Caracas, Venezuela – As dark clouds hovered over an eerily empty street in the Petare neighborhood, Eglle Camacho began to hear a dull, rhythmic noise.
The noise soon increased. From its windows and doors, there were people armed with kitchen utensils, banging spoons on pans. They began to spread across the street. Camacho decided to join them.
The impromptu march advanced toward the center of Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, on Monday, attracting thousands of people on foot and on motorcycles.
What united them was their indignation at what they considered to be fraudulent electoral results announced in favor of President Nicolás Maduro.
Camacho took many photos that day – the smiles, the flags and even the violence – but told Al Jazeera he has since deleted them all. She fears what Maduro’s government might do to protesters who support the opposition’s claims of victory.
“There is a lot of persecution,” Camacho said from his home in Petare. “They are going into neighborhoods looking for people.”
This fear was widespread in the days following the July 28 presidential elections.
For weeks, opinion polls ahead of the vote suggested that Maduro would lose to retired diplomat Edmundo Gonzalez, provided the elections were free and fair. Maduro’s rival had a considerable advantage – around 30 points. Exit polls reflected a similar trend.
But when Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) announced the results of the vote on Monday morning, it told a different story. The government agency said Maduro won with more than 51 percent of the vote, a comfortable seven points ahead of Gonzalez.
Demonstrations began and clashes between opposition supporters and security forces ensued. Some led to arrests, injuries and even death.
After days of turmoil, many opposition supporters are in no man’s land, navigating a narrow path between hope and fear about what comes next.
Jorge Fermín, 86, has been protesting for years against the socialist regime in Venezuela, first under the late Hugo Chávez and then under his handpicked successor, Maduro.
At a meeting in the center of Caracas, the former Ministry of Education employee waves a homemade poster in the air.
The poster offers an optical illusion: seen from the side, it shows Gonzalez’s face. But if we look at it from another angle, we see Maria Corina Machado, the candidate who was supposed to run against Maduro, only to be banned from public office.
“This is the biggest lie in the world,” said Fermín about the CNE results. “The government knows the true result, but does not want to show it.”
So far, Maduro’s government has not published vote counts from individual polling stations, as has been the tradition in the past. All the CNE offered was the global percentage.
However, tallies gathered by election observers – and given to the opposition – appear to show that Gonzalez won in a landslide, securing 67 percent of the vote.
Despite calls from the opposition, as well as the international community, the government has yet to present any proof that Maduro has officially won. Maduro promised to reveal the vote count, but the schedule has not yet been defined.
“This government has caused a lot of pain, misery and now it has tried to rob us of the last hope we have left,” Fermín told Al Jazeera.
As a retiree in Venezuela, your pension amounts to just US$3.50 per month. “It won’t even let me top up my phone,” he explained.
The pro-Maduro posters that once decorated almost every streetlight in Caracas have disappeared, been torn down and thrown into piles of trash or into bonfires. Several statues representing the late Chávez, seen as the father of Venezuela’s socialist project, were also torn down.
Margarita Lopez, a Venezuelan historian who has studied the country’s protest movement and Chávez’s socialist government, told Al Jazeera that today’s demonstrations share the characteristics of past mobilizations: the toppling of statues, the banging of pots and pans in a protest called “cacerolaço”.
But this time, she said, there is a fundamental difference. “The polarization has disappeared,” she explained.
Previous protests, Lopez highlighted, were largely made up of middle- and upper-class voters. But with Venezuela’s economy in continued decline, a more diverse sector of society has taken to the streets to demonstrate.
“Everyone is struggling with work,” Lopez said. “They became poorer. They do not have full access to public services. The political discourse of polarization is no longer valid for Venezuelans.”
Traditionally, many residents in working-class areas of Venezuela were followers of Chavismo – the ideology named after Chávez, which promotes income redistribution and resistance against “imperial” forces represented by countries such as the United States.
But for many, Chavismo did not live up to their expectations. After Chávez’s death in 2013, Maduro took over the government and the country fell into an economic abyss.
Part of the problem was the global fall in oil prices in 2014, but the crisis was also due to economic mismanagement, misappropriation of state funds and international sanctions.
“I came from Petare. I’m here for the freedom of my county, for the future of my daughter, for my sister, for my niece,” shouted a shirtless man at a recent protest, while raising a hand in the air.
He used the other to point to the tattoo on his chest: a colorful map of Venezuela.
According to Lopez, low-income areas like Petare were once bastions of Chavismo. But for residents there today, socialist rhetoric no longer seems relevant.
“Maduro may say that imperialism and the right-wing ‘fascist’ opposition have not yet been stopped, but in reality people are no longer interested,” explained López.
The country’s gross domestic product (GDP) has contracted 80 percent in recent years, according to the International Monetary Fund. Salaries and pensions have declined due to hyperinflation, currency devaluation, and informal dollarization, a process that arises when people turn to the US dollar as an alternative currency.
An estimated 7.7 million people – a quarter of the population – left the country due to low wages, lack of opportunities, poor healthcare and, in some cases, persecution.
Human rights groups such as Amnesty International have long criticized Maduro’s government for using arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances and even extrajudicial executions to suppress apparent dissent.
“I cannot bear to see blood in my country – a country that has so much to offer,” Camacho said, days after hearing the banging of pots for the first time on Monday in Petare.
The mother of two has already emigrated once and is now worried about the possibility of having to leave again. “If this government doesn’t fall, I will. I will have to do this. I can’t stay here – they’re going to put me in prison.”
At least 19 people have been killed so far in clashes between security forces and opposition supporters, according to the non-governmental organization Victim Monitor. At least six were murdered by colectivos, groups of armed men linked to the government, riding motorcycles and carrying weapons.
Victim Monitor reports that more than 1,000 people were also detained, refused access to legal assistance and unable to see their families.
Student Marta Diaz, who used a pseudonym for security reasons, had already been to some demonstrations in the mountain city of Mérida when she joined a protest to demand the release of 17 young people detained after the elections. One of them was her cousin.
“I felt really bad. I even had a kind of panic attack,” Diaz said. “I feel desperate. It’s difficult to maintain hope in such a dark situation.”
But despite her fears of repression, she does not want to give up the fight to secure her cousin’s release – and push for a transparent election result. “I will go to more protests. I’m scared, of course, but I’ll go as many as necessary.”
In a televised speech on state television on Thursday, Maduro announced the construction of two maximum security prisons for protest-related detainees. He said these would be “re-education camps” where prisoners would be forced to participate in forced labor.
However, Fermín, proudly wearing his Venezuelan flag cap, told Al Jazeera that he refuses to lose optimism that the opposition can prevail.
“The day I stop fighting, I will fall,” he said, cautiously hopeful that soon Venezuela will see a new government and a better future.
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
