The Maduro government still shows no signs of surrendering power in Venezuela
The recent election left Nicolás Maduro more dependent than ever on his foreign allies
As the deadline expired yesterday for the Maduro government in Venezuela to show detailed poll-by-poll voting records, opposition candidate Edmundo González was recognized as president-elect of Venezuela by the governments of Argentina, the United States and Uruguay. (Peru already recognized him on Tuesday).
But on the streets of Caracas and other Venezuelan cities, there was no sign this week that the Maduro government was reconsidering its strategy of claiming victory and seeking to crush dissent through force.
On Friday, the opposition reported that its headquarters, El Bejucal in the Caracas district of Altamira, was raided and vandalized overnight by a group of six armed and hooded men wearing camouflage.
Arrests of volunteer poll workers continued across the country, as the government sought to prevent the opposition from uploading digitized receipts from individual polls that show the opposition with a margin of victory of more than two-to-one.
Venezuelan social media is full of videos of raids showing opposition volunteers being dragged from their homes. In some cases, angry crowds have attempted to prevent the arrests.
Venezuelans have also been posting videos of uniformed foreigners on the streets of Caracas, including Cubans and a soldier wearing the insignia of the Wagner Group, a notorious mercenary group linked to the Kremlin that has played a major role in wars in Ukraine and various parts of Africa.
Others have tracked flights arriving from Cuba, or photographed Russian aircraft landing in Caracas.
An allegation of mass forgery
One of the gravest allegations of foreign interference comes from Francisco Santos, former vice-president of Colombia. He said on Wednesday that China is helping the Maduro regime with a massive effort to make counterfeit versions of more than 30,000 "actas" — digital receipts produced by voting machines — that have been altered to indicate that Nicolás Maduro won.
"In the warehouses of the National Electoral Council in Filas de Mariche in Miranda state there is a team of 150 employees, supervised by a group of four Chinese engineers," he said.
"All of this to print all-new actas and present them to international observers."
Santos said the 150 workers are dressed in grey overalls without pockets and are not allowed to carry cellphones, and that the Chinese engineers arrived from Cuba on a Conviasa flight.
CBC News has not been able to independently confirm that allegation.
If Santos's allegation is true, it would not be the first time China stepped in to help the Maduro regime with the digital aspects of repression.
Maduro's government is deep in debt to China and has had to offer Beijing generous concessions of Venezuelan resources to service that debt.
Chinese mining companies are foremost among the foreign interests taking gold, coltan, lithium and thorium out of Venezuela.
Chinese firm ZTE helped Venezuela produce its "carnet de la patria" or "fatherland card," a digitized national ID card that the Maduro government uses to track citizens' behaviour. In a country where most of the population depends on government handouts to eat, the cards are also used to direct scarce resources toward those who are loyal to the Maduro government.
On Friday, a legal deadline for the Maduro government to show the digital receipts from the election expired. The opposition says the government was simply not able to forge such a vast quantity of paperwork in time, since each digitized tile has to have the right QR code and alphanumeric digital signature, as well as the ink signatures of three witnesses.
The opposition began uploading copies of the digitized receipts in the hours following the election. Its volunteer scrutineers were entitled by law to a copy. Although they were prevented from leaving the polls with receipts in several thousand instances, they still were able to get "actas" covering 81.7 per cent of all polls in the country.
A 'double standard' on non-interference
"We finally have the proof in our hands, something that we have been explaining to the international community for years — that we always win the elections," said Alessa Polga, who for years was the Canadian coordinator for Vente, the party at the heart of the opposition coalition in Venezuela.
Polga told CBC News the opposition is frustrated by foreign countries that talk about respecting Venezuela's sovereignty and letting Venezuelans sort out their differences. Venezuela is already subject to tremendous foreign interference, she said, and ordinary people lack the means to force the dictatorship from power.
"That double standard that requests no interference in my country is a joke," she said.
"For years, the Maduro regime let forces from foreign countries control and administer public order in my country. Cuba was the first one, followed by Russians, Chinese and Iranians."
Polga said many Venezuelans have had the experience of going to renew their national ID card only to find themselves answering questions from officials with Cuban accents. Now, she said, the government is turning to Cuba to stiffen the backbone of its own forces, whose loyalty is seen as more suspect.
"Why? Because so many members of the middle commands of the national army, they are taking the side of the population," she said. "They are taking off their uniforms. They are putting down their weapons, because they and their families are struggling.
"A regular Venezuelan just earns between ten and eleven dollars per month. Nobody can survive that."
Cuban government watches nervously
While China and Russia are interested in Venezuela both for its resources and its strategic location in the western hemisphere, the government of Cuba depends on Maduro for its very survival, said Juan Antonio Blanco, a former Cuban diplomat, historian and president of the pro-democracy group Cuba Siglo 21.
"It was never the intention of the Venezuelan government, nor the intention of the Cuban government, to accept an electoral defeat in Venezuela," he told CBC News.
The Maduro government agreed to hold the election because it was promised concessions from the United States, including the lifting of some sanctions.
"They miscalculated the capacity of the opposition to come out with, first of all, an overwhelming smashing victory over the government," said Blanco. "They expected a defeat but by a lesser margin and they thought that that lesser margin could be easily manipulated and hidden from the public. That was not the case.
"The kind of defeat they received makes it pretty hard to follow that plan without the use of lethal force. And that's what they're doing now. They are at the last resort, which is lethal force against the population."
A number of aircraft on unscheduled flights, including Ilyushin IL-76s and Ilyushin IL-96s and Airbus 340s, have travelled between Cuba and Venezuela in recent days. Some have diverted west to avoid the identification zone over Curacao, while some have turned off the ADS-B transmitters used to track civil aviation.
Blanco said that while Cuba is clearly sending large numbers of people, he doesn't expect to see entire Cuban Army units disembarking at Caracas Airport.
"They don't need to send weapons because all the weapons are there. This is not like transferring troops to Angola with all the equipment to fight a war over there," he said. "They just have to send the personnel."
Blanco said the Cubans will have two main roles in Venezuela.
"The first one is to control the security of Maduro," he said. "They don't trust the security of Maduro to the Venezuelans, or to any person — even if it's a commander or a general — who might turn against Maduro at some point. So the first thing for them is to make sure that all the personal security of Maduro, and perhaps a couple of other leaders, is under their direct control.
"But if Maduro believes that those people are there just to protect him, he's stupid. Those people are also there to control him. To make sure that at some delicate moment he would not give up and say, 'OK, I'm accepting the golden bridge the United States or whoever is offering me.'
"So they are there to protect his life because that's useful for them now. If they have to liquidate him in the future, they will, but for now it's important to save his life from any attempt [at] rebellion from his own troops."
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