Is Venezuela on the Brink of Revolution After Stolen Election?

For nine months, the world waited, knowing Venezuela was heading towards an inflection point — a moment that would either usher in an era of change, or else snuff out the last hopes that democracy might ever be restored. Back in October, Nicolás Maduro’s socialist government and the opposition sealed a joint accord with the United States known as the Barbados Agreement. In exchange for Caracas holding free and fair elections in 2024, the US would ease the sanctions choking Venezuela’s oil industry. From that moment, the countdown was on till July 28th — till the moment that Venezuelans would vote, and everyone would see whether the will of the people still mattered.

Nearly two weeks on from that inflection point, the answer is clear. Democracy in Venezuela — on life support for so long — is officially dead. In its place has come chaos.

A Decade of Economic Collapse Behind the Barbados Agreement

At the time of writing, masked goons are on the streets of Caracas, attacking anti-regime protestors. Maduro is railing against supposed plots against him, all while refusing to release the official tallies of votes. Some two dozen are dead, and thousands more have been arrested.

With the atmosphere tense, Venezuelans are wondering if the regime can cling to power — if Maduro really can pull off what might be the largest electoral fraud in Latin American history. Because the alternative is an uprising like the one just seen in Bangladesh, a wave of people power that unseats an autocrat who has become increasingly repressive. Which of these two paths Venezuela chooses in the next few weeks could have an impact felt across the whole of the Americas.

To understand why, one must first sketch out the background to the July 28th vote. The Barbados Agreement of October 2023 did not come out of nowhere. The only reason the regime initially signed up to it was because the country was in a state of economic collapse.

According to the Council on Foreign Relations, Venezuela’s GDP has contracted by 75 percent over the last ten years — a contraction that has seen up to 80 percent of the population plunge into poverty. To put that number in context, the Great Depression of the 1930s saw American GDP contract by 30 percent. At the time, such a fall felt apocalyptic — and Depression-era Americans did not even have to deal with hyperinflation.

At one point in the 2010s, Venezuelan inflation hit an eye-popping 130,000 percent. Making all this additionally painful was the fact that Venezuela was not always like this. As recently as the 1970s, the nation was booming.

Sat atop the world’s largest proven oil reserves, it had grown into one of the wealthiest countries in Latin America. Even as late as the 1990s — when economic turbulence triggered violent protests — it was still considered relatively stable. But the rise to power of Hugo Chavez severely weakened the country’s institutions.

Maduro’s Gamble: A Real Opposition Candidate on the Ballot

By the time his anointed successor, Nicolás Maduro, took over in 2013, effective checks and balances had nearly disappeared. After narrowly winning election that same year, Maduro began to remove the last of them, just as economic mismanagement pushed the country off the cliff edge. The fraudulent election of 2018 occurred.

The exodus of up to a quarter of the population happened. The soaring homicide rate, which made Venezuela the most-murderous place in Latin America between 2017 and 2022, was a result. Adding to the government’s woes were US-imposed sanctions on the country’s oil industry — the same sanctions partially lifted by the White House to sweeten the deal of the Barbados Agreement.

This move seems to have convinced Maduro to hold the 2024 election with a real opposition candidate on the ballot. Although it is impossible to know the inner workings of the Venezuelan government, the fact that the election offered a genuine choice seems to reflect the regime’s assumption that small economic improvements would be enough to bring its base voters out in force, enough to perhaps even squeak a legitimate win. To be sure, Caracas banned the main opposition candidate — the highly charismatic María Corina Machado — from running.

After her handpicked replacement was also banned, the opposition was left running the uninspiring 74-year-old ex-diplomat, Edmundo González Urrutia. Maduro’s gamble seems to have been that if he just put his thumb on the scales enough, he could produce a win that looked legitimate to the outside world. If that is the case, though, the regime underestimated how much a decade of deprivation had turned the country against it.

Despite his relative lack of charisma, opinion polls soon recorded González holding a gigantic lead. Crisis Group reports that González was up thirty points ahead of the vote. Foreign Policy writes that in preelection public opinion polls, more than 80 percent of registered voters said they wanted political change, and an almost equal number expressed an intent to vote.

Combined with González and Machado drawing vast crowds at rallies in what had once been hardcore Chavista territory, it briefly felt like change might be in the air. In the weeks leading up to July 28th, foreign media outlets wondered if the vote might be “too lopsided to steal.”

