When Opposition Calls for “Free”
and “Fair” Elections to Guarantee
“Democracy” in Venezuela, What
Do They Mean?
Since Hugo Chavez came to power in 1999, the US has attacked the Bolivarian Revolution in multiple ways, including through propaganda that categorize it as “authoritarian,” “unfree,” and “undemocratic.” This US propaganda assault is intended to dictate what should be done in Venezuela, including a return to “democracy,” with “free” and “fair” elections. Emboldened by the US military attack on Jan. 3, and relying on the US propaganda assault, the Venezuelan opposition has launched an aggressive move to seize control of the state by seeking concessions from the Bolivarian government to purportedly ensure “democracy” through “free” and “fair” elections that guarantees “equal” political participation for all political parties. But what does the opposition mean by “equality,” “fairness,” and “democracy”? What does that look like in the context of the recent and proposed legislative changes? And what are the consequences of pursing these ideals, as defined by the US and laundered through the opposition, for most Venezuelans, especially the working class?
The “equality” and “fairness” the opposition calls for is an unequal balance of political power to advantage the claims of foreign and national capital to Venezuelan assets, unfairly disenfranchising most Venezuelans from their resources (e.g., oil, gas, minerals, etc.), especially the working class. Therefore, the opposition’s claims to equality, fairness, and democracy – and the actions it entails – are assaults against the Bolivarian Revolution and most of the Venezuelan population. These attacks include performances of victimhood inside Venezuela and abroad by the opposition to hide the unequal and unfair neoliberal government they hope to install. The imperial left – self-professed “socialist,” “progressives,” or “leftists” in the West whose arguments and actions inevitably sabotage governments moving towards socialism – is helping the US and Venezuelan right-wing opposition launder their inherently unequal and unfair political program by undermining Bolivarian Revolution unity, which is the most important card Chavismo has to play to maintain power and hold out for a more propitious political moment, which might arrive in the aftermath of the US-Israel war against Iran.
Enrique Marquez: Performing Equality for an Unequal World
The Trump administration invited Enrique Marquez, a Venezuelan opposition leader, to the 2026 State of the Union address. With the flare of a Price is Right episode, Trump called Mr. Marquez, who was waiting behind closed doors, to “please come down!” Mr. Marquez appeared and received a standing ovation from the US congress, as the fake “interim president” Juan Guaidó had before him as part of the failed US attempt to remove President Maduro from power in 2019. This symbolic gesture articulated to Venezuelans that Mr. Marquez – and the kind of politics he embodies – is the US’s newly preferred path towards the removal of the Bolivarian Revolution from power. In a subsequent speech, Mr. Marquez said the following:
The (Bolivarian) government has tried to eliminate the opposition. And the opposition has tried to eliminate its adversary (Bolivarian Revolution). Both destroyed the country. We cannot continue this way. I don’t see elections in the short run; thus, I am no candidate. I have a candidate – the constitution. My second candidate is called democracy. I will work so that my candidates win….I believe in a national unity government. I want to be the bridge.
At first glance, the speech seems innocuous enough. However, in claiming to prioritize national unity, Marquez argued that the opposition and Chavismo are equally to blame for Venezuela’s difficulties. In this narrative, there are no clear victims or aggressors; Chavismo and the opposition are equally bad. This claim imposes a moral equivalence between these political forces by burying actual events – opposition and US-led illegal abduction, coup d’etats, freezing of Venezuelan assets, guarimbas, unilateral coercive actions, assassination and invasion attempts, attacks to state infrastructure, oil strike, etc. – that Bolivarian governments have had to defend themselves against since taking power. Because the Bolivarian Revolution prioritizes the interests of the Venezuelan working class, this equivalence eclipses the US government’s – and the foreign capital they represent – attack against most of the Venezuelan population to steal its resources. Moreover, in muddling a clear distinction between the victim (Bolivarian Revolution) and the aggressor (US empire, through opposition proxies), this equivalence narrative renders Venezuelan difficulties as solely the result of a national struggle, obscuring the US empire’s role behind it.
