Government also pressures for independent review of last Sunday’s election results
With Venezuelan citizens desperate for change beginning to fear last Sunday’s elections won’t be allowed to give it to them, insiders are predicting a new exodus from the country – and that means a lot more ‘Luso descendants’ heading for Portugal (as happened back in 2017, during the social crisis prompted by hyperinflation)*.
“It’s obvious to the national and international media and to the whole world that the elections were fraudulent”, Christian Hon of the Venexos association said in interview with SIC earlier this week.
“Hours before voting closed Nicolás Maduro was already singing victory. To publicly announce that they gave him 50% of the vote when there was still 20% to be counted was absurd”.
But, according to the regime, Nicolás Maduro won a third six-year term with 51.2% of the vote – and no matter how much ‘the international community’ has criticised, exactly as happened the last time he was ‘put on the spot’, Maduro shows no sign of budging. Quite the opposite: over a thousand people have reportedly been detained following public protests – not to mention several killed.
All of which adds to the drama of living in a country under dictatorship: if change isn’t coming, the only alternative is to leave. The country has already ‘lost’ a quarter of its population in the last 10 years. Eight million Venezuelans are now living abroad – and many said pre- last Sunday’s elections that if Maduro was returned, they would have no alternative but do the same.
“Portugal has to prepare itself because a lot of people are going to return, a lot of people are going to leave Venezuela because they cannot accept to continue with this government”, warned Christian Hon, stressing that Maduro “will never want to leave power.
His assessment of what happened in Venezuela the morning after Sunday’s elections, is that democracy “woke up in mourning.
“Every country should fight for this. Where are the minutes? Who validated the minutes? Where are the 20% of the votes that were lost? How can anyone attribute victory when not all the votes have been counted?” These were all questions that have sent thousands onto the streets in angry protest, but the bottom line is Maduro is showing no signs of relenting.
And that leaves countrymen and women ‘between a rock and a hard place’: stay in the misery they voted against, or leave.
In the case of Luso-descendants, there are roughly 600,000 still living in Venezuela. Portugal’s ministry of foreign affairs has said it is “always accompanying” these people, and pushing for transparency in the election results. But as Expresso explains this week, the Portuguese diaspora is going through a lot of hardship, and needs help.
Between 2015-2018, around 10,000 Portuguese fled the country, of which 6,000 headed for Madeira.
The majority of Portuguese who emigrated to Venezuela came from either Madeira or the north, around Aveiro.
Yesterday, analysts were telling the Guardian newspaper that Maduro is “counting on being able to wait this out, and people will get tired of demonstrating.
“The problem is the country is in a death spiral and there’s no chance the economy will be able to recover without the legitimacy that comes from a fair election” Cynthia Arnson of a Washington-based think tank told the Associated Press.
*Coincidentally, the prime minister has said this week Portugal’s government is hoping that emigrés will return – which was not the case in 2017.
