A video both depressing and dangerous came dripping out of Venezuela on social media last week.
It shows the country's authoritarian and epically unpopular president, Nicolás Maduro, huddling despondently, as if in a dictator's bunker, with a handful of somber loyalists.
He tells them that if the opposition defeats him in the July 28 presidential election, "There will be a civil war here. If the [pro-regime] military and police take to the streets," he adds, there will be a "bloodbath... It will be inevitable."
That message, which Maduro has gone on to repeat in stump speeches, was the ominous warning of a desperate despot who's trying to scare Venezuelan voters away from turning out on Sunday. That's because he's staring at polls that show him some 40 points behind opposition challenger Edmundo González.
In fact, every campaign rally for González and opposition leader María Corina Machado in recent weeks has been spilling over with caravans of thousands of Venezuelans honking car horns, revving motorcycle engines and cheering full-throated. Those pro-opposition voters say they hope the election will free them from Maduro's socialist regime and the worst humanitarian crisis in modern South American history.
But there’s been another, if quieter, Venezuelan election effort going on here in South Florida and around the world, involving Venezuelan expats, that may end up being just as important to ousting the regime.
Maduro has effectively banned the pro-opposition diaspora from voting on Sunday. He's done so by making it next to impossible for that massive cohort — the 8 million Venezuelans who've fled their once oil-prosperous nation over the past decade — to register abroad. And he's done so out of raw political fear: eligible expat voters account for about a fifth of Venezuela’s total electorate.
As a result, since they can’t cast ballots, many expats are working to make sure people inside Venezuela can and will — and to keep the regime from stealing the election through fraud or violence, something most Venezuelans expect will be, to use Maduro's words, inevitable.
MORE ON VENEZUELA'S ELECTION:
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Exiles have been gathering in South Florida enclaves like Doral or European capitals like Madrid at events called tolditos, or “little tents,” often hosted by expat representatives of Machado’s political party, Vente Venezuela. The goal is to educate Venezuelans abroad about how to educate Venezuelans back home about how to navigate all the voting obstacles and intimidation they say the regime is throwing at them.
"It's horrible how the regime is generating confusion for voters," says Miami business consultant Beatriz Olavarría, one of the project's directors.
"The government-run election authority there," known as the CNE, "does whatever it wants to make the voting process more difficult and they don't give explanations."
Olavarría points to examples like the CNE suddenly changing the names of voting centers throughout the country, leaving people unsure where they should go on election day.
"You contact five people in Venezuela, make sure they have transportation, anything they need, to go and vote — it's crucial, and it's very powerful."Beatriz Olavarria
Because expats often have better access to CNE information abroad than Venezuelans do inside the country — where the regime controls information and internet access, and independent media are scarce if nonexistent — they've been able to reassure voters that their designated polling places have in fact not changed location.
Another, more daunting issue is Sunday's election ballot. Critics say it’s intentionally designed in such a chaotic and complicated fashion — and has Maduro's photo plastered all over it in conjunction with puppet parties endorsing him — that it’s easy for supporters of the challenger González to inadvertently vote for Maduro.
Again, expats often have more accurate information to share with voters in-country about how to avoid that.
“There’s a lot of instruction and motivating and explaining going on between here and there in that sense," says Olavarría.
"But let’s say you also contact five people in Venezuela and make sure they have transportation, anything they need, to go and vote. It’s crucial – and it’s very powerful.”
Aside from sending information and money into Venezuela to help the vote, the other key resource expats are offering is organization.
Through that chain letter-style process Olavarría describes, Venezuelans abroad have helped form voter activism cells here and throughout Venezuela called comanditos, or “little command centers.” One of their main roles is to stock the more than 30,000 voting stations in Venezuela with opposition poll workers and observers.
Psychological difference
One of the comandito organizers here is Petra Figueroa, who was a math professor in La Guaira, Venezuela, when she says she emigrated to Miami six years ago escaping political persecution.
"I located former students in Venezuela," Figueroa told WLRN. "They told me, 'Profesora, count on us,' and they began setting up cells in their neighborhoods and small towns to help people vote and sign up poll workers."
"The latter is just as if not more important," Figueroa says, "because in this election, holding vigil over the vote will matter as much as casting a vote."
She points out that effort to recruit and fund poll workers in Venezuela is especially critical because Maduro has now barred European Union and most other international observers from the country on election day.
"It makes a big psychological difference knowing we've got this kind of backing outside of Venezuela," a poll worker who was recruited by a comandito last month in eastern Venezuela told WLRN by WhatsApp.
She asked that her name not be used for fear of regime retaliation — pointing up the risks of working not just with the opposition but with a diaspora the regime accuses of being an agent of its nemesis, the U.S.
At a cafe in Kendall, former Venezuelan lawyer and Miami expat leader Edgar Simon Rodríguez holds up his Smartphone and points to a list of the thousands of comandito cells set up across Venezuela and supported by the diaspora. Their presence there, he insists, will make it harder for the Maduro regime to commit blatant voter fraud on Sunday.
“It makes it almost impossible for that kind of corrupt result to have any credibility with the rest of the world,” Rodríguez says.
Another expat leader here, Maria Teresa Morín, knows the Venezuelan regime will likely attempt it anyway. Maduro and his brutal security apparatus, which has been cited by the U.N. for crimes against humanity, look and sound unwilling to hand over power — despite pledging in an agreement last fall brokered by the U.S. that they would if they lose the vote.
But Morín says the election ties built now between the diaspora and voters inside Venezuela mean reports of fraud can be conveyed to officials in the U.S., Europe and Latin America more quickly and accurately — and make global response to it more effective.
“Congressmen, congresswomen, senators — they are going to have real time information for the world to know," says Morín.
"Since the diaspora can’t vote, we have found that this is the best tool, the best help that we can bring to our country," she said.
Those expats will set up a Venezuelan election monitoring center in Brickell on Sunday ,at 434 SW 3rd Ave, Miami, 33130. They urge anyone who wants to take part in the voter comandito effort to go to www.comanditosexterior.com/.
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