. When she travels, her supporters shout “Freedom! Freedom!” The United Socialist Party is using lots of tricks to try to stem her effectiveness, including arresting her colleagues and shuttering businesses that have had any working relationship with Machado.
The rate of inflation in Venezuela is so staggering it’s hard to believe; such complete devaluation of a nation’s currency is rarely seen. At its peak, the nation’s inflation rate was 130,000 percent, a figure so high it is almost impossible to translate it into real-world terms. Though the peak has passed, the crisis has impoverished millions of ordinary people and wiped out any savings or assets they might have had.
When young Americans naively hitch their wagons to socialist or democratic-socialist ideologies, they may want to look to their South American neighbor to see what kind of destruction lies in wait.