The Missing Tally Sheets and the Anatomy of Electoral Fraud

For all the hopes, for all the voter mobilization, the truth is that Maduro had likely been planning to steal the vote all along. And so it was that, around midnight on July 28th — mere hours after polls closed — the government-controlled National Electoral Council declared that Maduro had won with 52 percent of the vote to González’s 43. So comfortable did the claim of victory seem that some foreign outlets, including the New York Times, initially reported Maduro’s reelection as fact.

But then a few more hours passed, and people began to notice something very strange. As the New Yorker notes, the announcement was made without publishing a breakdown of vote counts. Here is something about how elections work in Venezuela.

Although voters use machines, the results are not just sent to some central database that the government can manipulate. Instead, every machine prints out a tally sheet before transmitting its data — what are known as actas. That means anyone in the country can check the official results against the sheets and see if the reported results are accurate.

By law, all participating political parties are entitled to copies of these tally sheets. On July 28th, multiple voting precincts refused to hand them over. The National Electoral Council did not publish them on its website.

The Maduro government claimed the release had been delayed due to hackers attacking election infrastructure. This was unusual. Hugo Chavez was long proud of the fact that his authoritarian rule was backed by voters.

Publishing the tallies was a way to prove Venezuela’s elections — while manipulated — were not stolen. For Maduro to keep them hidden for over a week after the election was fishy in the extreme. The opposition was already working to make the missing actas public.

Thanks to a vast ground game, the opposition claims it was able to get hold of 24,532 tally sheets — or about 79 percent of the total. In the days since the election, it has been posting them online. While their website was quickly blocked in Venezuela, it remains visible for the international community to see.

AP News analyzed the data. While cautioning that they could not independently verify the actas’ authenticity, they nonetheless said they were able to tabulate over 10.2 million votes. According to the calculations, the opposition’s Edmundo González received 6.89 million votes, nearly half a million more than the government says Maduro won with.

The tabulations also show Maduro received 3.13 million votes from the tally sheets released. If the actas posted online by the opposition are genuine, they show that González did not just win, but won by a landslide. Steve Levitsky, an expert on democracy at Harvard University, described the tally sheets as showing that the Maduro government had committed “one of the most egregious electoral frauds in modern Latin American history.”

International Response and the Protests in Former Regime Strongholds

It was an assessment most of the world seemed to share. The United States declared González the election’s legitimate winner. The European Union refused to recognize Maduro’s claims to victory.

Multiple Latin American governments questioned the results. In retaliation, Foreign Policy reports that Caracas ordered the shutting of embassies for Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, and Uruguay. Embassies usually remain open in all circumstances except outright war.

The Russian embassy in Washington, DC, is still open today. Russia congratulated Maduro on his win. Alongside Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, and Belgrade all welcomed the result.

In Latin America, Nicaragua, Cuba, Bolivia, and Honduras accepted the regime’s fraud at face value. Perhaps more important, though, are the three major nations that neither accepted nor rejected the results. At the time of writing, Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia have refrained from claiming fraud, but are pressing Maduro to release the voting tallies.

Given that Brazil and Colombia are currently led by leftists with known soft spots for Venezuela, that is potentially a massive problem for Maduro. The focus now shifts from the international reaction to the reaction inside Venezuela. The protests gripping the country are different from before — not necessarily in their intensity, but in the areas that are now at the center of the firestorm: former regime strongholds that were deeply loyal to Hugo Chavez.

According to the Economist, these strongholds include not just working-class districts in Caracas, like Petare, but also former regime bastions outside the capital, like Valle Lindo in Anzoátegui state. The Guardian reports that the El Valle district — where Maduro himself was raised — is gripped by unrest. Quoting a resident who spoke to their reporter, the newspaper headlined its article with a simple warning: “Maduro has lost the streets.”

These are places that once delivered 85 percent of their votes to Hugo Chavez — not due to fraud, but due to Chavez redirecting vast amounts of petro-dollars to their impoverished neighborhoods. The places that reliably voted for Maduro as recently as 2018, when the economic meltdown was already underway, are now the sites of ordinary Venezuelans pulling down statues of Chavez, of angry, roiling demonstrations.

The Regime’s Crackdown and the Military Question

And that means they are also the locations where the regime’s backlash has begun in earnest. The government is turning the full force of its security apparatus onto the protesters. The New Yorker reports on videos of plainclothes men dragging people into unmarked SUVs.

Armed pro-government groups have been witnessed firing guns into crowds. As of August 6th, 22 people are thought to have died. Thousands have been arrested, many from working-class communities.

