An audio clip of a panicked Nicolás Maduro Guerra, the son of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, leaked to media on Sunday exposed extreme concern among Venezuela’s socialist elite that the legislative election that day would embarrass them.
The elder Maduro staged elections for seats in the National Assembly, the federal legislature, for December 6. Prior to the election, he packed the National Electoral Council (CNE), the government institution that counts votes, with socialist cronies and hijacked opposition parties, installing his loyal supporters to lead them. The Organization of American States (OAS), in recognition of these moves, urged state powers last month not to recognize the results of the election.
Venezuela has not held elections marred by socialist intimidation since dictator Hugo Chávez was elected in 1998, so international observers have taken to attempting to measure public opinion towards the dictatorship through voters’ participation in elections. While Maduro’s party keeps winning elections, the number of people participating in elections has plummeted.
In the fraudulent presidential elections of May 2018, which Maduro claimed to win, the CNE counted 8.6 million votes, then a record low. On Sunday, that number was 5.2 million.
The CNE claimed that only about 31 percent of eligible voters went to the polls, one of the lowest turnouts ever recorded. The independent polling firm Meganálisis issued its own independent research finding that the true turnout rate was under 20 percent.
The low turnout was particularly embarrassing this year because Maduro henchmen were openly threatening to starve people if they did not vote.
“Those who don’t vote, don’t eat,” Diosdado Cabello, the suspected drug lord believed to be Maduro’s second-in-command, told a crowd last week.
The United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) secured an overwhelming majority in the National Assembly, which the elder Maduro dubbed a “people’s victory.”
Maduro Guerra – known as “Nicolasito,” or “little Nicolás,” despite his corpulent build – was on the ballot on Sunday after serving for three years in the “national constituent assembly,” an illegal parallel legislature his father invented when he lost control of the National Assembly. Speaking to socialist militants in La Guaira, the region he sought to represent in the legislature, Maduro Guerra firmly stated he and the Party were “not satisfied” with the turnout at the time, which he stated to be around 3:00 p.m. local time.
“I am telling you that we are not satisfied with the results until now, 3 in the evening, that we have achieved,” Maduro Guerra can be heard saying. “We can give more, we should give more. So I am calling the street bosses and the street teams. I am calling the bosses of the UBCh [Hugo Chávez Battle Units, propagandist cells], the community leaders. I am calling on church leaders, the axis chiefs, let’s score the perfect finish, please. A true finish to compensate what we maybe could not have or achieve in the past few hours.”
Maduro Guerra goes on to complain that the socialist party should be strong enough to force Venezuelans to vote.
“We have all the tools; let’s go for a perfect finish, and we will triumph. But let’s construct the victory, house by house,” he instructed. “Let’s go to people’s houses, let’s go to the buildings, the sidewalks, the streets in all the neighborhoods in La Guaira, and let’s tell people we aren’t playing.”
“We are not playing toy cars; we’re playing for the countries, the continuation of the Bolivarian Revolution,” he insisted.
“Nicolasito” has a long record of embarrassing his father in the public eye, though he has not fallen out of favor with the regime and will serve as a legislator in his father’s National Assembly. In 2017, as a member of the fraudulent “national people’s assembly,” Maduro Guerra appeared to threaten a military invasion of the United States but made critical mistakes regarding American geography.
“If the United States wants to stain our fatherland soil, the firearms will reach New York, and we will take the White House,” Maduro Guerra vowed. “Vietnam would look small. That isn’t what we want. We have never been and will never be a people of war.”
Maduro Guerra did not elaborate on his military strategy for Venezuela to “take the White House” once in New York, a location more than 200 miles from the White House.
Aside from his threats to America, “Nicolasito” has been involved in several instances of leaked reports of enjoying lavish parties and expensive events while the majority of Venezuelans struggle to find basic food items in their local stores, including a leaked video of him dancing while being showered with money at the wedding of a Venezuelan-Syrian businessman and reportedly violating Chinese coronavirus gathering restrictions for his 30th birthday party.
Venezuelan propaganda has applauded “Nicolasito” for being, allegedly, an accomplished flutist.
The younger Maduro’s concern shared in private contrasts significantly with the tenor of remarks by his father and his father’s cronies in public. In remarks on Sunday, Maduro, the dictator, declared the poorly attended election a “tremendous and great people’s victory,” telling Venezuelans to expect “positive, virtuous change” now that the PSUV had succeeded in hijacking the last democratically held institution in the country.
On Sunday afternoon, Cabello told the public nearly exactly the opposite that Maduro Guerra was telling socialist militants in private.
“The reports we have throughout the country are satisfactory, highly satisfactory, in participation, organization, installing tables, in the presence of people voting, being there present, in the organization of political parties that we have seen, who are there checking and verifying, doing their job,” Cabello claimed, according to state propaganda outlet VTV.
Cabello, nonetheless, urged more voting.
“No one should stay home,” he instructed. “Voting is an instrument of rebellion against imperialism, of raising the voice of Venezuelans and clearly expressing their political preference; that is how it is in democracy and how it should be.”
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