Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is the main accomplice of the three dictatorships on the continent
14ymedio, Yunior García Aguilera, Madrid, August 3, 2024 — On August 2, a haggard-looking Nicolás Maduro gave a press conference where he threw out clues about how he intends to hold on to power in Venezuela. Grabbing a Bible, he read a passage from the Gospel of St. John where Thomas’ disbelief is recounted. In chapter 20, verse 29, Jesus said to his apostle: “Blessed are those who did not see, and believed.” So… that’s what it’s all about. Maduro doesn’t plan to show a single bit of evidence of his supposed triumph, because he doesn’t have it!
The dictator hopes that both Venezuelans and the rest of the world will swallow the story of his victory as a matter of faith. But the opposition made a sagacious move. Despite all the difficulties that their supporters faced in accessing the voting centers, in the end they managed to get the voting records they needed to dismantle the fraud. Making those records available to the whole planet has made the National Electoral Council look ridiculous. In those votes, which now account for more than 80% of the total, it can be confirmed that the winner of the elections was Edmundo González, with 67% of the votes. The opposition has not defended its victory with mere statements or chest pounding; they are protecting it with verifiable evidence.
The opposition has not defended its victory with mere statements or chest pounding; they are protecting it with verifiable evidence
I confess that, at first, I was concerned about the way in which some of those records, which Venezuelans nickname chorizos [sausages], reached their hands. Knowing the deceptive nature of authoritarian regimes, I feared that Chavismo itself would provide them with false records and then go out to deny them. It is something they usually do, for example, with certain videos on social networks. They themselves make fictitious material, upload it to the internet, wait patiently for some clueless opponent to replicate it and then go out to denounce that it is fake news. It is a tactic that Castroism also used during the 11J mass protests in Cuba, in July of 2021, to try to deny the demonstrations. However, falsifying voting records is much more complex than adulterating videos, and the Venezuelan opposition “is not sucking its thumb” [‘wasn’t born yesterday’].
So far I have not seen any Chavista dismantle the results of the opposition website. This Friday, the president of the National Assembly, Jorge Rodríguez, tried, unsuccessfully, to convince us that the records displayed by the opposition are fake. This guy often uses sarcasm to cover his poverty of arguments. However, in his very brief speech, he devoted himself to speaking carefully, without daring to question the QR of a single record, without comparing them to his own in the sight of everyone, and without denying a single concrete result of any of the more than 24,000 tally sheets that the opposition has documented.
Some media have baptized what is happening as “the war of the votes,” but this is imprecise
Some media have baptized what is happening as “the war of the votes,” but this is imprecise. The only votes that we have all been able to observe, so far, are those displayed by the opposition. Maduro’s only exist in his speeches. The CNE, for its part, justifies its lack of transparency by quashing us with an alleged “cyber attack,” which has jumped from North Macedonia to Elon Musk, detracting from any seriousness of the matter. The doubt here would be: if the alleged hacking somehow prevented them from obtaining the records, where the hell did they get the statistics that awarded the triumph to Maduro? The CNE is caught in its own trap.
Some netizens talk about supposed Chinese experts who even falsified the Apollo 11 moon landing. However, even if this were true and the counterfeiters managed to manufacture new voting records, these would only serve for the internal circus that Maduro has mounted in the Supreme Tribunal of Justice. They would never dare make them public, tally sheet by tally sheet, because it would be too easy to refute them.
Meanwhile, each foreign Government has recognized as president the candidate most aligned with its own ideology. The allies of Chavismo in the OAS have boycotted a statement, but without daring to vote against it. The cowardly abstentions and absences translate as: “it is obvious that Maduro is lying, but we need cheap oil.” Lula continues with his wet dream of winning the Nobel Peace Prize as a mediator in some conflict; that’s why he pretends to fight from time to time with Maduro, to gain some credibility. But we all know that, deep down, the Brazilian president is the main accomplice of the three dictatorships on the continent.
Meanwhile, each Government has recognized as president the candidate most aligned with its own ideology
The world, fortunately, is still watching Caracas, although any result in another country or in the Olympic Games would be enough for us to stop watching, and Maduro continues to scam and massacre the people of Venezuela. The worst thing is that young people are increasingly losing their confidence in democracy and international institutions, dangerously returning us to those times of the violent struggle.
Operation Tomás* means everything should be resolved by faith. Maduro hopes that when the Supreme Tribunal of Justice (obviously controlled by him) ratifies the results announced by the CNE, everyone will accept his words as holy, and the “saint” will have won. Believing without seeing, that is the ruling party’s bet, as if we were living in the Middle Ages. But Maduro is not Jesus Christ; he is Herod. Maduro hasn’t even read the Bible very well. The donkey of Miraflores believes that Jesus was a Palestinian child killed by the Spanish Empire. And his false Operation Tomás is abut to appear to be Judas.
*A reference to Maduro’s use of the “doubting Thomas” story in the Bible.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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