I covered Venezuela’s three-week presidential electoral campaign, the elections, and their fallout for the Latin American terrestrial and satellite news TV network TeleSur (English) — the multilateral public TV news network funded by the governments of Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
I am an experienced analyst of Brazilian politics, but I do not claim to be a specialist in Venezuela. The following is not an analysis but a description of events I witnessed on election night.
I invite readers to use it to help with their own assessments of the political situation.
I worked on Sunday, July 28, from 2 a.m. to 4:45 a.m. Monday morning, with two cameramen, a producer, and a Spanish-language reporter. Together we spent the day doing live reports from inside and outside four polling stations around the city, finishing our day behind Miraflores Palace for the announcement of the election results.
We spent the afternoon inside the Andres Bello polling center in a primarily middle-class voting district in downtown Caracas, doing live hits at 2:30 p.m., 3:30 p.m., and 4:30 p.m., moving out to the front of the building shortly before the polls closed.
It was the same place where we reported on the opening of the polls at 6 a.m. At that moment, the single-file line in front of the polling station stretched around the block.
All morning long, the polling stations we visited at the center were full, leading other journalists I spoke to to make wild predictions about voter turnout, some saying they expected over 70 percent.
After lunch, however, the crowds began to thin out. From around 2:30 p.m., until the doors closed, Andres Bello, which was one of the largest polling stations in the city, had more volunteers gossiping than voters in its hallways.
We left the building at 5:50 p.m. to position ourselves to cover the closing of the polls. The government had ordered all polling stations to close their doors at 6 p.m., but Andres Bello stayed open for another 10 minutes or so to let a few stragglers in to vote – four or five people tops, including an elderly couple who had mobility problems.
When they finally closed the doors, a crowd of around 40 TV crew members and social media video makers had gathered, with around 30 citizens who stood in front of the doorway and cheered as the doors shut, and a group of around five police officers guarding the doors.
Minutes later, a crowd of around 100 people rushed up to the door and started yelling, “Let us vote! Let us vote!” Suddenly, there were live streamers everywhere.
An Argentinian co-worker pointed out a crew from Argentina’s Javier Milei-aligned Channel 13 that was streaming everything as a dour, conservatively dressed reporter asked crying women and angry-looking men why Nicolas Maduro wouldn’t let them vote.
Half an hour later, a group of hundreds of men rode up on loud motorcycles, some of which seemed to have had their engines adjusted to provide constant backfires, with some riders in black hoods and masks.
They blocked off the road in front of the polling station and sat there, revving their engines as the crowd yelled slogans like, “Viva Venezuela!” As I prepared to record a report, a muscular white man in the crowd glared at me, said, “Nicolas Maduro,” and made a throat-slitting gesture.
Suddenly, a group of them rode up onto the sidewalk to the entrance, everyone else got off their bikes and left them blocking the road. Together, they marched into the crowd and rushed for the door of the poll station, pushing at the police.
At this point, I moved about 50 yards back to avoid being trampled. From there, I saw a lot of pushing and heard a lot of screaming. Two male police officers ran by me carrying a female police officer who was bleeding from the head. They loaded her up on a motorcycle and rode down the sidewalk past me toward a hospital.
I saw no injuries in the crowd of Maria Corina Machado supporters.
A few minutes later, a group of motorcycles from the national police force rode up, two to a bike, with the passengers holding assault rifles, and most of the motorcyclists vacated the premises.
The five police officers guarding the doors were replaced with a group of 20 female riot control police with plexiglass shields and helmets. Suddenly, the YouTube and Twitter streams of angry white men yelling at the police looked less heroic. It was a clever tactical move.
As the crowd dwindled, more security arrived. A small group of Machado supporters lingered on, yelling: “We want the results! We want the results!” with far-right social media filmmakers cutting in close on their smartphones to make it look like they were in the middle of a big crowd.
Later that night, when I met up with other journalists covering the election behind Miraflores Palace, I heard similar stories from other polling stations.
One journalist told me that where she was located, the crowd started yelling, “Shut the doors! Shut the doors!” at 6 p.m. As soon as the doors shut, they started yelling, “Let us vote! Let us vote!”
Machado, Edmundo Gonzalez, and the opposition Democratic Unitary Platform (PUD) announced weeks before the election that they were not going to respect the democratic rule of law and would tally their own election results.
What I witnessed in front of Andres Bello polling station on Sunday night appears to have been a form of theatre (for the benefit of the assembled national and international media) — one of many tactics used to produce and disseminate videos to delegitimize the election, that was repeated identically at many polling stations across Caracas.
This article first appeared in venezuelaanalysis.com. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Venezuela Analysis editorial staff. The Morning Star, where it also appeared, or peoplesworld.org.
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