On the night of the Venezuelan presidential election on July 28, Andrés Villavicencio, 30, walked through the doors of the Paraguaná Educational Institute polling station in Falcón state with a copy of the voting records in his left hand.
After 19 hours of monitoring, Villavicencio, one of the more than 90,000 opposition electoral witnesses, walked straight towards the group of people who had gathered at the doors of the place to guard the vote.
“Nicolas Maduro: 195 votes. Edmundo Gonzalez: 1046”shouted the militant of Primero Justicia, the party of two-time presidential candidate Henrique Capriles, who is part of the Democratic Unitary Platform (PUD) and who put forward Edmundo González Urrutia as a candidate for the opposition, to the crowd.
The response was immediate. The cries of joy from the human cordon surrounding Villavicencio, this young lawyer and also vice president of his party in the municipality of Carirubana, broke the silence fueled by the wait.
“It was one of the best days of my life. I thought we were going to win, but I didn’t expect it to be by that much,” Villavicencio tells BBC Mundo, about the results at his polling station in the city of Punto Fijo, capital of Carirubana, a district that he defines as “traditionally Chavista”.
Information from copies of the minutes of the opposition witnesses, which mostly declared candidate Edmundo González the winner, began to flood the databases of the opposition, which had prepared a robust electoral supervision strategy.
But that midnight, the National Electoral Council of Venezuela (CNE) reported, without showing the minutes, that the winner had been Nicolás Maduro, which sparked the indignation of opposition politicians and witnesses, who did not hesitate to denounce fraud.
From there, Villavicencio describes a long series of intimidations which included guards in unmarked cars at the door of his house, an attempt to enter his home and even the cancellation of his passport, which led to voluntary exile abroad.
Villavicencio spoke to BBC Mundo from Madrid, Spain, about the persecution and harassment of which the opposition in Venezuela are victims after the vote.
The days before
On the Friday before the election, Andrés slept little. At 4:30 a.m. he was already at the door of his polling station ready to cast his vote. installation of electoral material.
Given his political experience as an activist and having overseen seven previous elections since 2012, he knew that the best way to avoid problems was to be there before the Chavista prosecutors arrived and the polling station opened.
Villavicencio arrived at the site along with five other opposition witnesses – one incumbent and one alternate for each of the three voting tables at that center – ready to deploy the electoral material and prepare the place for the elections that were to take place in two days.
In Venezuela, in each election, the members of the CNE and the witnesses of the different parties prepare what they call the “electoral party favors”which includes the deployment of ballot boxes and machines, to ensure in time that nothing fails.
“We were able to enter the center before the Chavista witnesses and There were no irregularities on Friday when the tables were set up,” says Villavicencio.
That day, he returned home calmly, having been able to verify that the election would not be manipulated, after printing the so-called “zero record,” which serves to certify that the voting machine had not been previously tampered with.
Despite this, the Primero Justicia activist denounces acts of “abuse of power” prior to the vote which he witnessed, ranging from the delay in the delivery of electoral credentials to opposition prosecutors and the use of public transport by the government to mobilize its voters.
Voting Sunday
On Sunday night, Villavicencio did not sleep. Anxiety dominated everything. It was 3 a.m. when the six witnesses arrived and sat waiting for the doors of the polling station to open.
I understood that the presence of witnesses distributed across 30,000 tables throughout the countrywhose main function was to guard the vote and take a copy of the minutes, was the only way the opposition could get the government to recognize a possible victory.
But he was not the only one who was waiting expectantly. To his surprise, when he arrived at the institute he found a long line of people who had started arriving at midnight, long before them, ready to cast their vote.
“We talked to them until the centre opened at 6am. I must say that everything went smoothly,” he recalls.
On Sunday, the turnout was high and peaceful, according to the vast majority of centres and local media, as well as political leaders from both the government and the opposition.
“Even the behavior of the military was the right one. “The Plan República performed at the highest level. I can assure you that the soldiers who were in my center acted in an institutional manner and that at no time were they rude or did they abuse us,” Villavicencio points out.
However, according to his recollection, which coincides with that of many other witnesses, things changed after 6pm, when the polls closed and the counting of votes began.
The fight for the minutes
The calm that had reigned at the Paraguaná Institute escaped with the last voter.
At the moment the machines printed the results, and the three tables gave their approval, the opposition candidate won by an overwhelming majoritythe CNE members began to deploy a battery of arguments to prevent the witnesses from taking a copy of the minutes.
After a manual scrutiny, enabled by the Venezuelan Electoral Process Lawwhich involves opening the ballot box and counting paper by paper to compare with the machine’s printout, those present confirmed that the difference in votes was in favor of the opposition candidate.
The Chavista witnesses remained silent. “When the Chavistas saw Edmundo González’s 82%, the world fell on them. They were completely surprised. They looked like they were at a funeral,” Andrés describes.
Villavicencio and the other five opposition witnesses could not, nor did they want to, pretend their joy. They just had to wait for the CNE members to give them a copy of the minutes so they could return home.
“No one leaves without the certificate”they had been told by the campaign command of the Democratic Unitary Platform.
At first, the members of the CNE refused to deliver copies of the minuteswhich is a right of prosecutors established by article 337 of the Electoral Processes Law of Venezuela.
“We were also told that it was forbidden to photograph the minutes. You can imagine my reaction,” he recalls.
The arbitrary decision of the CNE members, according to Villavicencio, was based on the instructions of a superior backed by a simple WhatsApp voice message calling for not handing over the minutes.
