Venezuelan Elections Held Hostage

Crucial elections in Venezuela this Sunday are being conducted against a backdrop of increased Russian military activity in the Caribbean as another naval task force sails into Cuba, and Moscow ally, President Nicolás Maduro threatens to submerge the region in chaos if he does not win re-election.

On the eve of voting day, the situation resembles a hostage drama: Venezuela’s terrorist leader Maduro has issued an ultimatum: “If you don’t want Venezuela to fall into a bloodbath, a fratricidal civil war, the product of the fascists, we must guarantee the greatest [electoral] success [ever], the greatest victory in the electoral history of our people.” In other words, the greatest victory for those in power. (READ MORE: The Spectacle Ep. 109: Will Communist Venezuela Attack Free Guyana Just as Scott McKay Predicted?)

By threatening to unleash what a group of retired Venezuelan generals has just denounced as “genocide,” Maduro believes that he can force his opposition and the international community to accept whatever fraudulent results his politically appointed electoral commission cooks up with the aid of Cuban, Russian, and Chinese agents embedded in his security services. He has invited Russian election observers to monitor the vote while rejecting official teams from the U.S. and Europe.

No objective observer of the election campaign could seriously conclude that Maduro’s brazenly corrupt regime, which destroyed the economy in 2018 with 130,000 percent inflation and caused an exodus of nearly 8 million Venezuelans over recent years, has much chance of winning a fair election.

Any Form of Opposition Suppressed

The opposition’s charismatic leader María Corina Machado — campaigning alongside Edmundo González who took her place as presidential candidate when she was “disqualified” from running — is enthusiastically met by massive crowds wherever she goes, despite the regime’s systematic efforts to intimidate her supporters.

Pro-government goon squads and police try to block people from joining her rallies, more than 70 members of her campaign staff have been arrested, and restaurants and hotels she uses get shut down. Machado’s campaign has become a mass act of civil disobedience rivaling historical precedents set by Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

Maduro on the other hand, despite his unfettered powers of mobilization through control of the media, is met by thin crowds and sometimes, nobody. There is a candid video of the autocrat walking through a largely empty square for a scheduled event in which he is overheard complaining to his local party boss “There are lots of cameras, but where are the people?” Most polls give the opposition a massive advantage of about 40 points, with his support calculated at less than 15 percent in some surveys.

As in a terrorist standoff, tense negotiations are underway between Maduro holding his people at gunpoint, and outside parties seeking their liberation through a bloodless outcome. The U.S. is maintaining highly sensitive and secretive talks with his regime, addressing the personal interests of his ruling group.

“We are dealing with a group of organized crime families that have ruled Venezuela for the past 25 years,” says Otto Reich, who was ambassador to Venezuela and undersecretary of state for hemispheric affairs in past Republican administrations. “They cannot afford to lose power and become hunted fugitives,” he told The American Spectator.

Criminal indictments and international arrest warrants on a host of charges ranging from gross human rights violations, massive drug trafficking, and money laundering have been filed against most of them by the U.S. Justice Department. Maduro has a $30 million reward on his head.

Reich recalls trying to negotiate with Maduro’s former vice-president and head of his secret police SEBIN, Delcy Rodríguez. Her father led a terrorist group that kidnapped an American executive in the 1970s and was appointed oil minister by Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez.

“Freedom to travel into exile was not enough for them,” according to Reich. “They wanted to be allowed to live in Venezuela and enjoy their loot from the national treasury.”

Maduro Waging an Espionage Operation to Claim Votes

The opposition believes that this time they can outmaneuver Maduro with a much stronger ground organization. They will have witnesses assigned to voting tables in all precincts across the country, receiving local results in QR codes that will be instantly relayed for their own central vote count. There are reports that the information will also be transmitted to a vote-counting center in Washington.

But the regime has a vast electronic spy agency based in a building next to Maduro’s presidential palace operated by an army of expertly trained hackers including Chinese, Russian, Cuban, and Iranian technicians experienced in running totalitarian espionage networks in their own countries. They have the capability to hack into the electronic voting system to alter results and block or interfere with their transmission.