By Saturday the 3rd, Maduro was boasting at a rally that 2,000 people had been detained and that the police would detain at least another 1,000 more. As El Pais writes, these numbers are far higher than those of 2017, when there were four months of protests. Maduro’s rhetoric is also getting harsher — quite a feat, given his bombastic nature.

In recent speeches, he has vowed to “pulverize” the protesters, and claimed he is “willing to do anything” to protect the “revolution.” That “anything” seems to include a final crackdown on the opposition. Offices have already been ransacked by the security forces, and prominent leaders taken into custody.

On August 5th, Attorney General Tarek Saab declared he was opening a criminal probe into both María Corina Machado and Edmundo González Urrutia. The charges came after Machado and González penned an open letter asking the armed forces to switch sides and stand with the Venezuelan people. So far, though, there is no sign of that happening.

The Bolivarian Army of Venezuela is at the center of an enormous patronage network that relies on the regime to keep its pockets lined with cash. It is also overseen by a ruthless intelligence service that quickly clamps down on any signs of dissent. Unless the protests become big enough to outweigh both the greed of the officer corps and the fear of its junior ranks, it is hard to see them turning their backs on Maduro.

Still, that does not mean it is impossible. Just look at Bangladesh, where Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina appeared invincible as she cracked down on similar mass protests — only to suddenly flee the country as the army ordered her to step down. The great hope of Venezuela’s protesters is that something similar will happen in Caracas.

Although it is not a hope shared by González, who recently wrote an editorial in the Economist claiming it would be against his principles and lifelong record to advocate any violence, let alone a coup d’état. But the possibility of the military stepping in remains less likely.

Paths Forward: Sanctions, Mediation, and the Specter of a Belarus Outcome

Assuming the army does not mount a coup, where might things go from here? For now, the opposition’s plan appears to be to focus on the tally sheets as a way of proving to the international community that González won the election. By relentlessly focusing on Maduro’s refusal to publish them, they likely hope to convince outside actors that something needs to be done.

What that something might be is anyone’s guess. The US could well reimpose the oil sanctions it lifted as part of the Barbados Agreement, but that might help Maduro sell his claim that the protests are all part of an imperialist plot. Additionally, as Bloomberg notes, it is not clear that the Biden administration would risk rattling the energy market, and potentially pushing up gasoline prices for US drivers, ahead of the November 5 US presidential vote.

A more constructive intervention might involve Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico mediating between the two sides. Brasilia and Bogota are already pressuring Maduro to release the actas, and the foreign ministers of all three nations are due in Caracas to try and find a solution to the crisis. The advantage of a process led by the trio is that Maduro might listen to them.

The disadvantage is that El Pais reports their current plan involves direct negotiations between Maduro and González — negotiations that would cut out María Corina Machado, and have therefore been rejected by the opposition. Another tool in the opposition’s box could be to try and harness the mass protests. If they get big enough and carry on for long enough, they might demonstrate to other members of the government that Maduro has lost the regime’s base, and that a bloodless palace coup could be in order.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies writes that the protests send the message that the Venezuelan people will not submit to such obscene cheating and that those in the streets are not only the opposition — Venezuela is in the streets. The question, though, is how long the demonstrators can keep going. After a decade of economic crisis and soaring crime, normal Venezuelans may be angry, but they are also busy just trying to scrape by.

Few people want to risk everything for a mass movement that fails. Crisis Group suggests that Maduro’s tactic will be to “batten down the hatches and try to ride out the storm.” This will involve both repression and spinning wild tales of international plots against him, but it will also involve just refusing to budge and hoping the international community will get tired and give up before he does.

If that is the case, then the coming weeks might unfold less like the successful protests in Bangladesh, and more like the 2020 protests in Belarus — where an aging autocrat came close to toppling but managed to cling on through a combination of brute violence and support from international allies, in that case Russia.

The Regional Exodus and the Question of Immunity

Yet following such a strategy is risky for Maduro. Crisis Group reports that even many hardcore Chavistas were annoyed that Maduro ran again instead of making way for new blood. If he is forced to fight tooth and nail just to stop a revolution, he may wind up being fatally weakened.

Sadly for Venezuela, such an outcome may not really matter. The question is not whether Maduro might be quietly removed from power in a year or two, but whether the election results are respected today — whether the country can return to the democratic path it left so long ago. If the answer turns out to be no — if the regime manages to survive these mass protests — then the knock-on effects could be felt across the Americas.

In the last decade alone, about eight million Venezuelans, over a quarter of the population, fled as their nation imploded — a tide of humanity surging towards the relative safety of regional neighbors. Today, Colombia alone plays host to three million Venezuelan refugees. Another million live in Brazil. 800,000 are in the United States, many having crossed the border illegally.

