Exploring the Implications of Venezuela’s 2024 Presidential Election with Héctor Fuentes
Exploring the Implications of Venezuela’s 2024 Presidential Election with Héctor Fuentes
Fuentes, a lawyer, human rights advocate, and agent of social change in Venezuela, is a member of the 2024 class of Fisher Family Summer Fellows at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.
After more than a decade of authoritarian rule under President Nicholás Maduro, the Venezuelan elections on July 28, 2024, were domestically and internationally regarded as a potential turning point in the country’s history. Within Venezuela’s borders, hyperinflation has gripped the economy due to poor governance, rampant corruption, and Venezuela’s excessive dependence on oil exports — descending the country into political and economic chaos. Since 2014, more than 7 million people have fled the country in a mass emigration crisis. Experts estimate that an additional 18-25% of the population is considering fleeing if Maduro remains president, putting neighboring Latin American countries and the United States at risk of destabilization as border pressures increase.
Héctor Fuentes, a member of the 2024 class of Fisher Family Summer Fellows at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), is a lawyer, human rights advocate, and agent of social change in Venezuela, dedicated to bottom-up national transformation. He serves as the executive director of EstadoLab, a think-and-do tank focused on state fragility and the reconstruction of democratic governance. In a conversation earlier this week with Michael McFaul, Director of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), Fuentes explained, “People are not leaving because the situation is bad, they’re leaving because they don’t see a future for their children.”
Although opposition leader Maria Corina Machado was banned from the presidential ballot, her endorsed substitute, Edmundo González, ran and received popular support from the public. Fuentes posits that the Maduro administration needed to give its base the illusion of legitimacy through the most recent elections, although this did not preclude widespread electoral irregularities. From delaying voting in centers where the opposition was grouped to forcefully recollecting boxes containing paper voting records, evidence has emerged of falsified results. After counting 80% of the ballots, the National Electoral Council (CNE) declared Maduro the winner with 51.2% of the votes compared to González’s 44.2%. However, independent research polls conducted in Venezuela containing over 7,000 responses from 100 centers certify that González won by a landslide majority.
How can Venezuela move forward?
Going forward, Fuentes argues that the key to revitalizing the health of Venezuelan democracy is normalizing economic and political ties to global actors. From an international standpoint, measures such as international condemnation of Maduro’s falsification of election results, strategic and massive sanctions, extending a “golden bridge” to Maduro’s administration, vigilance regarding human rights violations, and providing humanitarian aid to Venezuela will be essential.
Despite the government-controlled election authority’s refusal to release detailed results from the election, Fuentes echoes a rousing call that Machado often shares with her followers that has fueled his fight for another day: “Believe in your people.”
Further Commentary
Fuentes also sat down for an interview with Francis Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at FSI, to discuss why there is strong reason to believe this result was fraudulent. You can watch the interview below and read more in the Frankly Fukuyama column in Persuasion.
2022 Summer Fellow Jesús Armas, a Venezuelan activist and organizer of the María Corina Machado campaign in Caracas, also shared his reflections in this op-ed and with The Washington Post (here and here).
