Understanding the Venezuelan election: Two vital perspectives

“Don’t worry, Nicolás, don’t worry, Venezuela — we already know where the coups come from.”

The commentariat at Aporrea is full of theories and denunciations about how the hell Henrique “Majunche” Capriles Radonski could have picked up, or picked off, so many votes in such a short time, despite the commanding lead Nicolás Maduro had going in. I’ve found a couple of articles that resonated especially with me. Here’s the first, from Antonio Aponte’s regular column, Un Grano de Maíz (A Kernel of Corn):

Keys to Understanding What’s Going On

The reality, already difficult in itself to decipher, is becoming all the more so through the work of the media who, far from being a means of communication, have transformed themselves into veritable cannons in this war that our country is now suffering.

The first key: The oligarchy has a weak leadership. Capriles, we all know, as it has been proven, does not defend the votes; he is afraid of getting deeply involved. They received the orders of the gringo embassy to “not recognize” the result and they have not been able to justify the pretension. It is evident that the ballot-box thing is an excuse, and now they dare to ask for a new election. If the CNE audits all the ballots, they will look for another alibi to continue with their destabilization plans.

Second key: The counterrevolution is not homogeneous. Several different tendencies are united by foreign orders and allowances, by hatred of Chavismo, and a deep disdain for the lowly. They show descrepancies over how to truncate the Revolution, never in the necessity for doing so. They diverge over the timing of aggression, not over aggression itself.

Third key: The Caprilistas have a great contradiction. They want to sail the seas of sensitivity and at the same time they are splashing around in the miasmas of fascist aggression. If Nicolás [Maduro] stands up to them, they’ll run in terror seeking shelter in the Constitution; if they see a sign of weakness in us, they’ll advance.

The most decided ones want to crush us; they have been working for years to stimulate hatred and fear in their base, which is now demanding violent measures. Whoever doesn’t feed the fascist beast with violence runs the risk of losing their lead.

Fourth key: Amid the counterrevolution there is a fight going on for the leadership, which will be decided in the hours to come. The currents are slyly measuring themselves in practice. The destiny of each is in the pots they bang, and in the marches they are able to convoke.

Another key: While this is happening, the social contradictions are continuing to tighten, and the unreality created by the oligarchic media is trying to substitute itself for society.

The TV screen functions as intermediary between the directors and the people. The organization presents itself as an instrument of true communication, so that the masses hypnotized by the screen substitute for organized society, the basis of true human communication: looking each other in the eyes, speaking face to face, receiving a message directly from the leaders. Technology seeks to substitute itself for the genuine communication of the soul.

Social organization is important: Every organism, however small, must be a centre of human coexistence which communicates with other organisms in a manner which transmits and receives information without technological mediation. Communication is a human phenomenon, and technology must only be its supporter.

Now the true communication is confined to small groups. We have returned to tribal communication. Only in an organized society, in socialism, can there be communication.

Translation mine.

And here’s another, called “How they stole two million of our votes”, by Andrea Coa:

In spite of the surveys, which have been demonstrated to be scientifically exact, giving Maduro a victory with a reasonable margin, we have seen that there exists the certain possibility of a bourgeois candidate overriding the government, starting a bloody repression against the revolutionary Bolivarian Chavista movement.

It was between 2:00 and 4:00 in the afternoon on the 14th when, in the electoral system, the element which made the difference was activated, in order to produce a fraudulent bourgeois victory which would leave the people, who had voted mainly for their legitimate candidate, Nicolás Maduro, with their mouths hanging open and the bitter taste which we who have been victims of a scam know all too well.

If anyone had said, a few days earlier, that the most powerful enemy was the smallest, and that it would be at work inside the voting machines, nobody would have believed me, but in this moment, it is the answer to the question which the people have been asking:

“How could they do it?”

