The outcome of yesterday’s presidential election in Venezuela remains up in the air. In line with pre-election polling, opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia turned out more voters than President Nicolas Maduro by a large margin. However, hours after polls closed, Venezuela’s electoral council declared Maduro the winner with 51 percent of the vote, a blatant attempt to steal the election that the opposition will be able to disprove with the printed results of the digital voting machines from each precinct, which they have in hand.
In the week prior to the election, the mood in Venezuela was a mix of hopeful optimism that change was possible and fear of the more realistic probabilities of fraud and repression. While the mood this morning is leaning toward the latter, it will likely take at least a few more days to definitively know which direction things will take moving forward.
Sadly, even if the outcome of the election is a transfer of power come January, when the winner will be inaugurated, that transition would come about a decade too late. Maduro’s presidency, which he inherited when former President Hugo Chavez died in 2013, has been an absolute tragedy for Venezuela. But the country’s horrific descent since he took office has also exposed an enormous shortfall in terms of the hemisphere’s ability to stop mass human rights abuses and humanitarian disasters.