Communique from the Alliance for Global Justice
Media contact: William Camacaro, Alliance for Global Justice
Email: william@afgj.org
Phone: +1 (202) 540-8336 Ext. 501
We are a group of 17 citizens of various countries living in the United States, Canada and Costa Rica who visited Venezuela from July 21-31, 2024 to learn about the Bolivarian Revolution underway since 1999, to accompany the Venezuelan people and social movements during the July 28 election and to report to people in our countries about what we witnessed.
We congratulate the Venezuelan people for a well-organized electoral system that was implemented on July 28 in an atmosphere of peace. We also congratulate President Nicolás Maduro on his re-election and the Venezuelan National Electoral Council (CNE) for fulfilling its constitutional duty by administering a free and fair election.
We categorically denounce reports by hostile foreign governments and corporate media sources aligned with them that seek to undermine the legitimacy of the Venezuelan election and the results announced by the CNE. We visited several voting centers on July 28, where we saw thousands of people coming to vote in a process that was orderly, cheerful and transparent. Two of our members who are Venezuelan citizens voted themselves, and some of us witnessed the citizen participation vote audit. We denounce the violence caused in some parts of the country by paid criminals at the service of retrograde political actors within and outside of Venezuela. We urge an end to such malicious interference with the right of the Venezuelan people to exercise their democracy in peace.
We repudiate the insinuation of fraud that, in a destabilization campaign coordinated by the United States and including several of its client states in Latin America, purports that there are irregularities in the July 28 vote count. Despite a hacking attack from outside the country that delayed transmission of the tally the night of the vote, the vote count system itself is impenetrable and votes cannot be added, deleted or altered. There is no reason to doubt the validity of the 80% of the votes first reported. With 80% of the votes counted, it is statistically impossible to reverse the trend and the CNE declared President Maduro the winner. By law, the CNE has 30 days to provide the final details of the vote count. Criticisms of the completely legal administration of electoral procedures by the CNE are nothing more than malicious rumors aimed at undermining the legitimacy of the election and destabilizing Venezuela’s democracy. These were in fact anticipated by the Edmundo González campaign’s pre-election refusal to accept the results of the election unless it won.
At the seven voting centers we visited in Caracas — in both affluent and working-class neighborhoods — we witnessed a uniformly transparent and consistent system. We saw voters identify themselves by both cedula (citizen’s ID card) and thumbprint, which then activated a voting machine on which the citizen casts the vote, in turn issuing a paper receipt verified for accuracy and placed in a ballot box. In each voting room (“mesa”) where approximately 900 citizens are registered to vote, there is a tamper-proof voting machine that is not connected to the internet, which transmits the vote count to a central location once the polls are closed. After this transmission, the public is welcome to watch the vote audit, in which the paper voting receipts from 54% of the voting machines (randomly selected and with political party witnesses present) to compare the paper votes to the machine vote tally, making systematic vote fraud impossible. By comparison, a study in the United States revealed that only 1-10% of ballots are audited after the vote. There have been no credible reports of irregularities or inconsistencies in these audits, nor in the one dozen other safeguards built into the Venezuelan electoral system, which is lauded by numerous international experts as one of the most secure voting systems in the world.
We are well aware of the context of this election, in which the U.S. government threatened to maintain or increase the 930 illegal unilateral coercive measures (“sanctions”) it has imposed on Venezuelans if they did not select the candidate preferred by the U.S. We insist that this constitutes the most consequential and indisputable evidence of interference in the Venezuelan electoral process. Those who echo spurious arguments regarding the validity of the announced results without criticizing the tremendous and illegal interference imposed by the United States with measures that cost 40,000 Venezuelan lives in just one year cannot purport to be true supporters of democracy.
There are many reasons that we saw hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans in the streets of Caracas on July 25 enthusiastically supporting the candidacy of President Nicolás Maduro. They have benefited from 5.1 million public housing units (in a population of just 31 million) delivered to them by the Bolivarian government since 2011. Free education and healthcare have helped drastically reduce inequality in what was previously the most unequal society in the hemisphere. Participatory democracy flourishes with 3,600 communes in Venezuela, 49,000 communal councils and 4,500 new government-funded projects decided upon by the communes and communal councils themselves.
The government and people of Venezuela have also made tremendous progress in overcoming the economic warfare waged by the United States. Since the peak of the crisis in 2020 (which even included denial of access to medicines and supplies to combat the COVID-19 pandemic) the government has brought inflation to its lowest rate in 31 years, has attracted $24 billion in foreign direct investment just this year and now boasts the fastest growing economy in Latin America. Most importantly, Venezuelans have begun to produce their own food, moving from 80% dependence on food imports to being almost fully food self-sufficient.
This progress has not gone unnoticed by the millions of Venezuelans who have been driven from their country by the illegal economic measures imposed by the United States. For every 200 Venezuelans now leaving the country, 300 Venezuelans are returning home. For those of us who live in the United States, it has been remarkable to traverse the streets and towns of Venezuela and see no homeless people. This is quite a contrast to the very visible crisis of homelessness in the very country that purports to teach Venezuelans about human rights and democracy.
We are not surprised to see the Venezuelan people responding to this latest attack on their revolution by taking to the streets to defend their vote and their democracy. We pledge to do the same in our respective countries, and to demand that the United States and all countries respect the decision expressed by the Venezuelan people on July 28, as announced by their legitimate authorities. We demand respect for Venezuela’s self-determination and reject all attempts by the United States and its geopolitical allies to interfere in and destabilize the sovereign affairs of the Venezuelan people.
Initial signatories:
- David Brubaker (Industrial Workers of the World rank and file member)
- Gayle Nielsen (Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition)
- Guillermo Kuhl (activist, advocate, photographer)
- Jill Clark-Gollub (Coordinating Committee, Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition)
- Larry Fisk (Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition)
- Martha Rollins (International Peace Coalition)
- Michael Runyon (Students for Palestine — Normandale)
- The Most Rev. Filipe Cupertino Teixeira (OFSJC Diocese St. Francis of Assisi, CCA Brockton MA)
- Marlon Matthew Nunez (DSA International Committee and Venezuela Solidarity Network)
- Natalia Burdyńska Schuurman (Program Coordinator, Alliance for Global Justice and Coordinating Committee, Venezuela Solidarity Network)
- Polina Vasiliev (Pacifica Radio Producer/Reporter)
- Richard Hobbs (Founder, Human Agenda)
- William Camacaro (Program Coordinator, Alliance for Global Justice and Coordinating Committee, Venezuela Solidarity Network)
- Yhamir Chabur (Troika Media Collective and Venezuela Solidarity Network)