The government steals our wages, pensions, labour rights and carries out an electoral fraud and self-coup

The ‘official’ results of the presidential elections of July 28th have been rejected by the majority of the population, as they do not express the manifest decision of the people to bring about a change of government.

1) First of all, the proclamation of Nicolás Maduro as the winner, made on Monday 29 July by the National Electoral Council (CNE), took place without the totalisation of the votes having been completed (barely 80%, according to the first bulletin of the CNE, when the supposed difference in votes between Maduro and González was barely 7%). Accordingly, the proclamation of Maduro as the winner would be outside the law.

2) A second aspect is that, according to Enrique Márquez, a former opposition candidate, the first bulletin read at midnight by the president of the CNE, Elvis Amoroso (a well-known leader of the PSUV, the governing party), did not come out of the CNE's totalisation room, as he was informed by his electoral witnesses, and was allegedly a personal elaboration by Amoroso himself.

3) The candidate Márquez himself has denounced that the CNE closed its activities on the morning of 29 July. Officially, the government denounced that the CNE had been ‘hacked’, but has not allowed an independent verification, with the participation of the electoral witnesses of the other candidates, to verify this supposed hacking. The CNE website has been down since 29J, until today, 17 August. There is no CNE publication of the tally sheets. A second bulletin on Friday 2 August, according to NEC, collected 96% of the tally sheets (a third bulletin with 100% of the votes has not yet been published).

4) It has not been possible for the CNE to explain how it was able to count the votes indicated in the two bulletins published, if the electoral authorities' computer system had been hacked since the afternoon-evening of election day. Because, supposedly, this ‘hacking’ is what has prevented the CNE from publishing the totals of the tally sheets, broken down table by table, for each polling station, each parish, each municipality and each state of the country, until today, 14 August.

5) The main opposition candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, has indicated, based on the reports of his witnesses at the polling stations in all the electoral districts of Venezuela, that he would be the winner of the elections, with almost 70 % of the votes, and candidate Maduro would have barely received 30 % of the votes.

6) It is this situation that has generated widespread annoyance throughout the population, and provoked the large spontaneous popular demonstrations that took place in Caracas and other major cities on Monday 29 and Tuesday 30 July. These popular demonstrations, which took place mainly in the poorest neighbourhoods of Venezuela's urban areas, were almost entirely peaceful, with a few exceptions, including the toppling of statues symbolic of chavismo and attacks on the headquarters of some official institutions. Based on these small exceptions of violent protests, the Maduro government has described these demonstrations as part of a ‘terrorist plot’ against institutions, allegedly organised by opposition candidate González Urrutia and leader María Corina Machado, and with this excuse the government has unleashed a brutal repressive campaign, unseen in the country for more than 50 years, in which, according to figures from the human rights organisation PROVEA, more than 20 people have died (some at the hands of police and military forces, and others at the hands of paramilitary ‘collectives’ of the PSUV itself), and more than 1400 citizens have been detained, according to figures from the organisation Foro Penal, the majority of whom are young people living in popular neighbourhoods, presented before anti-terrorist courts, without the right to a defence, and in total isolation (their families do not even know where they are being held), through collective and virtual trials, taking them to maximum security prisons, where, according to the words of Maduro himself, they will be subjected to forced labour for their ‘re-education’ (presenting a video showing a hundred young people, dressed in yellow panties, where they are forced to shout ‘Chávez lives’).

7) The massive repressive campaign against peaceful protests has been extended with selective repression against citizens who participated as table witnesses for the main opposition candidate, and against some leaders of opposition political parties. In some cases, through various forms of coercion, detainees are forced to read a ‘confession’ in front of cameras, in which they say that foreigners paid them to protest and to record messages on anti-government networks, actions that in reality do not constitute crimes under Venezuelan law. To this must be added coercion, threats of dismissal and outright dismissal in state companies and public institutions, against workers for not having gone to vote, or for exercising their legitimate right to vote for the candidate of their choice (in this case against the government candidate), or for receiving, maintaining and/or disseminating pro-opposition content on their mobile phones. 