Between two and four in the afternoon, the charge began — or the activation of a virus in the voting machine system, which took votes away from Maduro in an imperceptible manner, and transferred them to the bourgeois candidate [Capriles], in the same way that some computer “worms” steal money from the banks penny by penny, accumulating great fortunes before being found out. The plan was that the bourgeois would win the elections by surprise, with eight million votes. They calculated that he would keep the six million he won in October, and would not need more, since the electoral rolls would be the same as they were then. But the denunciations of fraud that the right uttered affect their own voters, and many of them abstained, so that Capriles only legitimately obtained a little more than five million votes, while we Chavistas remained loyal, and Maduro kept the votes that had gone to Chávez. The final result was the triumph of Maduro by a slim margin, which surprised those who had hatched and applied a “perfect” plan.

Our blind confidence in our automated system is a weakness, because imperialism counts on technological means to injure it, and yesterday, they proved it.

He whose family bought him the presidency of the national congress had the security of knowing that the empire had prepared for him a triumph forged by the hands of unscrupulous hackers, by way of the technology of the moment, directed at elements which were, until now, impenetrable: the system of voting machines; meanwhile the armed forces and Bolivarian intelligence were busy with the guarimbas and the threats. The cyber-attack on the Twitter accounts of President Maduro and other high-ranking personages of the government were an element of distraction (the imperial hackers could not resist the temptation to sign their work) while the plan of altering the election results was under way. It was conceived by the empire in order to take control of our natural resources with minimal cost, relying on a puppet government which would hand it all over on a silver platter. From there, as well, came the attack on CANTV [Venezuela’s national telephone service], probably from a satellite.

The love of the people for Chávez, the awareness that our survival as a nation is at stake, and the future of our descendants, made certain that we all went to vote, so that the right, many of whom thought there would be fraud, abstained. […] The vote margin was as predicted in the polls, and this difference was so great that even with two million votes subtracted, Nicolás Maduro still won. […]

The empire killed Chávez, precisely to set in motion the second part of the plan, which was a fraudulent triumph, which would be achieved while disqualifying the CNE […]

Should this plan fail, there would still be Plan B: crying “fraud”.

The proposal that the vote be audited 100% was made believing that it would not be accepted, but the empire never makes a stitch without a thimble. It is almost certain that the “mission impossible” of connecting what is in the boxes with the altered results could already have been completed. Imperial “intelligence” has the resources for that. However, revolutionary hackers can, if allowed to examine the software in minute detail, determine the manner in which the attack occurred. And the digital fingerprints on the ballots in favor of the bourgeois which are in the boxes, could be a surprise in that many do not correspond to the voters. The right wing don’t want everything examined in minute detail, so even though the plan seems perfect, there are always chinks in the armor.

Even though Plan A did not succeed, since the people kept their promise to Chávez and Maduro won in spite of the cyber-attack against our elections, which robbed us of two million votes, Plan B remains in play. The non-recognition of the electoral result is part of the destabilization plan, aimed at justifying on an international level the climate of violence which they have set in motion, with the aim of converting Venezuela into a Syria, or a Libya, which they want to sack via a massacre already planned, against the heads of the revolution and the organized people.

The menace which hangs over us is more dangerous than ever, the hyena is wounded and is not about to lose the prey. Now, the job is for the Bolivarian government’s intelligence service. The people understand, and for that reason the psychic environment on Monday following the victory was one of alertness and not of euphoria. The people know that the direct confrontation is about to begin, and must be stopped.

At this moment the head of the Revolution, embodied in Nicolás Maduro, must remain serene and trust his intuition. He is protected by God, but he is not immortal, and at this moment, he is the target of the most powerful, unscrupulous and lethal empire known to Earth. However, this empire is not invincible, and is in the midst of an internal crisis which has weakened it. […]

The empire likes direct, violent confrontation, because that’s where they have experience and greater strength. But we prefer to build in peace, with all the peace we can get, this pilot plan for the future of humanity […]

Taking a moment to recognize the reality and trusting intuition to mark the correct path is the first piece of advice; the second is to maintain the unity of the collective government, which must be well armored, even though for this to happen, we will have to dispense with anyone who could be vacillating.

The third recommendation is to keep the election promises, which won’t be easy because the boycott will grow in an effort to impede it.

The people will continue to do their part.

Again, translation mine.

