Maduro stole another election

An old post about how Socialism destroyed Venezuela is found below this new post.

Spoiler: Maduro is perhaps the most useless dictator of all. He is even more useless than his predecessor Chavez who began the transformation of one of Latin America’s richest countries to a disaster area. As history shows, socialism is incompatible with democracy. In order to turn the economy into a plan economy, opponents have to be jailed or killed. This is easier if you abolish freedoms of expression, media, and turn the judiciary into rubber stamping puppets. Both Chavez and now Maduro have repeatedly attacked the opposition.

Five years ago I wrote a post where I showed how Socialism destroyed Venezuela. You can find it below. There are a lot of graphs in that post which I can’t update because statistics about Venezuela are hard to come by. Their statistical office’s web site have been closed. The World Bank, IMF, and Harvard Growth Lab provide some guesstimates of inflation, GDP and other variables.

But statistics on the political conditions have been updated. Amnesty Internatinal, Freedom House, Human Rights Watch, Transparency International, and Varieties of Democracy have data which can be used to analyse the state of democracy and freedom in Venezuela.

It was not the first time Maduro stole an election.

From my previous post.

The opposition won the elections to the National Assembly in 2015 but Maduro soon adapted to the new situation. But by violating the Constitution, including the establishment of a non-constitutional electoral commission, imprisonment of politicians belonging to the opposition and manipulation of the election in 2018, Maduro remans in power. The elections in 2018 was of course recognised by pariah states as Russia, Iran and North-Korea.

Varieties of Democracy’s Clean Elections Index ends at 2023 showing a value of 0.12 for Venezuela. Unle

ss the Venezuelan people manage to kick the dictator out of power now, next year’s index will probably be below 0.1.

Maduro is stepping in Chavez’s and his own footsteps of fraudulent elections

Source: Varieties of Democracy. Note: The indicator ranges from 0 to 1. It aims to gauge the extent to which elections are free and fair, where Free and fair connotes an absence of registration fraud, systematic irregularities, government intimidation of the opposition, vote buying, and election violence. The lower the index, the dirtier the elections.

As most of the dictators, Maduro is surrounded by people just as stupid as he is. Here’s a picture taken by his Election Council in their motinoring office. On the walls are screens showing that the opposition, the blue colour, received more votes than Maduro.

Maduro put idiots in his Election Council.

Source: Daniel Di Martino

Not only did they pose in front of the screen showing the steal, they also “provided” the absolute number of the faked results from the percentages which they considered to be appropriate. But the idiots only choose one decimal: 51.2% for Maduro, 44.2% for Edmundo, and 4.6% for the rest. Then the idiots in the Election Council multiplied the percentages with the total number of votes to get the number of votes for each candidate.

This blatant stupidity has not prevented autocrats in other countries to recognise the election result. The usual suspect China, muscovy, Iran, Syria, North Korea, and Cuba have been joined by Nicaragua, Honduras and Bolivia.

China, the world's largest importer of crude oil, is Venezuela's largest creditor and holds large stakes in the country's oil and gas sector. muscovy has not only provided financial help, but also exported guns and Wagner forces to help Maduro keep his own people silent.

Rumour has it that China has sent people to help Maduro’s Election Council to come up with more credible numbers and the little fascist in chief in the kremlin has sent a bunch of Wagners, that were lucky enough to not to be sent to Mali, to help kill Venezuelan protesters.

Corruption works better if you silence the media and pack the courts with your own people.

Even though Maduro himself may count it as progress, there are negative developments in other areas too. According to Reporters without Borders, Venezuela ranks as 153 out of 180 countries in the organisation’s Press Freedom Index. The country report begins with this introduction:

Since becoming president in 2013, Nicolás Maduro has continued the "communication hegemony" policy established by his predecessor, Hugo Chávez. Venezuela is very restrictive for the news media, with policies that threaten the existence of independent journalism. 

And as other socialist dictators who wish to hang on to power, corruption is pervasive. According to Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, Venezuela ranks as 177 out of 180. Since Venezula shares this ranking with two other countries, there is only one country deemed more corrupt than Venezuela.

Silencing the media so it can’t report about corrupt practices and other government nefarious activities should, as every autocrat knows, be complemented by making sure that the courts are on your side. Both the ordinary courts but also the High court where the government’s legitimacy can be questioned. And Maduro made sure that he had the right judges in the court.

Maduro silenced the media, and packed the courts so he and his entourage could enrich themselves.

Source: Varieties of Democracy. Note: The indicators showing censorship of the media and high court independence, range from 0 to 4 where 0 indicates situation with high censorship and no independence. The regime corruption (right axis) ranges between 0 and 1. The closer to 1, the more corrupt regime.

Maduro is a murderer

As witnessed by many human rights organisations, Maduro’s regime is brutal. Human Rights Watch introduction to its chapter on Venezuela is very clear on the subject:

Venezuela faces three simultaneous crises related to the crackdown on dissent, the humanitarian emergency and the massive exodus of Venezuelans. Authorities persecute and criminally prosecute opponents, journalists, human rights defenders and civil society organizations. The UN Fact-Finding Mission and the International Criminal Court are documenting possible crimes against humanity being committed with the knowledge of high-ranking authorities.

It was already bad during Chavez but got even worse with Maduro. When he came to power, he immediately began to hunt his critics. As shown by Varieties of Democracy, the regime murdered and tortured even more critics after 2013.

It was already bad during Chavez but when Maduro came to power, he unleashed his executioners.

Source: Varieties of Democracy. Note: The indicators range from 0 to 4 where 0 indicates a situaion where killings and torture are practiced systematically by the government, and 4 where such atrocities are absent.

No economic growth in Venezuela where corruption thrives and the media is silenced.

My previous post was mostly about economics. I showed how first Chavez and then Maduro turned Venezuela into a disaster area. Economics statistics are hard to come by but IMF tries hard. Despite increased oil revenues the last few years, Venezuela is still at the 1980 year level of GDP per capita

No GDP per capita progress in the disaster area aka Venezuela

Source: IMF Data Mapper.

More information about Venezuela

Is available on the web pages run by other Human Rights Organisations, the UN, but also on the websites of independent media such as Caracas Chronicles. They do not only cover current affairs but also provide information about Venezuelan history. The have for example written this useful Beginner’s Guide which presents the history before Maduro. By now, many have forgotten that Chavez was a coup maker.

Here’s the old post