Already, social tensions are growing around the refugees. Fairly or unfairly, the think tank Chatham House reports that locals blame them for surges in crime. Yet this may be just the start of the exodus.

Prior to the vote, polling by the firm Meganálisis showed that up to 40 percent of the remaining population was thinking about emigrating should Maduro be reelected. That is millions and millions of people who might attempt to cross into Brazil or Colombia, ratcheting up local anger, or who might flee to the US, creating a major border crisis in an already tense election year. Clearly, the international community has skin in the game of convincing Maduro to respect the election results.

And there are ways outside countries might help. One major one — as distasteful as it might seem — could be to offer Maduro immunity from prosecution. Right now, the autocrat is wanted in the US on drug trafficking charges, and may soon be indicted by the International Criminal Court for the killing of protesters in 2017.

The magazine Americas Quarterly explains that what Maduro and his allies fear most is not losing power per se, but spending the rest of their lives in a Supermax federal prison in the United States. Should Maduro and his cronies be offered sweeping immunity — as well as one-way tickets to, say, Cuba — it might remove one incentive for them to cling to power. Whether Venezuelans who have suffered at the hands of the regime could accept such a deal, though, is another story.

Venezuela feels like it is on the brink, with a massive political crisis overwhelming the nation but with seemingly no easy way out — no easy way to make sure the tyrant who just stole an election can be convinced to step down without any more bloodshed. Events are moving fast. It could be that some solution will present itself in the coming days, even if it is as simple as a military coup or a revolution.

But amid all the uncertainty that lies ahead, the one thing that should never be forgotten are the Venezuelan people themselves — people who have now lived for a decade or more in a nation in a state of collapse, people who have been immiserated and locked up by the regime now trying to cling on to power. For their sakes alone, one can only hope that a solution is found, that Maduro is convinced to stand aside, so that this once-proud country might be able to — at last — start rebuilding again.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the Barbados Agreement and why did it collapse?

The Barbados Agreement, signed in October 2023, was a deal between Nicolás Maduro’s government and the Venezuelan opposition brokered with US involvement. In exchange for Caracas holding free and fair elections in 2024, the US would ease oil sanctions. The agreement collapsed when Maduro declared victory on July 28th without publishing the tally-sheet breakdown, a departure from decades of Venezuelan electoral practice, and the opposition produced 24,532 actas showing Edmundo González had won by a landslide.

What evidence suggests Maduro stole the 2024 election?

The National Electoral Council declared Maduro the winner with 52 percent but refused to publish the vote-count breakdown. The opposition obtained 24,532 tally sheets covering roughly 79 percent of precincts; AP News tabulated these as showing González received 6.89 million votes versus Maduro’s 3.13 million. Harvard democracy scholar Steve Levitsky described it as “one of the most egregious electoral frauds in modern Latin American history.”

Why are protests unusual this time—and why do they threaten Maduro more than before?

Protests have erupted not just in opposition districts but in former Chavista strongholds including Petare, Valle Lindo in Anzoátegui state, and El Valle—where Maduro himself was raised—areas that once delivered 85 percent of their votes to Hugo Chávez. Protesters in these neighborhoods are pulling down Chávez statues, and as one Guardian report headlined: “Maduro has lost the streets.” As of August 6th, 22 people had been killed and over 2,000 detained in the crackdown.

What role could the military play in resolving the crisis?

Venezuela’s armed forces are embedded in a vast patronage network that relies on the regime to keep its officer corps enriched, and a ruthless intelligence service quickly clamps down on dissent in the ranks. However, the opposition openly asked the armed forces to switch sides, and the Bangladesh example—where Sheikh Hasina appeared invincible before the army ordered her to step down—shows that even entrenched militaries can turn. Edmundo González publicly opposed advocating any coup, but a voluntary military step-down remains a possibility.

What happens to the broader region if Maduro clings to power?

About eight million Venezuelans—over a quarter of the population—have already fled the country’s economic collapse, with three million in Colombia alone and 800,000 in the United States. Pre-election polling by Meganálisis showed that up to 40 percent of remaining residents were considering emigrating if Maduro was reelected, which could trigger a vastly larger refugee wave, straining neighbors and fueling US border tensions. One possible off-ramp that outside actors have discussed is offering Maduro immunity from prosecution—including on US drug trafficking charges—and passage to Cuba in exchange for a peaceful transfer of power.

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