A week after Venezuela’s presidential election, in which President Nicolas Maduro claims to have defeated opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the international community is divided in its reaction. Some countries, including the United States, have recognized Gonzalez as the winner. Others, including Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, have withheld recognition of Maduro’s claimed victory and are demanding that his government release a transparent accounting of the election results.
Gonzalez and the opposition coalition led by Maria Corina Machado have been able to confirm that he won in a landslide via the printed paper tallies produced by Venezuela’s electronic voting machines, which its election observers collected at polling stations around the country. They are publishing that data online so the world knows that the results claimed by Maduro and the institutions he controls are fraudulent. This data is the key obstacle to Maduro’s attempt to steal the election and the reason why so many countries around the world continue to pressure his government to back up its claims of victory or acknowledge Gonzalez as the winner.
However, Maduro has his own cheerleading squad among a group of autocratic allies who are helping him deflect that international pressure and prepare for the consequences to come. Within hours of the announcement by Venezuela’s National Electoral Council falsely proclaiming Maduro the winner of the July 27 election, the governments of China, Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua and Russia sent him messages of congratulations. All of these countries are consolidated authoritarian regimes, the latter three of which have not witnessed a handover of power at the top in decades.