How Venezuela’s election could upend the geopolitics of the Americas

There’s widespread agreement that Maduro’s government is facing its toughest electoral moment in the last 25 years. The stakes are high – both in Venezuela and abroad.

It would be easy to dismiss this Sunday’s presidential election in Venezuela as a fait accompli. The country’s opposition movement is challenging Nicolas Maduro, a strongman who has ruled Venezuela since 2013 and has made clear he intends to keep doing so – saying last week that if he were not re-elected, Venezuela might face a “bloodbath.” Maduro’s government controls all public institutions in Venezuela, and it has been accused of rigging votes in the past, most notably in 2017, when electoral authorities briefly showed the opposition had won a gubernatorial race – only to revert its decision in favor of the government candidate, an episode widely referred to as a glaring example of electoral fraud. In the run-up to this election, a new report by local NGO Laboratorio de Paz says there have been more than 70 arbitrary detentions since the election campaign formally began on July 4. And yet, uncertainty is the mantra in Caracas these days. The opposition campaign has re-energized its bases, and the candidature of Edmundo González has attracted widespread support in Venezuela and abroad. There’s widespread agreement that Maduro’s government is facing its toughest electoral moment in the last 25 years The stakes are high – both here and abroad. “On the ballot is how long it’ll take to fix Venezuela’s economy,” said Asdrubal Oliveros, founder of Caracas firm Ecoanalitica, in his weekly podcast on July 8. Under Maduro, oil-rich Venezuela has suffered the worst economic crash in a peacetime country in recent history. Once the fifth-largest economy in Latin America, today Venezuela’s economy has shrunk to the equivalent of a medium-sized city, smaller than say, Milwaukee, according to data from the IMF.