National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby put on his tough guy act today during a White House briefing, threatening Venezuela, “I want to note that our patience and that of the international community is running out. … on waiting for the Venezuelan electoral authorities to come clean and release the full, detailed data on this election so that everyone can see the results.” Quoting a report from the Atlanta-based Carter Center, he warned that the failure of election authorities to release disaggregated data “constitutes a serious breach of electoral principles.” He got more bellicose as he announced that the Organization of American States (OAS) is meeting today to discuss the Venezuelan crisis, and that the U.S. “shares the concerns” of the nations of the region, and of the whole world “about this subversion of democratic norms.” He offered no proof of such subversion, but had to share more concerns about what he alleged was growing violence on the streets, arrests, repression, etc.
The Miami Herald’s Latin America specialist Andres Oppenheimer, a well-known outlet for the State Department, took a slightly different tack in his July 30 column. He states that Venezuela’s July 28 elections may be “the biggest scandal in Latin America’s recent memory,” but his argument accepts what appears to be the situation at this moment: that there are protests, but the opposition lacks sufficient backing to shut down the country. Do not worry, is Oppenheimer’s message. The grounds for Nicolás Maduro’s ouster will come soon, he writes, citing Bolivia (2019) and Ukraine (2004) as models.
“History is full of examples of authoritarian rulers who rigged elections, only to later face violent backlashes,” he states confidently, offering two examples. “Bolivia’s former authoritarian populist leader Evo Morales rigged the 2019 elections and was soon forced to step down by a combination of mass protests and international pressures. Ukraine’s fraudulent 2004 presidential elections led to mass protests known as the Velvet Revolution [actually it was Orange—ed.] which moved the country’s supreme court to order a new election that was won by the opposition.” So, he asserts, it will only be a matter of time in Venezuela’s case.
