Venezuela: Carlos Ron on Bolivarian Revolution’s Democratic Tradition

On August 7, Peoples Dispatch editor Zoe Alexandra conducted an interview with Carlos Ron, Venezuela’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and President of the Simon Bolivar Institute, on the 2024 Venezuelan presidential elections, and the ongoing controversy around them stirred up by the right-wing national opposition and the United States.

Since then, this controversy has metastasized into an all out attempt to overthrow reelected President Nicolas Maduro, especially on the part of the United States. On the first day of August, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken boldly declared, “it is clear to the United States and, most importantly, to the Venezuelan people that Edmundo González Urrutia won the most votes in Venezuela’s July 28 presidential election.”

In an unfortunate turn of events, on August 15 Colombia and Brazil shifted their position and called for fresh elections in Venezuela, after having called for the respect of Venezuela’s sovereignty and democratic process.

This interview will be divided into three parts, the first of which will concern the events of election night and the figure of Maria Corina Machado.

Read part one of our interview with Ron, which has been lightly edited for clarity: 

Zoe Alexandra: Venezuela has been dominating the headlines of international corporate media since its presidential elections were held on July 28. We have seen the New York Times calling for outright military coups, questioning the validity of the South American country and its democratic processes.

We’ve seen US elected officials issuing contradictory statements about democracy and who they recognize as the victor in this democratic process. For many of us who have been following the politics in the region, this is not a new script. Since the Bolivarian Revolution began in 1999, the US government has undertaken a variety of means to attempt to undermine and destabilize the socialist project and the will of the people.

We have seen some of the harshest sanctions or unilateral coercive measures being imposed on Venezuela, as well as attempted coups, invasions and sabotage campaigns. In this juncture, as we are once again being bombarded by different media campaigns and propaganda attempting to shape our understanding of Venezuela, it is crucial for us to be informed about what really is at stake and what is behind this current iteration of attacks.

For this conversation, we are very honored to be joined by Venezuela’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and the president of the Simon Bolivar Institute, Carlos Ron.

Can you first start off by telling us what has happened in the week and a half since the elections? What was the reaction of the right wing? What allegations are they making? 

Carlos Ron: So July 28 was pretty much a normal election day to what we have been accustomed to. This was our 31st election in 25 years. We saw a high amount of people going out to vote very early on, which is, again, normal by our historical standards.

Some time after midday, some of the numbers of people in the lines started to dwindle down, particularly in places where historically there have been majority opposition votes. But throughout the day, there was a peaceful atmosphere. A lot of people were just exercising their vote. 

Right before the closing time of the polls, there were statements being made, a lot of rumors by social media about the need to close the voting centers, even though by Venezuelan law, the voting centers can stand [open] at least until the last person in line has exercised their vote. 

This was important because it generated some confusion in some centers. The Edmundo Gonzalez crowd, they were coming up [to polling stations] and demanding that the witnesses have a copy of the tally that it’s printed out from the machines.

All voting in Venezuela is through electronic machines. You come, you first show you your Venezuelan ID card to the people operating the table. You’re certified with your thumbprint, so they verify your identity. And once your identity is verified, then the machine allows you to vote. At the end you get a copy, a small receipt, where you can verify that your vote is exactly what you pushed in the ballot and then that gets placed away in a box. 

At the end of the day when all voting is done, there’s a printout of the results. There are witnesses from the political fractions. They get a copy of what the results are, they sign it, and each keeps a copy. These are the so-called actas. 

But it’s important for people to know that this is not what gets counted at the end of the day. This doesn’t get tallied by somebody, who collects them all and adds them. This is just part of the guarantees of the system that you can check back. 

What really tells what happened, who won and so forth, are the actual voting machines. You don’t check against the paper trail, you check against the record in the voting machine, because the record in the voting machine can’t be altered. Papers, you never know what happens, they get ripped, they get lost. That’s not how you count. You count by the electronic record. 

So at the end of the [election] day, you have people from these groups tied to Gonzalez asking for the paper receipt. The problem with that is that they did it even before voting was over. So when at the end of the day, they had to wait for people to actually finish voting. Otherwise, there’s no way you can actually have the receipt printed.

But they created this confusion. Some people wanted to get violent. And this, to me, was the beginning of the operation that we already had known about. [The Edmundo Gonzalez camp] declared beforehand that they were not going to accept the results coming from the Electoral Council. They were only going to accept the vote tallies that they had in their hands.

