Caracas Chronicles

#NowWhatVenezuela keeps you informed about what’s happening deep inside la patria—from headline-making events to underreported stories that provide the clearest picture of our reality. This digest is published weekly.

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A few thoughts on the May crackdown

We don’t know when this will end, or if María Corina is right when she says “fifth time’s the charm,” or if Venezuela can only be “liberated,” as Magalli Meda put it in her first press conference abroad. Where we do agree on with both of them is that none of this is normal or acceptable, and that it’s up to the people to make sure that indifference and forgetfulness aren’t an option. Especially now, as documenting abuses, supporting victims, representing political prisoners, and defending vulnerable civil society groups becomes even harder under new threats from Diosdado Cabello. He’s now calling the country’s top human rights organizations “terrorists.” Right now, Chavista violence doesn’t distinguish between so-called moderates and radicals. It’s coming for anyone, whether you’re Foro Penal, Provea or Monitor Dólar.

The crackdown launched by the regime over the past ten days is a warning that the terror that followed July 28th isn’t over. The system keeps generating violence around events it organizes itself, just to punish whoever or remind who holds the power. But we cannot always guess what the grotesque violence embodied by the Interior Minister is about. Was this about keeping even more people from voting on May 25th? Was it meant to cement the argument that Sunday’s candidates are just as complicit as Bernabé Gutiérrez and Timoteo Zambrano? Was it a tantrum over the (so far) failed backchannel negotiations with Richard Grenell?

In any case, it seems like Maduro and Jorge Rodríguez care more than Cabello about keeping up the appearance of having an “adversary” at home, someone to argue with in the National Assembly so they can say, look, here’s the real opposition. Even Nicolasito said last week that we “need a more plural AN, with more voices.”

With people like Carlos Marcano in custody, Capriles, Tomás Guanipa, and Stalin González will have more than enough on their plate.

Setting aside the Twitter wars and the narrative that another mass abstention event was a milestone for the opposition, the truth is Capriles and Rosales did get what they were after: they’ll have parliamentary presence. Whether we can call that parliamentary representation depends on what they do from now on. Capriles says he has no desire to be a lawmaker now and that he’s there to negotiate the release of political prisoners. If that’s true, those efforts should have started as soon as the CNE’s inauguration ceremony wrapped up. There are reportedly over 70 new political prisoners and disappearances following the vote—and counting—including a notable someone from the very party Capriles just resigned from.

Back to the broader issue of failed normalization: when we found out Juan Pablo Guanipa had been arrested, one of the new names on Diosdado Cabello’s list of detainees stood out: Carlos Marcano, who’s now been missing for six days. I met Carlos when I was 16—he’s a bit older than me—and now I know we had several things in common. The obsession with our favorite sports teams. The way he tried, despite being involved in activism since he was a teenager, to do the impossible: go out for drinks with friends, hike up hills, run marathons, and live some version of a normal youth in Venezuela.

Just a few weeks before July 28th, I ran into him at a baseball game. I’m not sure he remembers it but we said a quick hello—probably not knowing what was coming. I’m not his friend, but I hope Carlos gets out soon and can have a beer again watching the Tiburones de La Guaira or Atlético de Madrid. I hope this nightmare ends soon, for him, for his friends, and for his mom, who hasn’t stopped searching and making noise since Diosdado’s people raided their home in Caracas.

With people like Carlos Marcano in custody, Capriles, Tomás Guanipa, and Stalin González will have more than enough on their plate.

Something doesn’t add up in the new National Assembly

The UNT-UNICA bloc has stains on it before even stepping into the chamber, and Stalin was wrong again when he said the seats wouldn’t be handed out arbitrarily. Chavismo is, it turns out, slicing up the National Assembly pie however it wants and handing out seats not only to the faux opposition of the Democratic Alliance, but also to candidates from the Capriles and Un Nuevo Tiempo alliance, Fuerza Vecinal, and Antonio Ecarri.

Let’s start with the UNT-UNICA case. According to the first bulletin by CNE board member Carlos Quintero, they got 304,425 votes or 5.05% of the total. Under the d’Hondt method (used to assign 50 of the Assembly’s seats proportionally based on each party’s performance), this alliance should’ve only gotten two seats: the top two names on their national list, Capriles and Luis Emilio Rondón (UNT’s secretary general). Quintero said a third name, Stalin González, also won a seat—which already raised questions among people doing the math.

The next day, Jorge Rodríguez announced that Henri Falcón, Pablo Pérez, and Tomás Guanipa had also been elected from the national list—four more names than d’Hondt allows—and that UNT-UNICA had gotten 11 seats in total. The names of the other five weren’t revealed—not during Quintero’s bulletin, nor at the CNE’s seat assignment ceremony.

Of course, the Democratic Alliance got the same treatment (or perhaps even better), and not for the first time. Despite winning just 6% of the vote (according to the CNE), they’re only entitled to three national list seats. But Jorge Rodríguez said Monday they’d been awarded eight. As of yesterday, we know they’ll have 13. Antonio Ecarri also got a seat—even though the CNE didn’t report the total vote share for his Alianza del Lápiz Alliance. We don’t even know if Ecarri’s formation reached 2%.

Data analyst Javier Martucci explained the seat math according to d’Hondt in this tweet. By his numbers, Chavismo seems to be giving 29 seats to what it calls “its oppositions”—which is 10.28% of the National Assembly. Once again, Capriles, Guanipa, and Stalin will have plenty of explaining to do after accepting these gifts from chavismo—gifts that probably come with strings attached.

The week’s plot twists

Lubrio is probably one of Twitterzuela’s best-known chavistas, famous for picking fights with opposition tweeters and defending the revolution to the death. This week, he admitted he didn’t vote on May 25th—for “10,000 reasons,” but mainly because the results from the July 28th vote still haven’t been published, and hence he can no longer brag about Venezuela having the world’s best electoral system. A pretty bold move, and obviously not without risk for him.

And on Thursday, Sebastiana Barráez reported that the president of the Venezuelan-Russian Chamber of Commerce was arrested by the DGCIM—the same man who, on May 8th, had inaugurated a mausoleum to Soviet victims of World War II alongside the Colectivo La Piedrita. Apparently, the Russian ambassador accused him of using the embassy’s image without permission to make political connections in Venezuela. If confirmed, this would be the second known arrest ordered by Moscow on Venezuelan soil in under a year—after two Colombians who fought in Ukraine were captured in Maiquetía and extradited to Russia.

Recommended reads:

The appointment of a first governor and the official discourse glorifying the imaginary state of Guayana Esequiba, as reported by EFE, has sparked hope among the residents of San Isidro and Dalla Costa, who live without electricity for 10 hours a day and use gold dust as local currency. These were the two parishes that, electorally, “constituted” our new state on Sunday, May 25th. And this investigation by the Venezuelan Investigative Journalists Network tells the story of post-electoral exile through the borders with Brazil and Colombia, where all sorts of activists, journalists, and polling station staff fled after the July 28th elections.