So now we have a clearer picture of what’s going on. It’s much the same as what happened 11 years ago, almost to the day, with the exception that the president the oligarchy and its imperial overlords tried to topple then, is now physically gone (due to “natural” causes, or something plausibly deniable as such), and the circumstance to be shrouded in chaos and confusion is an election, rather than an anti-government protest come to a bloody and sudden head. But the players, with a few exceptions are the same: We have the putschist Capriles, then mayor of Baruta, now governor of Miranda, who stormed the Cuban embassy then, and is storming the electoral authority now. In both instances, he’s claiming that the Cubans are hiding some illegitimacy or other on the part of the Bolivarian government; then, it was Chavista officials, now, allegedly, it’s ballot boxes full of evidence of supposed fraud. The fact that there is no illegitimacy and no fraud is being obscured by hacking, by violence, and by murder.

The excuse, then as now, is that the opposition members who are committing the crimes, have been “driven” to it by an illegitimate defeat. Of course, that’s a lie. And while the opposition keeps shifting the goalposts, the ball has a funny way of still finding its own way in. The people know what happened; they know who they voted for, and it’s not the Majunche. They know full well what his real plan is, and all his tap-dancing and pretending to be more Chavista than Chávez, more Bolivarian than Bolívar, can’t hide the fact that he is an arch-conservative privatizer, an imperial puppet, and a corporatist stooge. He will not do what the people want; he will do what foreign capital wants.

Not for nothing do a lot of Chavistas refer to him as CAPriles, alluding to CAP (Carlos Andrés Pérez), who was elected in the late 1980s to kick the IMF to the curb, and who instead turned right around and kissed its boots. And got kicked to the curb himself, as a final result, after Chávez and friends led a failed uprising against him. Even as Chavecito was cooling his army boots in jail, the people and the process were at work, and the result spoke for itself: CAP was impeached, Chavecito pardoned and freed, and a few years later, there was an overwhelming electoral victory for the Bolivarians, with Chávez at the helm.

That same electoral victory has been repeated time and again, with only one small setback since then. And last Sunday it was repeated once more, this time with his “son”, Maduro, standing in for the great leader. It’s as though Chavecito never died, and indeed, he never did. The fact that the same villains are still using the same tricks they tried on him (and failed) proves that he’s as much a force to be reckoned with as ever; more so, in fact, since now, a hacking of the election computers was necessary in order to create the appearance of a much narrower margin of victory (and a correspondingly greater semblance of a possible fraud) than the last time around.

The empire thought that with Chávez out of the way, it would be easy sailing, but Maduro proved that to be bullshit. Loyalty is rock-solid among Chavistas, and it is highly unlikely that any of them would have voluntarily turncoated to the same man their beloved president called a coward, a majunche and a pig just a few months ago. I call bullshit on any analysis that claims he ran a strong campaign. His campaign was weak sauce. He could not win their votes by pretending to suddenly be a better Chavista than Chávez himself, or a better Bolivarian than Bolívar. So he relied, predictably, on the tools of empire, and they came through, partway.

Two million stolen votes is a lot, but it still wasn’t enough to defeat Maduro. And dozens of countries have signalled that they will not be falling for the lie either. It doesn’t matter a damn what the State Dept. says. The world knows the truth, and major leaders from all over the region, as well as overseas, are on their way to Caracas as I write. And the CNE? They have just announced that they will audit the vote 100%. Don’t be too surprised if they find evidence of fraud along the way…on the part of Capriles & Co.

And in the meantime, among the people, the cordura counselled by Aponte and Coa will prevail. The provocations, as severe and murderous as they are, will not budge the Bolivarians. They’ve been through it all before, many times, and they know the pattern as well as any schoolchild knows a fire drill. Even the growing pile of martyrs from this latest assault — eight, so far — will only serve to strengthen their resolve. They may seem poor, but they are many…and they are seasoned fighters, intelligent and loyal. If anyone in the oligarchy, the international corporatocracy, or the imperial State Dept. thinks that they can steamroll the will of these people, they are in for one hell of a shock.