Again, this is not the safest way to count votes. It’s not the way Venezuela historically certainly has counted votes. But it was a way to mobilize public opinion inside and outside of the country to think that there was something going on. 

We later learned afterwards that there was a plan by opposition hackers to not only attack the National Electoral Council, which they managed to do, and knock down the page where the results usually come up, but they were also ready to shut down electricity for a few hours, sometime around noon.

We’ve known this before also because we received several attacks prior to election day. So we were aware that something like this might be happening. 

This is a strategy that we have seen before, because these same groups in the opposition, it’s not the first time that they don’t recognize the electoral outcome. We’ve had, out of all these cycles, over 30 elections. Every time that we’ve won a major election, they’ve contested the results both in Venezuela and outside of Venezuela. 

By the end of the night, the CNE finally is able to solve at least some of the problems from receiving the transmission of the votes. And with 80% of the count, they were able to declare that President Maduro had been elected president.

The National Electoral Council of Venezuela only makes a statement once the count is irreversible. So for them to have stated, that same night, that President Maduro had won, it was because with the percentage of votes they had already tallied, it was impossible for the remaining votes to actually change the outcome and elect somebody else. So that’s how we know that President Maduro got elected that night. 

The next day, [the opposition-tied groups] unleashed a terror campaign on the population as a result of them not wanting to accept the results. 

ZA: Right now, Venezuela is managing to emerge from one of the worst economic declines in its history, which was a direct result of the extremely restrictive and heavy unilateral coercive measures imposed by the United States. After one of the harshest of sanctions regimes was imposed on the country, there was an over 90% drop in the country’s GDP. 

Can you talk a little bit about this context?

CR: One of the candidates is subjected to having a [bounty] on his head, which is President Maduro. One of the candidates has had his life attempted against during and before this campaign. There were also some possible attempts against his life that we know the security forces were able to to stop during the campaign. 

He’s also subjected to being banned from social media. There was no showing of the campaign the way the other side was able to do so, and so forth.

But also, a government’s reelection also depends on how well you can manage your tenure. If you’re able to provide good social programs.

When you’re trying to do that under a regime of attacks and unilateral coercive measures, that not only affects people personally, because the discourse has always been that this is a visa cancellation for a politician. But that’s not what it implies. The implications for Venezuela have been that the oil industry, which is our main source of income, has been blocked. Other sources of income have been blocked as well. We can’t provide everyday repairs or spare parts for things that are key to public works and services.

The electric system in Venezuela was built by foreign companies. The spare parts come from foreign companies. Maintenance is done by foreign companies. They can no longer do this because of the unilateral measures. 

When your electricity doesn’t work the right way, when your water pumping system doesn’t work the right way, when your garbage collection system doesn’t work the right way, it’s not because of mismanagement or the socialist vision, it’s because you have 930 measures that prevent these things from working the right way. This has been the struggle throughout the last ten years or so.

Even despite all this, there is a commitment by the Venezuelan government, because this has been part of our history as a social movement. The history of the Bolivarian Revolution has been the history of deepening democracy.

We came to power when President Chavez was elected in ‘98, under a platform of creating a new constitution that allowed people to participate. It was the first constitution that people actually voted for in Venezuela, and the people were able to directly vote for their representatives. This is a democratic tradition that we had.

We’ve never suspended elections. There are countries under war, under sanctions, that have suspended elections. Ukraine is an example. We’ve never even considered that. Because despite all the aggression that we’re getting, we have a commitment. It’s been a moral commitment of the Bolivarian revolution to hold elections when it’s required to hold them. 

But the funny thing is, the Edmundo González camp never signed the agreement saying that they would recognize the results of the election. In past cases, it has been the same thing with the opposition. In the Barbados agreement, they committed to present the candidates but also to go through the process where the electoral authorities and the Supreme Court were going to say whether these candidates are eligible or not.

That was a process they had to comply with. In the case of Maria Corina Machado, who was who was the person that they tried to propose as a presidential candidate, the process that she underwent wasn’t successful for her. 

But they knew this from before. She’s been ineligible to hold public office since 2015. And the main reason is because in 2014, she, as a member of the National Assembly, allowed Panama to invest her as a permanent representative of Panama, before the Organization of American States, so that she can sit at that table with the other nations and ask for sanctions against her own country.

This is illegal through the constitution, of course, this is treason. Anywhere else in the world would have taken similar, or probably worse measures than were taken by Venezuelan authorities. 

So, if [the opposition knew] this ahead of time, why run this candidacy? Why go through a primary process, which was questioned throughout the world?