The Price of Humiliating Nicolás Maduro

For many years, Venezuelans understood instinctively what was meant when someone invoked la situación in conversation. The rich started leaving the country because of la situación. One would be crazy to drive at night, given la situación del país. The main features of this “situation of the country,” in the years around President Hugo Chávez’s death in 2013, were an economy in free fall, empty supermarket shelves, and the normalization of new forms of criminality—such as “express kidnappings,” or abductions in which ransoms were paid by speedy bank transfers and the victims released within a couple of hours.

People no longer speak so much about la situación. But they have begun using a word that rhymes: la represión. Since the July 28 election, in which plausibly two-thirds of voters rejected incumbent President Nicolás Maduro, Venezuelans have entered a “silent tunnel,” the historian Edgardo Mondolfi told me. They breathe fear, watch what they say, and mind their own business.

To international observers, the news that things are bad in a country where things have been bad for so long must seem unremarkable. Since Maduro, Chávez’s successor and heir, came to power, one in four Venezuelans has left the country. Why would anyone be shocked that Venezuelans fear the erratic tyrant who rules them?

And yet, for some Venezuelans, the months of mounting repression are painful because they followed a brief period of hope. In the two years leading up to the July election, everyday life in Venezuela seemed to be improving, even if only in illusory, unsustainable ways. Maduro looked aside as businesses skirted some of his most ludicrous regulations, allowing certain segments of the economy to flourish. Foreign currencies remained technically illegal, but Venezuelans could now pay in dollars—cash or Zelle—in place of their own hyperinflationary currency. Maduro seemed to have struck a deal with the citizenry: If you don’t challenge me, life will become more bearable.

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On July 28, Venezuelans broke the deal and voted. Maduro had barred the candidacy of Venezuela’s wildly popular opposition leader, María Corina Machado, so the opposition candidate on the ballot wound up being a man no one had heard of; even then, Maduro littered his rival’s path with obstacles. Still, the opposition campaign generated enthusiasm that reached every corner of the country.

By nearly every report except his own official one, Maduro lost the election. Yet he clung to power, refusing entreaties from Washington, Bogotá, and Brasilia to publish detailed vote tallies, and brushing aside the evidence from opposition-affiliated poll watchers that he may have been trounced, earning fewer than half as many votes as his opponent. Now Maduro is determined that the populace that humiliated him on election day must pay.

Venezuela is not new to repression. Before the campaign season even began, Maduro’s government had jailed more than 15,000 politicians, protesters, activists, and journalists, subjecting an unknown number to torture. In the months leading to the election, such arrests became more common, but Venezuelans who weren’t looking to visibly challenge Maduro could take comfort in the fact that most of those arrested had political profiles. As long as I don’t go out looking for trouble, many could tell themselves, I should be fine.

Now the repression feels more pervasive. Protesters aren’t just swept up during protests; since July, the authorities have plucked low-profile demonstrators from their homes days after they were seen on the street. The national guard has established checkpoints where it inspects people’s phones for compromising content; one young man was sent to prison because he’d saved an anti-government meme to his phone gallery. The fear is far-reaching. My aunt in Caracas told me that she has uninstalled her social-media apps for fear of these stops, and she deletes many of her WhatsApp chats before leaving the house.

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In the past nine months, the plight of six people in particular has drawn considerable attention. These people are caged—not in their homes, and not in the underground cells of Venezuela’s notorious prisons, but in a gated villa shaded by palm trees. A few months before the election, the authorities had issued arrest warrants for eight of Machado’s closest aides. Two were detained, but six managed to secure asylum in the Argentine embassy. “We feel safe here,” one declared to the press.

They had reason to: Under an international law known, ironically, as the Caracas Convention, when an embassy requests a travel permit for someone to whom it has granted asylum, the host country must grant the request “immediately.” Chávez and Maduro didn’t have the best record of respecting international laws, but they had honored this one in the past. Pedro Carmona, who led an attempted coup d’état against Chávez, took refuge in the Colombian embassy and was permitted to flee. In 2020, the former political prisoner and presidential candidate Leopoldo López landed in Madrid after staying for more than a year in the Spanish embassy.

This time, however, Maduro took his time in granting travel permits. A hundred days after they first sought refuge in the Argentine embassy, the asylees were reportedly told they could leave the country—but only if they agreed to refrain from working for Machado from overseas. They refused. Then, on July 29, the day after the election, Maduro expelled the diplomatic missions of seven Latin American countries whose state officials had used words like fraud or asked for detailed tallies of the results. Argentina was one of them. Brazil agreed to take custody of the Argentine embassy, but President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, once an ally of Chávez, has shown scant interest in playing regional peace broker or advocating for the fates of his six houseguests.

What was once the Argentine embassy has become a kind of prison. The Venezuelan government has surrounded the property with police officers and soldiers; in November, it cut off the villa’s electricity. The asylees are allowed no visits—not even Brazilian diplomatic staffers are allowed to enter. They can receive food packages from outside, but the police intercept these; one asylee told me they have been forced to ration what they receive. Even the water supply to the villa has been curtailed. Drones buzz continually outside. I’ve kept in close touch with one of the six, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals.

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Last Saturday, half of the prisoners held a rare press conference via Zoom. “We are six unarmed civilians,” Pedro Urruchurtu, an adviser to Machado and a former professor at Central University of Venezuela, said. “We are just asking for international laws to be respected.” Venezuela’s government responded by trying to leverage the asylees in a sort of hostage deal: On Tuesday, Maduro suggested he’d be open to freeing them in exchange for certain prisoners held in Ecuador and Argentina. Two days later, Fernando Martínez, an asylee who served as a transportation minister in the 1990s, left the embassy. Some reports say he turned himself in to the authorities; others say he made it home with his family. In either case, he lost his right to a travel permit.

La represión, in Venezuela as elsewhere, derives much of its power from unpredictability. And so the Maduro regime has made its redlines and allowances ever harder for ordinary people to tell apart. Last spring, the six people currently in the former Argentine embassy had reason to think that working with Machado was an acceptable risk, because in the worst-case-scenario, they could seek political asylum from an embassy, as others had done before them. But now the rules, if there are any, have changed.

Curiously, the Maduro regime has shown little interest in imprisoning or physically harming Machado herself. The opposition leader remains in an undisclosed location that can’t be too hard for the government to find. But Maduro seems to have concluded that arresting such an internationally high-profile leader isn’t worth the headache. Instead, the government has opted to punish unknown people who work for or support her. La represión will leave her with some press attention but virtually no ability to act, until she is eventually forgotten. Perhaps Machado has nothing to fear for now, but no one else in Venezuela can say the same.