8) In addition to the total silence of the CNE, Maduro's government introduced an alleged appeal before the Electoral Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice, so that it will address the issue of the election results. To date, no one knows the text of this appeal, but in any case, it is unconstitutional for the TSJ to assume powers that are exclusive to the electoral power, and on the other hand, if Maduro was declared the winner, it is against all logic that he should be the one to introduce an appeal that can only be justified when the rights of the person activating the judicial claim have been violated. The fact is that the TSJ has been acting on the basis of this appeal by Maduro, has summoned the CNE and all the candidates who participated in the elections, and is supposed to issue a ruling in the coming days. Such a ruling would be totally outside of constitutional legality, because it is the electoral power, the CNE, who must process any audit or complaint about the election results, and the fact is that the CNE has not published the tally sheets, has not published the results table by table, and has had no public activity since election day itself (supposedly due to a ‘permanent hacking’).

In conclusion, since July 28th, the government of Nicolás Maduro has been carrying out actions outside the Constitution and the Electoral Law, which can be characterised as fraud, where the sovereign decision of the people who voted massively (more than 70%) against the government is being violated, and through the imposition of a repressive campaign of terror against the population, it intends to silence all dissident voices that denounce the alleged fraud and the self-coup against the constitution that is in full swing.

This fraud is confirmed by the statements made by the Carter Center mission and by the United Nations Panel of Experts, who were observers on July 28th, and who have concluded that the electoral process does not conform to international standards, that the electoral results reported by the CNE are not credible, and that the main opposition candidate would be the real winner of the elections.

The fraud perpetrated is also evident in the notorious and majority rejection of the Venezuelan population of the results given by the CNE (demonstrations that continue to take place throughout the country), as well as in the popular expressions that could be observed before, during and after the electoral process, of rejection of the ruling party and in favour of a change of government. 

It is worth pointing out that the fraud is not reduced only to the announcement of results that have nothing to do with what happened on election day and that are totally contrary to the will of the people, but on the contrary, such an announcement is the logical continuation of an electoral process plagued by anti-democratic vices from the moment it was called, such as the government's attempts to sabotage or directly suspend the process, the ‘ventajismo’, the use of public resources and state programmes in favour of the government candidate, the illegalisation of parties, the kidnapping of boards of directors of organisations for political electoral purposes, the arrest of opposition political and trade union leaders, the keeping of more than 150 workers in prison and prosecuted for defending their rights, as well as a large number of political prisoners, in short, a series of manoeuvres typical of a government with a clear anti-democratic vocation.

We Venezuelan workers have denounced in recent years how the government of Nicolás Maduro has confiscated all the labour rights enshrined in the Constitution and the Labour Law, including the disappearance of wages as remuneration for work, and the imposition of a system of miserable bonuses that have taken us back to the era of colonial slavery. Now, the government has also stolen the votes of the people, who voted overwhelmingly against Maduro and the PSUV, by a difference of more than double the number of votes, and blatantly violates article 5 of our Constitution, which states that sovereignty resides non-transferably in the people, and is exercised through suffrage.

The Venezuelan workers‘ movement joins the rest of the citizens’ voices that demand the CNE to publish the totalisation of the tallies and the votes table by table, that demand the execution of the legally established audits, by opening the ballot boxes of all the polling stations of the country (which are supposed to be guarded by the armed forces), to execute a vote by vote recount, so that the sovereign decision of the people, who through the vote have elected the president who should take office on January 10, 2025, can be confirmed. We also raise our voice against the brutal repressive raid that the government has unleashed against the workers and the Venezuelan people. 

Likewise we pronounce ourselves against the criminalisation of social, labour and popular protest, making it clear that protesting is not a crime, and claiming the defence of the legitimate right to protest, to demonstrate, to organise and mobilise, union and politically, as a mechanism to recover our wage, labour, trade union, political and democratic rights; curtailed today by the government of Maduro.

We urge the workers of the world to show their solidarity with the Venezuelan workers, your support is important to move forward in the difficult historical challenge we face today.

INTERNATIONAL SUPPORT COMMISSION OF THE 
NATIONAL CONFLICT COMMITTEE - WORKERS IN STRUGGLE
CNC-TL

Venezuela, 18 August 2024.