Thus, by nationalizing the struggle, thereby dimming its international/imperial dimension, and obscuring the US-aligned capital assault against the Venezuelan population to loot its resources, Marquez’s moral equivalence masks what it actually launders: an unequal claim to Venezuelan natural resources, such that the interests of US-aligned foreign capital (and their national proxies) should be prioritized over the claims of most Venezuelans to their resources. If said plainly – that a foreign rich person should have more of a claim to Venezuelan assets than most Venezuelans – it would be political untenable, but that is what is actually being asserted, hidden as it is under smoke and mirrors of politically tractable “equal” blame for the country’s difficulties in a “national” political struggle for power.
This is what Marquez – and the rest of the Western world, including the United States – calls democracy: a political system that pays discursive homage to “equality” among national actors, as it institutionalizes a (foreign) capital assault against the majority of the country guaranteed through an alternation of power with capital-controlled parties under the guise of “choice,” leading to dispossession for the working class. For neo-colonized countries, this “democratic” system limits most of the population from accessing state power and their national resources; in doing so, it jettisons any semblance of national sovereignty. In this vision of “democracy,” the state is nothing more than a vessel of capital interests, a neoliberal monster. In the current imperial context, this means that nation-states, including Venezuela, should facilitate US-aligned corporate exploitation and extraction of resources through its national proxies.
Given the power of capital interests represented by the US government, if the nation-state is to act on behalf of its citizens, it should be strong and not treat parties who represent foreign capital interests versus those who prioritize its national population, especially the working class, on “equal” footing. The Bolivarian Revolution understands that bourgeois democracy – through its discursive, cynical, and rhetorical calls to “freedom,” “equality” and “fairness” – all but guarantees failure for political movements representing the interests of the working class. The opposition’s call for equality and fairness are discursive moves to return to a representative and inherently unequal neoliberal democracy of the past. The Bolivarian Revolution, by contrast, envisions, prioritizes, and is building a participatory democracy, with communes taking direct reins of the state. This participatory democracy prioritizes the rights of most Venezuelans, especially the working class, to its national resources, not those of foreign capital interests.
Representative bourgeois democracy does not work for most people, not even those living in the US empire. For instance, studies show that the priorities of most of the population are rarely reflected in legislation in the US, including the current war of choice against Iran, which most of the US population rejects. Laws enacted, usually passed on a bipartisan basis, mostly represent the interests of politicians’ corporate donors. Theoretically, every citizen has the same “equal” vote, but, in reality, rich people deploy their money to wield undue influence and hoard resources. Inside and outside Venezuela, the opposition’s discursive attack imposes a narrative that extols the superiority of an “equal” and “fair” (representative and neoliberal) democracy, exemplified in the US, in contrast to the “unequal” Bolivarian “autocratic” government. This is partly why, as I’ve written in the past, some in the Venezuelan diaspora support the illegal kidnapping of Maduro and celebrate the bombing of their birth country.
Legislative Equality?
Following the US attack that led to the illegal kidnapping of President Maduro and Cilia Flores on January 3, the Trump administration is forcing the Bolivarian government to unfair concessions in their legal infrastructure, including the Law of Hydrocarbons. Trump boasted that the oil revenue generated under this law is going to benefit “both the United States and Venezuela,” but did not mention it would do so unequally. One of the concessions the Bolivarian government was forced to accept is that disputes arising between corporate capital and the Bolivarian state must be adjudicated in the US under its jurisprudence. Under the pretense, rhetoric, and propaganda of “legal equality,” the juridical infrastructure in the United States is heavily tilted towards capital interests. Thus, it comes as no surprise that the US government imposed its laws as the legal framework to adjudicate disputes between PDVSA, Venezuela’s oil company currently administered by the Bolivarian government, and US-aligned corporate capital. Because these corporations will be looking to extract as much profit as possible from contracts with PDVSA (and the Bolivarian state), by imposing US laws to adjudicate disputes, the Venezuelan people are likely to lose when disagreements arise, a form of resource theft and dispossession under the guise of an “equal,” “fair” – and, therefore, legitimate – “legal” process.
