Re-elected President Nicolás Maduro, after winning the election on Sunday, July 28, announced that he will call for new general elections to elect 335 municipal governments and 23 regional governments on August 25.
By Ollantay Itzamna
In this way, despite the violent chaos that the opposition that lost the recent presidential elections tried to generate, Venezuela is destined to ratify its peaceful and democratic vocation at the polls. It will be the 32nd electoral process in 25 years of Chavismo.
The opposition knew and knew that the only way to defeat Nicolás Maduro and Chavismo is through the ballot box. Neither coups d’état, cognitive wars, riots, nor attempts to create institutions parallel to the State work for them. In that sense, regardless of whether Corina Machado or Edmundo Gonzáles are prosecuted/imprisoned or not, the Venezuelan opposition is compelled to compete at the ballot box, if it wants to continue existing politically. After all, it obtained more than 4 million votes on July 28.
In any case, the political framework is set for the opposition: if it does not participate in the next municipal and regional elections, it will be further weakened politically and Chavista hegemony will be imposed on more than one million km2 of the national territory. If it participates, it will tacitly recognize the results of the electoral process of July 28th because it is the re-elected Nicolás Maduro who is calling for these elections.
In this difficult electoral political challenge, the Venezuelan opposition is harmed by the “support” it receives from the dictatorship of Dina Boluarte of Peru, or from the Argentine anarchist impoverisher Javier Milei. Worse still, the recent failure of the OAS, in its attempt to ignore the electoral results of July 28, is the total victory of Maduro at the international level. That meeting of the OAS should not have even occurred in the case of Venezuela because this country, since 2019, is no longer formally part of the OAS.
Without expressly seeking it, the recent electoral processes in Venezuela are forcing us to externalize our authentic democratic vocation, both to the Venezuelan oligarchies and their counterparts on the Continent, as well as to the peoples who choose the democratic path to advance in our decolonial and decolonial processes.
Ollantay Itzamna, Defender of the Rights of Mother Earth and Human Rights from Abya Yala https://ollantayitzamna.com @JubenalQ