“I have been an election witness eight times in my life. This was the first election where We had to demand that the minutes be handed over to the prosecutors“That had never happened to me before, they had never refused to give me a copy before,” he says.
After 20 minutes of discussion between opposition witnesses and members of the CNE, under the watchful eye of the military and the silence of the Chavistas, the electoral authorities agreed to hand over copies of the minutes.
The young lawyer is convinced that the CNE representatives gave him the copy of the minutes for which Dozens of people began to gather in the street demanding to know the results of the vote.
“They gave us the records because of the citizen presence. Otherwise, the CNE staff would not have given us a copy,” he says.
The announcement of the results
With copies of the minutes in hand, Villavicencio hurried to the door to tell nearly a hundred people gathered in the street that Edmundo González had won the election at that polling station.
Since Chavez came to power, the mayor’s office Punto Fijo was never governed by the oppositionThis time, the records showed that the government had not managed to win in any part of the municipality. Not even in the poorest, Los Rosales, where González obtained 65% of the votes, according to the PUD data.
The instance of reporting a result at the doors of a school is not usual but is legal in Venezuela. Article 140 of the Organic Law of Electoral Processes mentions the right to a “citizen audit”that is, that each voter goes to his or her polling station to witness the result.
That same day, María Corina Machado had called on her supporters to “take care of the vote” and to go to the polling stations to guard the results.
But at midnight, the president of the CNE, Elvis Amoroso, announced without showing the minutes, that with 80% of the tables counted, Maduro had been re-elected for a third term with 51% support.
As of the date of publication of this note, the CNE has not made the minutes public as demanded by the opposition and numerous governments and international organizations.
On the contrary, Nicolás Maduro decided that the Supreme Court of Justicecontrolled by the ruling party, would be the body in charge of certifying the result, although they could have used the records of their own prosecutors to confirm the votes as they did in the 2013 elections.
This Thursday, almost a month before the elections, the TSJ certified “in an unobjectionable manner” the election result issued by the CNE.
“Hours later I understood why they had not wanted to give us copies of the minutes. At that moment, I knew that something worse than what we already knew was coming,” says Villavicencio.
On the Monday following the elections, Andrés Villavicencio began to feel the pressure of the bullying and harassment against him.
That same day, while her neighbors went out to Bolívar Avenue in the city of Punto Fijo to demand proof of the results, two men wearing face masks, one with a hood and the other with a cap, got out of a car without a license plate and knocked on the door of her house.
The men introduced themselves as internet company technicians. But neither Andrés nor any member of his family had called the company. They had not reported a fault, nor had they ever been in a situation like this before, where two people had unexpectedly arrived.
That’s why he didn’t open the door to them.
“I denied them entry despite who insisted. Then, They took pictures of my house for a while, until they left. That’s when the harassment began,” Villavicencio complains.
This Friday, a United Nations committee condemned the actions of harassment, intimidation, bullying and threats to human rights defenders and representatives of civil society in Venezuela and asked Maduro to adopt effective measures for prevention.
From that moment on, Andrés never left his house alone again.
A few days later, he heard a leader of Primero Justicia, Juan Pablo Guanipa, say that the government was arbitrarily annulling passports opposition leaders, critical journalists and election witnesses.
Villavicencio, who had not stopped sharing his political opinions and his fraud complaint on social media, went in to see what was happening with his passport: “canceled”he read in red letters and in capital letters.
“It was a totally arbitrary decision because my passport is valid until 2031. Obviously, it was a political decision and I understand that the message was: Keep in mind that you will not be able to leave the country.“, says Villavicencio.
Until Saturday, August 10, something changed.
That day, a car, this time with a license plate, parked in front of his house, but no one rang the bell. A man got out of the car and they took photos of the facade of his house again. This time, the visitors stayed there for four hours.
Villavicencio called an informant he knows within the government, about whom he does not want to give more details so as not to expose him, to help him understand what was happening.
“At that time, they confirmed to me that My arrest was imminent and my place of confinement would be the Helicoide. Thanks to that person, I am now free, thanks to that person I was able to leave the country on time,” he says.
“So, I understood that this time the dynamic was going to be different,” says Andrés, who that same day gathered his family and told them he was leaving Venezuela.
“I don’t regret anything”
The departure to Madrid was not easy.
The cancellation of his passport and surveillance at his front door prevented him from leaving his country from Maiquetía International Airport. So he decided to cross the border by land into Colombia to fly from there to Europe.
“Before leaving my house, I disconnected the chip from my phone to avoid being geolocated. Once at the border, I reconnected it. I went to a place where they picked me up and took me across to Colombia,” explains Villavicencio.
In Colombia, he was able to confirm the arbitrariness of the measure that led to the cancellation of his passport and that of other opponents: except in Venezuela, Your passport is still valid. So he was able to fly to Spain without any problems.
Villavicencio, like many other electoral witnesses and opposition activists, has always been aware that participating in elections and denouncing fraud can lead to reprisals.
“If one frontally opposes a regime, one always runs the risk of having to leave the country. All of us who are in the opposition are exposed and we take risks to make things change,” says Villavicencio.
But despite having to leave his native Falcón, even after experiencing intimidating situations and feeling that his physical safety was at risk, Villavicencio says he would do everything he did again.
“I don’t regret anything. “I feel proud to have frontally opposed this system of oppression,” he says.
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