While the Bolivarian government is agreeing to these terms under the barrel of a gun, these neoliberal schemes are central to the opposition’s political program. In other words, the opposition willingly prioritizes (US-aligned foreign) capital claims to Venezuela’s resources over those of Venezuelans, especially the working class. The different factions of the opposition differ in the extent and speed with which they want to impose neoliberal laws and priorities in Venezuela, but they agree with the broad political program. Maria Corina Machado, for example, has vowed to impose aggressive neo-liberalization in Venezuela with virtually no concessions from (foreign) capital. This is her vision of a “full democracy.”
In another example, Rocío Guijarro, the director of the Centro para la Divulgación del Conocimiento Económico (CEDICE) is pushing a law to reverse “unfair” expropriations by Bolivarian governments, such that it would return assets to their previous “genuine owners,” and another law to further promote and protect “derechos de propiedad” (property rights). Both legislative projects aim to further prioritize the interests of capitalists in Venezuela’s legal infrastructure, including privatization. CEDICE does not acknowledge why these expropriations occurred. Neither does CEDICE propose laws that undermine the hoarding and unfair practices that abet private ownership and hoarding among elites, including labor abuses, wage theft, unequal employee-employer contracts, or corruption that funneled Venezuelan collective resources to private actors. Moreover, they are not proposing laws to guarantee accountability for millions of dollars belonging to the Venezuelan people which remain unaccounted for by members of the 2015 zombie National Assembly or by Juan Guaidó and the rest of his “interim” administration.
Cynicism in the opposition’s discursive “equality” and “fairness” claim is also evident in the Amnesty Law. To prioritize national unity and peace, the Bolivarian government has pardoned thousands of people, some with documented severe crimes against their fellow citizens and the state, including guarimberos who, at the instruction of the opposition, wreaked havoc on the country to dislodge Chavismo from power. The opposition and the US (along with some of its allies) refer to guarimberos and other criminals as “political prisoners,” thereby portraying them as victims. Although some prisoners engaged in political activism, their incarceration resulted from illegal actions, including victimization of others, not political ideology.
In ushering in the Amnesty Law, representatives from the Bolivarian Revolution have explicitly acknowledged errors they committed, and they have asked for forgiveness. By contrast, no member of the opposition has acknowledged the victims or asked for forgiveness for their crimes, and still, they are unilaterally pardoned. Neither the opposition nor their aligned media ever talk about Chavista victims of their violence, including Orlando Figuera, Giovanni Pantoja, Robert Serra, Maria Herrera and many others who were killed, injured, or otherwise harmed; they obscure these families’ suffering, as if it never happened. This is the “equality” and “fairness” the opposition wants with regards to amnesty. They receive pardons without offering restitution, even if symbolic. Henrique Capriles, for example, who is singularly responsible for guarimba mayhem, has yet to acknowledge or apologize for his role in fomenting violence. To add insult to injury, after being released, some beneficiaries of amnesty immediately renew calls that encourage confrontation on the streets, whose intention is to destabilize the country to precipitate elections in which they demand participation on “equal” footing to guarantee a “fair” and “democratic” process.
For the opposition, an “equal,” “fair,” and “democratic” process is one where the largely internationally isolated Bolivarian Revolution enters an election contest under a barrel of a US gun, facing military, political, and economic threats if they do not concede to US demands. For them, the elections should occur while the Bolivarian government is subjected to a barrage of negative propaganda through US-aligned opposition and Western corporate media seeking to fracture and weaken Chavismo from within. At the same time, for the opposition, an “equal,” “fair,” and “democratic” process for elections is one where they enjoy financial, political, economic, and diplomatic backing of the US (and the Western world), which will engage in every dirty trick in the book to ensure the opposition candidate emerges as the winner, fulfilling Marco Rubio’s preferred “democratic transition” for Venezuela. For the opposition, this blatantly unequal environment in their favor is what they term “equal,” “fair” and “democratic” context for elections.
