LatAm in Focus: Venezuela's Electoral Battle on the Ground and Online
LatAm in Focus: Venezuela's Electoral Battle on the Ground and Online
Caracas-based journalist Tony Frangie Mawad and ProBox Executive Director Mariví Marin Vázquez explore what’s at stake in the July 28 election.
Since he came to power 11 years ago, Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro has been stacking the deck in his political favor. But will he hit a wall in the July 28 election?
The Maduro regime is trying to pave a path to victory, taking steps like its March disqualification of popular opposition candidate Maria Corina Machado and its arrests of opposition supporters days before the election. Meanwhile the opposition has united behind Machado and her replacement, the seasoned diplomat Edmundo González Urrutia. Polls give him a double-digit advantage over Maduro.
“[The Maduro government] could try to do a mega fraud, but the political costs, even within the ruling coalition, could be very high,” said Tony Frangie Mawad, a journalist and political analyst who is an editor at Caracas Chronicles and has written for Bloomberg, The Economist, Politico, and Americas Quarterly. He explained that while members of the Maduro regime have taken advantage of tight races in the past to claim victory, the broad support for the opposition this time means “they could be forced to recognize a sort of transition.”
In a conversation with Guillermo Zubillaga, head of AS/COA’s Venezuela Working Group, Frangie gives an on-the-ground view of the election and the “tsunami of human mobilization” in Machado’s opposition movement. He also covers how she is reaching younger voters. “She's talking to a generation that hasn't even lived [under a] democracy—which includes me,” says Frangie. “Many young people are actually trying to do something to help, because for young people in Venezuela, a change in the political system means a massive change in their future.”
A unified opposition has a real chance to restore democracy on July 28, write the AS/COA Chairman and President and CEO in Americas Quarterly.
The election isn’t just being battled out in the streets but online as well. In a country that has faced years of press censorship, Venezuelans are turning away from what’s left of traditional media. More than 70 percent get their news from social media and online sources—a fact that’s not lost on the Maduro government, explains Mariví Marin Vázquez, founder and executive director of ProBox, an organization dedicated to investigating disinformation operations in digital ecosystems in Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and El Salvador.
“We have documented how the Maduro government has been using tactics very similar as the other authoritarian countries in the region uses. They pay for people to tweet in favor of them. They also use institution resources to promote propaganda and disinformation,” she explained to AS/COA Online’s Carin Zissis. Not only that, but the regime is using social media to soften Maduro’s image. “One of the things that we are going to be monitoring is TikTok, especially because we know that the government has interest in this network and basically in promoting and portraying itself as a democratic government,” says Marin.
But online tools are also a way for Venezuelans to become politically engaged and connect with others, whether within the country or in the massive diaspora. “One of the things…we repeat a lot is to not underestimate the things you can achieve for civil society and for the critical voices through social media,” says Marin. “I think it's important to understand that we have more than 8 million people outside Venezuela in exile that don’t have, for example, the opportunity to vote. But that doesn't mean they don't care.”
This is the seventh episode in our 2024 election series. Prior episodes covered what comes next for Mexico after Claudia’s Sheinbaum’s electoral win, how Latin America figures into the Trump-Biden battle, the Dominican Republic’s unique political culture, the economic agenda for Panama’s next president, the youth vote in Mexico, and Nayib Bukele’s global reach.
Find this content and more electoral insight in this year's 2024 Election Guide at: www.as-coa.org/2024
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