• Lucky_777@lemmy.world
    0·
    27 days ago

    If you look what happened since 2013 when he took over. He is a dictator though. Trump is actually following his playbook, but in a lighter since. Some examples…

    Electoral Fraud and Illegitimate Power

    Maduro’s grip on power relies fundamentally on electoral manipulation. In the July 28, 2024 presidential election, Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE)—controlled by Maduro loyalists—declared he won with 51.2% of the vote despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The opposition collected 83.5% of voting tally sheets showing their candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, actually won with approximately 67% of votes compared to Maduro’s 30%. The CNE refused to release disaggregated results or conduct post-election audits, and its website remains inactive. International observers, including the Carter Center and Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, documented widespread fraud throughout the electoral process. The government disqualified opposition candidate María Corina Machado, obstructed voter registration for millions, imposed restrictions on opposition poll watchers, and used state resources during campaigns. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights concluded it cannot recognize Maduro’s re-election as democratically legitimate due to the “severe disruption to Venezuela’s constitutional order”.

    Following the contested 2024 election, Maduro launched “Operation Tun Tun” (Operación Tun Tun), a brutal crackdown described by experts as “state terrorism”. Authorities conducted door-to-door raids to detain anyone with suspected opposition ties, creating what human rights groups call a “climate of terror” intended to terrify Venezuelans into submission.According to official figures, over 2,000 people were arrested in the first month after the election, including at least 129 children. As of July 2025, 853 political prisoners remain behind bars. These detentions are characterized by systematic torture, enforced disappearances, and arbitrary detention without warrants. Victims reported beatings, electric shocks, suffocation, and confinement in dark, overcrowded cells. Amnesty International documented that at least 198 children have been subjected to unfair detention, torture, and abuse, with four months passing before many saw their families.A 2024 UN fact-finding mission report concluded there are “reasonable grounds to believe that the crime of persecution on political grounds has been committed”. Between 2015 and 2017 alone, Venezuelan security forces carried out 8,292 extrajudicial executions, with 22% of all homicides in one year committed by state forces. The UN mission has documented that Venezuela’s intelligence agencies have used sexual and gender-based violence to torture detainees since at least 2014.

  • transending_the_binary@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    26 days ago

    He is an authoritarien and the country went to shit.

    Venezuela is not a nice place to live in.

    Maduro is a corrupt dictator, trump aswell and the current opposition to maduro most likely will just be an authoritarian and fascist pupped goverment that will act in the USAs interest. So yeah multible things can be true at once, just because a nation is opposed to the american empire does not mean that it is automaticallly good.

    Its quite sad to see that some terminally online leftist just automaticly replace siding with the imperialist systems that there born into( USA, EU Australia etc.) And just replace that with other imperial powers like russia and china.

    Like why?? How about not bootlicking authoritarians?

    • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
      0·
      26 days ago

      Under Maduro, Venezuelan communes and participatory democracy is flourishing. In addition, massive social programs have been implemented, focusing on housing, food security, and poverty eradication. I’m not sure on what basis you distrust him so much, Venezuela is building socialism under Maduro from the bottom-up, and Maduro is doing his part from the top.

      Venezuela is a developing country, that is developing despite the US Empire’s best efforts. It is regularly improving, which is why the working classes support Maduro.

      Russia isn’t imperialist, it has no colonies nor neocolonies, and a tiny amount of global financial capital. China isn’t imperialist either, it’s a socialist country wituout any financial domination of the state or economy. There’s no mechanisms pushing for imperialism within China, and this manifests in regular south-south trade leading to development of global south countries when trading with China, unlike the unequal exchange of trade with the west where the west charges monopoly prices for tech and places compradors in power to prevent industrial development.

      Multiple things are true, correct. This isn’t the grand own you think it is, though. You’re passively parroting imperialist narratives.

      • SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        26 days ago

        Venezuelan communes and participatory democracy is flourishing. In addition, massive social programs have been implemented, focusing on housing, food security, and poverty eradication

        I think this really needs to be stressed. Venezuela is a country building Socialism. Maduro and the PSUV is in power because of a genuinely incredible mass movement of communes, neighborhood committees, and other organs of grassroots democracy. This is qualitatively different from say, any of the Gulf oil monarchies

        I highly recommend the books Building The Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela, and Commune or Nothing: Venezuela’s Communal Movement and Its Socialist Project, for a look at these aspects of Venezuelan politics, because it’s often papered over in discussions about the country.

        • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
          0·
          26 days ago

          The general Marxist take is that when Yanukovych was offered an IMF loan that required austerity policies and privatization of safety nets, and a Russian loan that did not come with the same restrictions, he went with the Russian loan and was couped for it, including a western-supported Banderite false-flag shooting. Following the western-supported coup, the areas in the Donbass region seceded, as they supported Yanukovych, are culturally and ethnically Russian, and were unhappy with the Banderites taking over the government under the cover of “democracy.” Said Banderites were also legally suppressing the Russian language in the Donbass region.

          What ensued was a decade of fighting, 2 failed Minsk agreements that Kiev broke and admitted to never wanting to follow, and massive risk of NATO on Russia’s doorstep. The Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics requested Russian assistance, and Russia complied, sparking the next stage of the war.

          Russia purely wants the Donbass region and NATO neutrality. They want the Donbass region not out of the kindness of their hearts, nor for plunder or further expansion, but because it’s a land bridge straight to Russia, the same route the Nazis took in World War II. NATO was building up because the West uses their millitary to threaten countries into opening up their economies to foreign plunder (like what’s happening right now in Venezuela), a tradition employed since NATO was founded, destroyed Yugoslavia and Libya, etc.

          This is the common Marxist take, shared largely by PSL’s statement and FRSO’s statement. Essentially, the war is tragic, should end as quickly as possible, and was provoked by the west.

      • Tinidril@midwest.socialEnglish
        0·
        26 days ago

        Russia isn’t imperialist, it has no colonies nor neocolonies

        Yeah, tell that to Crimea, the Donbas, or even Siberia or the puppet states like Belarus, Georgia and Moldova. Russian neo-colonialism is all over Africa.

        China isn’t imperialist either, it’s a socialist country wituout any financial domination of the state or economy.

        China is a kinder imperialist, but they are using largely the same playbook that the west used in Africa, including debt-trap diplomacy, undermining local sovereignty and regulation, and undermining labor movements.

        They also have a mix of socialism and capitalism, sometimes getting the best of both, and sometimes the worst. They definitely dominate the state economy through control of banking and the use of capital controls to direct funding to national priorities. The current real estate crisis and “ghost cities” are a pretty obvious example.

    • ordnance_qf_17_pounder@reddthat.com
      0·
      26 days ago

      Tell us what a non-authoritarian leader of Venezuela would look like to you and how they would resist the constant pressure and hostile actions of the US government, because it seems to me that leftist leaders are always denounced as authoritarian by North American and European based NGOs and governments.

      The only way to avoid being labelled as authoritarian is to be friendly to the imperial core countries, i.e. being capitalist.

      • davel [he/him]@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        26 days ago

        👆If you don’t suppress the inevitable imperial-supported bourgeois counterinsurgencies, your socialist project will go the way of Allende’s Chile.