Even though the Bolivarian government has limited wiggle room to maneuver against a US empire hellbent on dropping bombs to guarantee compliance, the imperial left engages in moralistic and self-indulgent denunciations of the Bolivarian government for concessions made at gun point. Demanding either political martyrdom or a pure socialist utopia, imperial leftists discredit the Bolivarian Revolution, thereby undermining its support inside and outside of Venezuela, helping the opposition and its US overlords in the process. If the Bolivarian Revolution is fractured, the US will gain total control of Venezuela through unequal and unfair elections in which an opposition figure emerges as the winner. If so, the US will accomplish regime change with national and international legitimacy. To aver this outcome, the US must confront the stability and strength of Chavismo, which is only achievable through unity.
Within Chavismo, lively debates, self-reflection, and planning are occurring in the context of necessary and iron-clad unity, but Bolivarian leaders, as government officials, cannot articulate these conversations and resulting strategies to the public. Imperial leftists have limited, if any, information to evaluate Bolivarian leadership decisions at this juncture. If anyone is equipped to maneuver during these difficult times, it is the current Bolivarian leadership. This is why there is a massive campaign by the Venezuelan opposition to remove Diosdado Cabello from the current Bolivarian government.
Holding On to Power Now, Buying Time for Opportunities in the Future
The United States attacked Venezuela with its military because it had exhausted all other means of removing the Bolivarian Revolution from power. The attack was a continuation of US aggression against Chavismo, moving the assault to a military domain, where the US is unequivocally advantaged. But even in that context, the US did not accomplish its goal of regime change. The Bolivarian Revolution’s strength allowed it to stay in power. In other words, the US threw all its military might against the Bolivarian Revolution but only achieved concessions from it. The US did not achieve the removal of the Bolivarian government. This is important because the current political juncture tends to be evaluated and judged from the point of view of Bolivarian Revolution. What did it conceded or lose? But it is equally true that the US, especially as represented by Marco Rubio, would rather have dispose of the Bolivarian Revolution and install a puppet government with Maria Corina Machado at the helm. The US is being forced to sit with Bolivarian leaders who control the state, albeit in unequal terms. Despite its military might, the US, too, has had to concede, including by formally recognizing Delcy Rodriguez as the legitimate (acting) president of Venezuela, which may open opportunities for the Bolivarian government moving forward.
The US military supremacy, upon which current concessions are drawn from the Bolivarian government, is being tested. The US-Israeli war against Iran is not going according to plan for the US. It is unclear how this war will end, but, thus far, the might of the US military has encountered a forceful Iranian resistance. As in Venezuela, leadership decapitation has not achieved Iranian regime change. In contrast, it strengthened Iran’s resolve. US military might encounter limits, and its strength is being re-assessed, if not questioned. Internationally, the war is facing political resistance, even among traditional US allies. On the US domestic front, the war is unpopular even amongst MAGA. If the war drags on, the US commits ground troops, and the economic fallout is felt more strongly among US citizens, the political consequences might cripple the Trump administration.
The outcome of the war might usher an even more aggressive US approach against Venezuela, but it might, on the other hand, provide the Bolivarian Revolution wiggle room to maneuver on domestic and international fronts against US-aligned foreign capital. Thus, we cannot fall for the discursive assaults that deploy “equality,” “fairness” and associated “democracy” claims, through which the opposition is trying to seize power. This is a trojan horse against the Venezuelan people, especially the working class. Championing Chavismo unity, including support for the Bolivarian government leadership at this critical juncture, is imperative for the Left. It is up to the Chavista base – socialist party (PSUV) militants, people in the communes, and those organizing the streets – and its leadership to steer the direction of the Bolivarian Revolution. They will lead the way towards a substantively equal and fair Venezuelan society.