Machado says that the opposition is prepared to counter any fraud by remaining mobilized following the vote. “We will stay at the voting places counting every single print out of our electronic ballot to make sure they match the announced results,” she says. A long pause in the vote count is expected after midnight as the military high command, who will know the real results, decides on backing the official tally to be announced by the National Election Commission (CNE).

According to the highly informed Venezuelan political analyst Casto Ocando who operates a YouTube channel out of Miami with over a million viewers, Maduro has placed all members of the CNE under strict 24/7 surveillance, assigning them new security escorts from his own military household unit to closely monitor all their contacts and communications.

Most of Venezuela’s 2,000 generals are compromised in the regime’s system of corruption. Machado has said that such crimes would be subject to amnesty under an opposition government, but not crimes against humanity in which the armed forces would engage if they conduct the type of brutal crackdown that Maduro is threatening. At that point, there would be no turning back.

Planeloads of Cuban troops have been flown in to bolster the Caracas army garrison in Fort Tiuna, headquarters of the much feared military counterintelligence service (DGIM) that’s run by Cuban officers through a network of “advisors” assigned to units throughout the country. There are also Iranian Quds Force officers and Russian Spetznaz working with Venezuela’s security services.

National Guard Colonel Antonio Semprun, who recently went into exile in the U.S., tells The American Spectator that “Venezuelan soldiers will have to decide whether they will take orders from foreign advisors to shoot Venezuelans.” He believes that the situation has reached a point where the junior ranks may be prepared to challenge the high command. But 135 Venezuelan officers are already in prison for alleged coup plots and disloyalty to the regime. Some of them have died under torture.

Orchestrating a coup is also complicated by Maduro’s deployment of the bulk of his combat forces to jungle bases along the remote western border with Guyana where he has fabricated a border dispute with the ex-British colony. Dr. Evan Ellis of the U.S. Army War College says that it’s unlikely that Maduro would attack Guyana at this point as the risk of a military conflict with Britain and possibly the U.S. could outweigh the benefits of gaining a pretext to cancel the elections. But with elite units like marines and paratroopers stationed far from Venezuela’s main cities, the troops needed to take over the government may not be available.

Biden’s Failure to Negotiate Has Given Maduro Confidence

“There is a lot of uncertainty,” says an opposition activist contacted by phone in Caracas who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “We don’t see the CNE giving results contrary to Maduro. If they don’t announce results by Monday morning Maduro will mobilize his security services.”

Among troubling signs, the source notes is a sudden denial of access to an army base where he had been coordinating election security with the military. He also says that “there are fears that the regime could invalidate the opposition’s ticket through the supreme court,” which it controls.

“Maduro believes that he is negotiating from a position of strength because of the weakness he perceives in Washington,” says Ambassador Reich. The Venezuelan strongman got the better of Biden in previous negotiations, which resulted in a partial removal of sanctions on international oil sales that raked in enough cash to support his military. The deal was so poorly structured that the NSC official in charge of the negotiations actually got fired. “That’s saying a lot under Biden,” observes Reich.

While the current U.S. negotiating team is led by a seasoned State Department official who has the confidence of the opposition, “Maduro meets with the Cuban, Russian, and Chinese ambassadors after talking with the U.S. team,” says a veteran Venezuelan diplomat with knowledge of the proceedings.

If Maduro invalidates an opposition victory or part of the army turns on the regime and civil war breaks out, a massive wave of refugees can be expected to pour out of Venezuela. It may be the reason why center-left presidents in neighboring Colombia and Brazil, which could be destabilized by the human avalanche, have urged Maduro over recent days to accept an opposition victory. “Maduro has to learn to accept defeat,” said Brazilian President Lula da Silva.

The migrant surge would flow up to the U.S. border, led this time by Venezuelan prison gangs such as Tren de Aragua which have become “an armed branch of the Venezuelan and Cuban intelligence services,” according to Argentine and Chilean security officials investigating the group’s involvement in the recent assassination of an exiled Venezuelan army officer. Thousands of members of Hezbollah who have been issued Venezuelan passports will also join the flow.

While hostage sieges can be ended by well-trained assault forces that eliminate the terrorists, Maduro has little fear of such a threat. The Biden administration is hardly up to the task of intervening in Venezuela, which could rile radical left Democrats in the middle of an election year. The only gunboat around Caracas these days is a Russian frigate.

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